Decline is a change over time from previously efficient to inefficient organizational functioning, from previously rational to non-rational organizational and individual decision-making, from previously law-abiding to law violating organizational and individual behavior, from previously virtuous to iniquitous individual moral behavior. Note: The word decline should not be confused with the word obsolete. Decline refers to the degenerating of something whereas obsolete refers to the outdating of something or that it is no longer in use. It is the process of declining, a gradual sinking and wasting away.
Social decline or moral decline is typically characterised as reduced adherence to cultural or social norms or values and widespread lapses in ethical behavior.
Entities and organizations may enter a state of decline if they fail to respond effectively to changes, because they :
- Don't know about it : inability to recognize change in the organizational environment
- Can't : insufficient resources to respond to change in the organizational environment
- Don't want to : refusal to respond to change in the organizational environment because organizational leaders benefit from organizational decline
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)