The Organization of the Environment: Ecological Perspectives

The primary concern for the analysts that follow the ecological perspective is the composition of the environment. They are not concerned about observing the way the organizations behave or try to control their environments
Most of the research maintains that the changes in organizations are shaped by the changes in the environment The approaches suggest that change in one organization is a very small contributor to social transformations The criticism is immediate: the ecological and institutional approaches pay no attention to the organization adaptive behaviors.

Organizational Ecology Theory

Core: effort to explain the diversity of organizational forms across the social landscape and account for changes in the mixture of forms
The variety and mix of organizations is a property of aggregates of organizations We can't find "mix" in the internal part of the organization, so we need to explain the environment to explain the mix Three levels of Organizational Ecology - Organizational level: Demography and development of individual organizations - Population Level: Selection processes - Community Level: Macro-evolutionary processes Language - Population of organizations: a class of organizations facing the same vulnerabilities - Locus of causality: Shifts from the rational and adaptive organization to the environment - Survival: Be isomorphic to the environment

Assumptions
Organizations experience strong pressures to retain their form over time rather than engage in structural change Variations in forms is attributable to the deaths of inert organizations and the births of new ones There is a problem with the assumption that if several organizations are in the same field and similar in size, then they are similar in shape. This has proven false many times An Organizational Specie is defined as a group that shares "dominant competencies" but is isolated from other populations

Key areas of research

Organizational Birth Organizational characteristics at founding - How do prevailing social conditions affect the characteristics of organizations founded during a particular historical time period?
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The Organization of the Environment: Ecological Perspectives

Founded at the same time, share similar structures Imprinted time at birth is relatively inert

Rates of founding - Social situation such as revolutions quicken the pace at which new organizations are brought into existence - Example: several newspapers were born in times of revolution in Argentina and San Francisco - The density of the population also plays an important role in the rate of founding Organizational Death Organizational death is bad: bankruptcy, bad performance, etc. There are four areas of research in organizational mortality Liabilities of age and size Newer organizations are in more danger Organizational mortality tends to decline with age (!) Very small organizations are also in danger of dying Specialism and generalism Variable environments will favor generalist organizations Generalism and specialism are fundamentally interrelated: The success of generalist organizations creates the conditions for the success of specialists Internal crisis and transformation Internal changes make the organization more prone to dying Reorganizations can prevent the company of reflecting its accumulated history and then deprive it of its previous survival value Environmental and population characteristics Very little research has been made in this field Population-level processes and external environmental processes affect the mortality rates of organizational populations Community Dynamics - It is important to take the emergent properties of populations into account - Several examples of particular case studies are mentioned.

Critique
Defining Form and Population
Populations: Bounded sets of organizations sharing a common form Form: Blueprint for organizational action that can be inferred from the organization's formal structure, patterns of activity or normative order Techniques for discerning form - Applying network models to data - Locating the boundaries that separate populations and determining the processes that sustain or erode them

The Role and Nature of Environmental Selection

Competition takes place at even higher levels Government favors, natural resources, etc
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The Organization of the Environment: Ecological Perspectives

Forms of Change
Is change gradual, or is it just a cycle of deaths and births? Most researches are implicitly gradualists

Future Directions
Ecological research has grown beyond the initial theoretical statements of population ecology Fields of study that have evolved: technology and interdependence, relations with the environment and organizational demography Ecological research will remain controversial because its assumptions - Greatly simplify the key processes as competition and legitimation - Abstract much of the organizational detail and complexity that characterize what goes on in organizations

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