Organizational Ecology - Introduction To Organizational Ecology

Introduction To Organizational Ecology

Introduced in 1977 by Michael T. Hannan and the late John H. Freeman in their American Journal of Sociology piece The population ecology of organizations and later refined in their 1989 book Organizational Ecology, organizational ecology examines the environment in which organizations compete and a process like natural selection occurs. This theory looks at the death of organizations (firm mortality), the birth of new organizations (organizational founding), as well as organizational growth and change.

Organizational ecology contains a number of more specific 'theory fragments', including:

• Inertia and change
• Niche width
• Resource partitioning
• Density dependence
• Age dependence

Organizational ecology has over the years become one of the central fields in organizational studies, and is known for its empirical, quantitative character. Ecological studies usually have a large-scale, longitudinal focus (datasets often span several decades, sometimes even centuries). The books The Demography of Corporations and Industries by Glenn Carroll and Michael Hannan (2000) and Logics of Organization Theory: Audiences, Codes, and Ecologies by Michael Hannan, Laszlo Polos, and Glenn Carroll (2007), provide the most comprehensive overview of the various theories and methods in organizational ecology.

Organizational ecology researchers include Michael T. Hannan, John H. Freeman, Glenn R. Carroll, Terry L. Amburgey, Laszlo Polos, Gabor Peli, Olav Sorenson, William P. Barnett, Christophe Boone, James B. Wade, Joel Baum, Henrich Greve, Heather Haveman, Alessandro Lomi, Anand Swaminathan, Giacomo Negro, and Stanislav Dobrev.