Theory of Organizational Ecology

Organizational ecology theory examines how organizational populations change and develop over time through stages of founding, growth, transformation, decline, and death (Hannan & Freeman, 1977, 1989). The theory addresses the forces of social, political, and economic systems that (1) increase organizational diversity, for example, creating new organizational forms, and (2) decrease organizational diversity, for

Organizational Diversity

The ecological-evolutionary approach developed in this book directs attention primarily to organizational diversity. It seeks to answer the question. Why are there so many (or so few) kinds of organizations? Addressing this question means specifying (1) sources of increasing diversity, such as the creation of new forms, and (2) sources of decreasing diversity, such

Ecological Perspectives on Organizational Change

Although organizational processes figure prominently in social change, most macrosociological theory and research make little reference to systematic research on organizations. In Chapter 2 we argue that this situation reflects the partial intellectual isolation of the field of organizational sociology from the rest of the discipline during the 1960s and 1970s. Organizational sociologists made

The Demography and Ecology of Organizations

Ecological analysis is appropriate when organizations are subject to strong inertial pressures and face changeable, uncertain environments. Under these conditions there are strong parallels between processes of change in organizational populations and in biotic populations. In such cases it may be useful to eschew the typical social-scientific preoccupation with single organizations and their environments

Population Thinking in Ecological Perspective

The unit of observation in the studies we report is the individual organization. We follow the life histories of individual members of organizational populations, studying events such as founding, disbanding, and merger. The formal statistical analyses applied to such histories may look little different from analyses designed to test propositions at the level of

Evolution of Organizational Forms in Ecological Perspective

The view that selection processes govern the dynamics of organizational diversity shades naturally into a Darwinian evolutionary position. Such a position claims that long-run changes in organizational diversity reflect the accumulated effects of short-run differences in net mortality rates of popu- lations facing limited resource environments. Moving from a population ecology of organizations to

Dynamic and Comparative Analysis in Ecological Perspective

We think that research on organizational diversity must attend to dynamics and must analyze the entire range of variation within types of organizations. The remainder of this chapter summarizes these themes and previews the approach that we use in empirical analyses reported in Part III. 1. Dynamics The diversity of organizations in society depends on

Approaches to Defining Forms in Ecological Perspective

We have already noted that an organizational form gives unitary character to a population of organizations. But what does this mean concretely? A number of answers to this question have been given in the population- ecology literature. 1. Organizational Genetics One set of answers looks for an analogue to the genetic structure that reproduces

A Focus on Boundaries in Ecological Perspective

In the remainder of this chapter we argue that approaches emphasizing content and pairwise relations should be supplemented by others that emphasize the dynamics of boundaries in organizational space. To motivate this alternative perspective, it is instructive to consider a seemingly quite different problem. Social life in many societies is channeled by boundaries that

Boundary Dynamics and Diversity in Ecological Perspective

Segregating and blending processes have immediate implications for organizational diversity, a main concern of ecological theories. When segregating processes dominate, institutional and other constraints create holes in the social structure in the sense that some feasible kinds of organizations do not exist because of these constraints. Thus it appears that (1) strong segregating processes

Structural Inertia of the firm

The existing literature usually stresses the capacity of organizations to learn about and adapt to uncertain, changing environments. We think this emphasis is misplaced. The most important issues about the applicability of evolutionary-ecological theories to organizations concern the timing of changes. Learning and adjusting structure enhance the chance of survival only if the speed

A Hierarchy of Inertial Forces in the firm

So far we have considered organizations as unitary actors, either adapting to their environments or remaining inert. This is simplistic in that it ignores the obvious fact that some parts of organizations change more quickly than others, and that adaptive changes are sometimes not difficult to discern or implement. Universities, for example, constantly change

Variations in Strength of Inertia in the firm

New organizations presumably have lower levels of reproducibility than older ones. As Stinchcombe (1965) pointed out, new organizations typically rely on the cooperation of strangers. Development of trust and smooth working relationships takes time, as does the working out of routines. Initially there is much learning by doing and comparing alternatives. Existing organizations have

The Principle of Isomorphism

Until fairly recently, the sociological literature lacked explicit treatments of the causes of organizational diversity. The absence of theory and research on this issue is doubtless a result of the strong concentration of interest at the level of the individual organization. But recent theory on the organizational level does contain an implicit proposition about

The concept of Niche

The main point of contact between existing organization theory and modern ecological theory is the concept of the niche. The concept provides a useful general way to express how environmental variations and competition affect the growth rates of populations. The imagery of the niche expresses the role of a population (or species) in a

Classical Competition Theory

The development of competition theory in population bioecology was in- fluenced strongly by Gause’s (1934) experiments on the coexistence of closely related species of beetles in controlled environments. He found that mixing two populations in the laboratory invariably caused one population to disappear. Gause summarized his findings by proposing a general ecological law. His

Niche Overlap and Competition in Ecological Perspective

Competition, unlike conflict, is difficult to observe directly because it is often indirect. Therefore, empirically-minded analysts look for ways to study competition indirectly. One way is to exploit the relationship between niche overlap and competition that is implied by classical competition theory. This is the tack that population biologists have taken. They typically do

Variations in Intrinsic Founding Rates in Organizational Populations

We begin with variation among organizational populations in intrinsic growth rates, that is, the rates of growth in the absence of any resource or competitive constraint. One advantage of the ecological perspective is that it directs attention to the possible importance of such variations in the social world. Although the fact and its implications

Effects of Environments on Carrying Capacities in Organizational Populations

The notion of a carrying capacity for a population of organizations summa- rizes the dependence of the growth rate of the population on numerous dimensions of the social and economic environment. We have found that sociologists tend to assume that use of the notion of carrying capacity implies that a society has some fixed

Conceptualizing the Size of Organizational Populations

We have now developed an image of a set of interacting populations whose numbers are constrained by the speed of founding of new organizations and by social and material processes that set (time-varying) carrying capacities. The last step in model building considers the effects of interactions within and between populations on the growth and