307 Managing the environment: Strategies for executives in human service organizations Hillel SCHMID School of Social Work, The Hebrew University, Mt. Sco pus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel Hillel Schmid has a B.A., M.B.A. and Ph.D. degree from the Hebrew Uni- versity of Jerusalem, Israel. He is lec- turer of organizational theory, organi- zational behavior, and management of human se rvice organizations and managerial skjlls in the school of So- cial Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The main research i nt eres ts are: administrative strategies, strategic planning, organization- envi ronment relations, managerial processes, pat- terns of d ecision making and roles and functions of executives in human se rvice organizati ons. Pub- li shed articles in the ar eas of research which have been li sted above. Thi s pa per delinea tes strategies for executies in human service organization s, which enable them to effectively manage the turbulent environment in which the organizations ac t. The administrative strategies are derived from a conceptual frame- work of organization-environment relations, and are intended to present executives with an overall scheme of the various linkages. Based on this framework , the pa per suggests ways for executives to learn , scan and map the opportunities and risks inherent in the environment. Keywords: Human service organiza ti ons, general environment , task envi ronment, organizational domain, resource- dependency, adminis trative strategies, func tional strategies, scanning. Introduction Numerous scientific studies have been written about the relations between the organization and its environment, as well as the implications of these relations for administrative strategies. The subject is particularly well developed in the busi- ness sector, and different works stress different aspects of the issue [12,7,6,33,27,14,26,2,37,38]. However, very little in this context has been No rth-Holland Human Systems Management 6 (1986) 307-315 written, whether from a theoretical or an empirical perspective, with regard to human service organi- zations, despite the great importance of defining strategies in the network of relations between this type of organization and the environment. All approaches concur that the term ' strategy' defines the character and quality of the relations between the organization and the environment, since it relates to ' how an organization defines its rela- tionships to its environment in the pursuit of its objectives' [10 , p. 27]. Furthermore, the term de- fines not only the essence of the relations between an organization and the environment but also the course an organization should elect in order to continue to survive in the environment; conse- quently, the term can even be defined as the ' match between an organization's resources and skills and the environmental opportunities and risks it faces and the process it wishes to accom- plish' [27, p. 11]. The objective of this paper is to present a conceptual framework relating to administrative strategies for executives in human service organi- zations, as derived from the relations between the organizations and the environment. Although the concepts appearing in the paper are based on existing literature, an attempt will be made to illustrate the implications of the relations for executives in the above-mentioned organizations, so as to better enable these executives to effec- tively manage the environment. The strategies as- sume particular importance since the organiza- tion's executives manage their environment as they manage their organization, and an organization's activity vis-a.-vis its environment is no less im- portant - and perhaps even more so - than the management of the organization [3] . The subject's particular importance in human service organiza- tions stems from the following reasons as well: (a) Executives in human service organizations face increasingly critical problems as the result of cutbacks in resources which cause greater un- certainty in managing the environment. 01 67- 2533/ 86/ $3 .50 © 1986, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-H olland)