Organizational Ecology Has a Bright Future

The Image of Organizational Ecology

Organizational ecology is here to stay. Clearly, Michael Hannan and John Freeman's paradigm-building programme, which started with their classic 1977 article 'The population ecology of organizations' in the American Journal of Sociology, has been successful. By now, at the start of the 21st century, the flourishing organizational ecology population has produced hundreds of studies into the fate of industries and organizations (e.g. Baum 1996). On the solid foundation of a well-communicated and well-established theoretical core - basically an organizational translation and extension of Darwinian biology - and a ditto methodological apparatus - basically a set of econometric hazard rate estimation techniques - organizational ecology has evolved into the sub-field of organization studies that exhibits the greatest theoretical and methodological consensus (Pfeffer 1993; Aldrich 1999). In this respect, organizational ecology is like (neoclassical) economics. Although many organizational ecologists are anything but uncritical towards economics, disliking the latter's utility-maximizing dogma, the former's ability to develop and sustain methodological and theoretical consensus is associated with a sense of research determination and knowledge accumulation that is also very typical of (neo-)classical economics. The downside of the strong profile of organizational ecology, though, is the sub-field's relatively small influence outside the inner circle of its own parish, particularly in Europe.

The lack of popularity of organizational ecology in broader organization sciences circles is largely based upon a set of misunderstandings about the sub-field's theoretical 'inertia' and methodological 'poverty'. This image is perhaps partly the inevitable side-effect of the prolific paradigm-promotion campaign that dominated the early days of organizational ecology. However, the current state-of-the-art in organizational ecology does not justify this dogmatic, and uninformed, opposition. The first strawman-type accusation is that the unshakable assumption of relative (or structural) inertia in organizational ecology is squared to the real-world truth of the key importance of organizational transformation. This critique sets aside the just antidote of organizational ecology against the traditional overemphasis on organizational adaptability, and ignores in-depth studies in organizational ecology into the performance effect of organizational change (e.g. Amburgey et al. 1993), as well as the thought-provoking application of ecological reasoning to issues of organizational learning (e.g. Burgelman 1994). The second 'feeling of discomfort' relates to the - often unspoken - critique that the heavy emphasis in organizational ecology on large-scale quantitative studies is at the expense of 'thick' description - that is, organizational ecology studies only offer information-poor analyses of shallow industry-level processes. However, apart from the observation that such industry-level processes are central to the understanding of organizational performance in the organization sciences, this comment overlooks the impressively 'heavy' fruits of the time-consuming archival-type of work that is so inextricably bound up with large-scale quantitative data collection.

The bottom line is that the unfavourable but unjustified image of organizational ecology among many fellow (particularly European) organization scientists stands in the way of the full exploitation of the promising potential of the theoretical framework and methodological apparatus of this sub-field in the broad domain of the study into industry evolution and organizational performance. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Hopefully, then, the five in-depth empirical studies in this special issue will bring home the message that the flexible (i.e. cross-fertilizing) application of what organizational ecology has to offer, both theoretically and methodologically, is likely to produce much added value in the quest in the organization sciences for a deepened understanding of issues of industry

evolution and organizational performance. Before introducing the articles in this special issue, to set the scene, this editorial will briefly introduce the position of organizational ecology in the organi zation sciences domain, its backbone of theoretical and methodological strengths, as well as a number of promising potential avenues for future research.

The Position of Organization Ecology

The key source of inspiration of organizational ecology, evolutionary biology, has been influential in the social sciences since times immemorial. The central notion of the survival-of-the-fittest struggle in the social world was, for example, already well-embedded in the classic contributions of such eminent scholars as Adam Smith and Emile Durkheim. In effect, Charles Darwin recognizes the influence on his thinking of the ideas of the population economist Robert Malthus in the introduction to his Origin. of Species! Ignoring the many bits and pieces of evolutionary thinking in the social sciences before Joseph Schumpeter's arrival on the evolutionary scenery, however, it is probably fair to say that the latter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) marks a watershed. In particular, his six-paged (!) Chapter VII, 'The Process of Creative Destruction', has set into motion a process of 60 years of the evolutionary development of evolutionary theories in the social sciences: 'The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutuionary process. ... Now, a theoretical construction which neglects this essential element [the process of creative destruction: AvW] of the case, neglects all that is most typically capitalist about it; even if correct in logic as well as in fact, it is like Hamlet without the Danish prince' (pps. 82 and 86). Luckily, the Danish prince is the leading role in organizational ecology's script of the evolutionary Hamlet play.