Systems theorists maintain that all organizations, in order to survive, must be able to fulfill certain basic needs. In this article, these needs relate to: (1) the organization's ability to search out and respond to the properties of the external environment; (2) the organization's ability to use its resources to produce outputs and to maintain and restore the system; and (3) the organization's ability to bargain and optimize its use of resources in an environment with a number of decision-makers, each with different objectives. These criteria are used to evaluate the effectiveness of seven local government organizations.
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