Organizational fit into an environment was started with Fred Edmund Emery (1925 – 97) with Eric Lansdown Trist (1909 – 93) who moved from an external environment affecting an organization to Robert B Duncan  where the management’s perception of the environment set the strategy making the environmental fit subject to interpretation, learning, and bias. 

The works above from the 1960s and 70s saw the world in the past tense where the right calls on how to structure can be seen in the organizations that came through them (worth noting many that time was very dynamic with peace/ stand off in Europe, USA, and the USSR  (now Russia and countries to the West of it, Eastern Europe) leading to the acceleration of globalization).

Fast forward to 1997 Igor Ansoff (1918 – 02), a Russian American mathematician who created the subject of strategic management through his work. One of his works was to look at descriptive environmental fit and changed the view that it was stuck either as environmental factors happening to an organization like the wind to be harnessed or to be fought against or as situation to to interpreted to a practical, prescriptive, environmental fit which could be actioned. 

In Ansoff’s prescriptive environment there are five types of environment based on the level of uncertainty (like Duncan’s) ranging from near certain (Repetitive) to highly uncertain (Surprising). The five levels allow a manager to look to fit their strategy to the environment at the time but also the environment of the future.

Ansoff’s allowed environmental fit to be more of an active tool rather than a dry piece of management strategy.

Ansoff distinguishes two types of environmental  change:

1) Extrapolative – stable – scale and exploit

2) Discontinuous – unstable – gamble and promote

Organizations will bounce between these two as they need to find a fit that allows either success through scaling or producing a niche product with very high margins.

How well managers in an organization can fit into their environment is dependant on environmental determinism which looks to show the impact of the organization or the environment on each other and others as the organizations are part of the environment and affect other objects within it.