Ecological Metaphors in Organizational Science: An Interdisciplinary Critique
A social scientist and an ecologist, Mars and Bronstein, set the ecological terms organisational science has borrowed against what those terms mean in ecology, as a worked example of building metaphors across disciplines. Alongside a primer on the ecological hierarchy and the sign-based grid of species interactions, they trace three interaction types through the organisational literature. Mutualism, which ecologists now read as reciprocal antagonism, self-interested exchange prone to cheating and to competition for partners, is generally used there without those conflicts. Commensalism, in ecology a +/0 interaction in which one partner gains and the other is unaffected, has been used since Hawley in idiosyncratic ways, conflated with mutualism and read with an intentionality not observed in nature. Symbiosis, in ecology a lifestyle of living inside a host that may benefit, harm or leave the host unaffected, has been used interchangeably with mutualism, Hannan and Freeman among others, and set against competition. They also stress context dependency: whether an interaction helps or harms can shift with conditions, as when ants that tend aphids for honeydew turn and eat them when they have plenty of sugar but lack protein.
Mars and Bronstein keep their confidence in ecological metaphors, arguing that rigour comes from tracing a metaphor back to its source with collaborators from that discipline, and caution that human intention sets humans apart from species whose interactions emerge through natural selection. The bridge to psychological safety is ours: describing it in ecological terms, as habitat, ecosystem or substrate, is the kind of borrowing the paper tests, and, on their argument, is sound when the borrowed concept is articulated clearly against its ecological source rather than taken literally. Its limits: a conceptual critique built on chosen examples rather than a systematic review, confined to hierarchy and three interaction types.
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