Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews organizational theories that posit significant environmental influence on organizations. It examines the neo-institutional theory, the effects of environmental and internal factors on hospital efficiency and community service outcomes. The book provides the analytical layout of the research project, describing the data and the dependent variables. It also provides an overview of the internal and external factors controlled for in this research. The internal factors include hospital affiliation, hospital size, teaching status and case mix; the environmental factors are physician mix, location, population demographics and indices of community wealth. The book provides an in-depth description of the procedures used to merge internal and environmental characteristics and an explanation of the research methods.