An organization's macroenvironment consists of nonspecific aspects in the organization's surroundings that have the potential to affect the organization's strategies. When compared to a firm's task environment, the impact of macroenvironmental variables is less direct and the organization has a more limited impact on these elements of the environment.

Macroenvironmental variables include sociocultural, technological, political-legal, economic, and international variables. A firm considers these variables as part of its environmental scanning to better understand the threats and opportunities created by the variables and how strategic plans need to be adjusted so the firm can obtain and retain competitive advantage.

The macroenvironment consists of forces that originate outside of an organization and generally cannot be altered by actions of the organization. In other words, a firm may be influenced by changes within this element of its environment, but cannot itself influence the environment. The curved lines in Figure...