ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how cultural centers perceive the concept of resource dependence, and how they manage this dependency in practice. Resource dependence theory (RDT) suggests that organizations cannot internally generate all the resources required to sustain their activities and, therefore, must conduct transactions with elements in the environment to secure a stable flow of resources. RDT has three main themes crucial to understanding how organizational decision making is constrained by the environment: interdependency; strategic options; and power. As organizations’ autonomy is limited by their dependence on certain stakeholder groups to sustain certain resource bases, we can conclude that the role of the environment is imperative to the organization. The environmental interdependencies also include interorganizational cooperation. The quantitative findings are hardly surprising and suggest that cultural centers do have significant environmental interdependencies, supporting the qualitative findings.
