Ecological Approaches to Organizations
A review of organisational ecology, a prominent subfield for more than 25 years by the chapter's count, organised around demographic and ecological processes. Baum and Shipilov set out the approach: changes in populations of organisations reflect variation, selection, retention and competition, studied across whole populations, from the largest and longest lived to the smallest and shortest lived, because looking only at current successes invites sample-selection bias. They take in the liabilities of newness, adolescence, ageing and smallness; structural inertia theory, in which an attempt to change an organisation's core renews its liability of newness, so in the short run organisations may fail precisely as a result of their attempts to survive; niche width and resource partitioning; and density dependence, in which a growing number of organisations of a form first lends it legitimacy and then produces competition.
Much of the evidence they assemble is mixed. In the studies they tabulate, organisations appear to change frequently, often without harm, and rates of change are often not constrained by age and size as inertia theory predicts; yet the survival consequences of change appear more consistent with random groping or imitation than calculated strategy. One reading they offer is that decision-makers are not, on average, able to tell beneficial from harmful changes in advance. Experience is a double-edged sword: among Manhattan hotels, failure rates first fell and then rose with a hotel's own operating experience, and organisations must divide effort between exploring new routines and exploiting old ones (citing March, 1991), with the short-run rewards of exploitation typically driving out exploration. Populations can explore while their members exploit, and failures give the population a chance to learn, since when an organisation disappears only the population can learn from its experience. They close on the field's limits and on progress against them: generality bought at the cost of precision and realism, with proxies such as age, size and density revealing little about underlying processes, which finer-grained work has begun to address. Nothing here concerns teams or voice; the link to psychological safety is ours, through learning from failure and the difficulty of telling a good change from a bad one in advance.
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