ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING - A CONCEPTUAL-FRAMEWORK FOR STUDYING THE INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR OF EXECUTIVES

Today's business enterprises thrive in increasingly volatile environments that are characterized by rapid changes in the competition, technology, and economic and social conditions. Environmental scanning is the process of gaining external information about events and relationships in the organization's environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning future courses of action. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for studying the information seeking behavior of executives when they scan the business environment. The framework could be especially useful in designing research to investigate some basic questions about executive scanning behavior. These questions could address issues such as what information about the environment do executives require, which sources are used by them to obtain the information, and how is environmental information used in decision making. The framework is synthesized from two streams of research: management theory (the study of managerial behavior), and information science (the study of information seeking and information use). It draws on the small number of scanning studies done by management scientists, and introduces an information science perspective that highlights information needs, information seeking, and information use.