John Freeman

The Population Ecology of Organizations

A population ecology perspective on organization-environment relations is proposed as an alternative to the dominant adaptation perspective. The strength of inertial pressures on organizational structure suggests the application of models that depend on competition and selection in populations of organizations. Several such models as well as issues that arise in attempts to apply them to the organization-environment problem are discussed.

Structural Inertia and Organizational Change

Considers structural inertia in organizational populations as an outcome of an ecological-evolutionary process. Structural inertia is considered to be a consequence of selection as opposed to a precondition. The focus of this analysis is on the timing of organizational change. Structural inertia is defined to be a correspondence between a class of organizations and their environments. Reliably producing collective action and accounting rationally for their activities are identified as important organizational competencies. This reliability and accountability are achieved when the organization has the capacity to reproduce structure with high fidelity. Organizations are composed of various hierarchical layers that vary in their ability to respond and change. Organizational goals, forms of authority, core technology, and marketing strategy are the four organizational properties used to classify organizations in the proposed theory. Older organizations are found to have more inertia than younger ones. The effect of size on inertia is more difficult to determine. The variance in inertia with respect to the complexity of organizational arrangements is also explored. (SRD)

Niche Width and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations

This paper explores the effects of environmental variability and grain on the niche width of organizational populations. It develops a model of the manner in which environmental variations affect the life changes of specialist and generalist organizations. This model predicts that death rates of generalists exceed those of specialists in fine-grained environments, regardless of the level of variability, but that generalists have lower death rates when environmental variation is both coarse grained and large. The model is applied to a sample of restaurant organizations in 18 California cities. Maximum likelihood estimates and tests confirm the major predictions of the model.

The Ecology of Organizational Mortality: American Labor Unions, 1836-1985

This paper analyzes the founding rate of national labor unions in the United States for the period 1836-1985. It investigates the effects of competitive processes and environmental effects on this rate. A number of stochastics models embodying different assumptions about the ecology of foundings are estimated. The best-fitting models posit that the effect of density (the number of unions in existence) and the number of recent foundings on the foundig rate is curvilinear. Analysis of more complicated models reveals that the growth of industrial unions inhibited the founding rate of craft unions. However, the founding rate of industrial unions was unaffected by the number of craft unions in existence.

Where do organizational forms come from

Most theory and research on organizations assumes that the great diversity of organizational attributes reflects variation in implementation of a relatively small number of forms. Modern conceptions of organizational form concentrate on discontinuities in distributions of either attributes or relationships with other organizations. We argue that this approach be supplemented with an explicitly dynamic one that focuses on processes that create and erode boundaries in the organizational world. This paper discusses some of the advantages of this approach and specifies a number of processes that create and erode boundaries around organizational populations.

The Population Ecology of Restaurants Revisited: Reply to Herriott

We thank Scott Herriott for provoking a reconsideration of our earlier work. In doing so, we did indeed uncover a minor coding error. We take this occasion to present correct estimates, which should be viewed as errata for our original paper. None of Herriotts arguments is valid, however. Although comments such as this can often help to clarify a complicated theoretical argument, this does not seem to be true here. All the theoretical issues raised by Herriott are discussed in our earlier papers (Hannan and Freeman 1977; Freeman and Hannan 1983), as we show below. Since the paper under criticism is an empirical test of a theory developed in a previous paper (Hannan and Freeman 1977), our response should be considered in the context of the original theoretical statement. We began by considering Hawleys (1968) principle of isomorphism. Hawleys argument is that similar environmental conditions constrain organizations to adopt similar structures-that organizations come to have structures that are isomorphic to the structures of the organizations in the environment hat control critical resources. We noted that Hawleys principle refers to a static equilibrium and that it does not consider competitive processes as sources of isomorphic tendencies. We set out to extend sociological human ecology by adding a dynamic approach and considering the effects of competition explicitly. In an effort o introduce such ingredients into theoretical consideration, we examined the social science literature but found little help. We turned to population ecology because competition, conceptualized dynamically, plays a central role in contemporary theoretical formulations in bioecology. In particular, we found Levinss (1968) ideas about the evolution of

Organizations and Environments.Howard E. Aldrich

This is an excellent book. It is as thorough topically as any standard text currently available. It is exceptionally well written. It meets its stated objectives. It provides a flexibility of content and methodology that many in university teaching will welcome, especially if this book is used in conjunction with other instructional materials. Harold C. White Professor Department of Management Arizona State University