The Population Ecology of Organizations
A proposal for a population ecology of organisations, as an alternative to the dominant adaptation view. Hannan and Freeman argue that writing on organisations and their environments had taken an adaptation view, in which managers scan for threats and adjust structure, and had emphasised adaptation to the exclusion of selection. They list pressures toward structural inertia: sunk costs, limited information, internal politics, normative agreements laid down in an organisation's history, barriers to entry and exit, legitimacy, and strategies that are rational for one organisation but not if many adopt them. The stronger these pressures, the lower an organisation's adaptive flexibility and the more likely that a logic of environmental selection is appropriate. Their unit is the population, all the organisations within a boundary that share a form, a blueprint for turning inputs into outputs, and their question, after the ecologist Hutchinson, is why there are so many kinds of organisations. In a footnote they grant that a complete theory needs both adaptation and selection; they set out to show what can be learned from selection alone.
From there they bring bioecology's formal models to organisations. Lotka-Volterra competition models imply that the more similar two populations competing for the same limited resources, the less feasible it is for one environment to support both in equilibrium, and that the number of distinct resources and constraints sets an upper bound on the diversity of forms, so regulation that replaces local constraints with uniform ones should reduce it. Levins's niche theory gives a result against the view widely held in the organisations literature: specialists win in stable environments, but uncertainty does not always favour generalists, because when the environment switches quickly between very different states a generalist spends most of its time adjusting structure. Generalism, they suggest, means holding excess capacity, which outsiders will often mistake for waste and which may be the difference between survival and failure later. They insist the models are analogues, not metaphors, and say they have only sketched the issues, frustrated by the lack of data on rates of selection. The paper says nothing about voice and mentions teams once, in passing; the connection to psychological safety is ours, through a selection lens borrowed from it for the argument that where failure is visible and consequential, the selection pressure for psychologically safe behaviour is strongest.
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