The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms
The paper that gave ecology the word ecosystem, and gave it for polemical reasons that matter to anyone borrowing ecological language for organisations. Tansley was arguing against Clements and Phillips, whose view held a plant community to be a complex organism or quasi-organism: a superorganism with a life cycle, a maturity, and a proper climax state it was striving toward. He thought this mysticism, and proposed instead a term stripped of vitalism. An ecosystem is a physical system: organisms and their non-living surroundings taken together as one set of interacting components, with no purpose, no will, and no destiny. The abuse in the title is the treating of a community as an organism, and the correction is the reason the word exists. That origin is a standing caution for this corpus. The move Tansley refused, treating a collective as a single organism with a health, a maturity and a natural end state it should be helped toward, is exactly the move organisational writing makes when it speaks of an organisation's health or its journey to maturity, and it is the grammar underneath every stage model here criticised. The concept that licenses ecological thinking about organisations was coined specifically to stop people doing that. Worth noting too what Tansley preserved: the ecosystem is defined by interaction and includes the physical substrate rather than only the living parts, which is the substrate argument in its original form. Limitations are real and later work addressed them. The formulation is equilibrium-leaning, with disturbance treated as interruption rather than as constitutive, a gap Holling closed in 1973 by making disturbance the thing resilience is measured against. Read Tansley for the definition and the warning, then Holling for the dynamics.
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