In Defense of Organizational Evolution

Abstract

Organizational ecology applies Darwinian principles of natural selection to understand the evolution of new forms of organizations over time. The idea here is that there are different forms of human organizations, such as different business organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, etc. The growth of new forms of organizations within each of these fields is to be understood in terms of a struggle for existence among organizations with different traits. In a recent article, Reydon and Scholz (2009) argue that this Darwinian view of the evolution of new organizational forms is highly problematic because organizational populations do not exhibit the levels of internal cohesion, isolation, and closure that are necessary for something like Darwinian evolution to occur. In this article, I defend organizational ecology by rebutting the arguments of Reydon and Scholz.

Who Inhabits a Business Ecosystem? The Technospecies as a Unifying Concept

“…Species is a biological term used in many areas of the business literature, including: platforms (Kang & Downing, 2014), keystones species (Iansiti & Levien, 2004a, 2004b, organizational species (Gundlach, 2006;Lemos, 2009;Pagano, 2013), non-profit organizational species (Potter & Crawford, 2008), organizational species barrier (Gaba & Meyer, 2008), flagship species (Kim et al, 2010), leading species (Knight & Cavugil, 2004), ecosys- (Bruhn, 2013), business species diversity (Wright et al, 2009), and endangered (business) species (Cooke, 2000). Although the word is used in the business literature with similar connotation to the biological term (Prendergast & Berthon, 2000) -that of a distinct population of organisms -business species and biological species are very different.…”

Untangling the Conceptual Issues Raised in Reydon and Scholz’s Critique of Organizational Ecology and Darwinian Populations

“…In a defense of organizational ecology's Darwinian credentials, Lemos (2009) proffered an immediate but ultimately unpersuasive challenge to Reydon and Scholz's critique, based as it was on the resolute view that sets can be conceived as real entities. 8 This was dismissed by the authors in a rejoinder (Scholz and Reydon 2010) where they reasserted the need for a population thinking approach for Darwinian evolutionary selection processes.…”

“…However, it does at least point toward the kind of theoretical framework that needs to be considered by social scientists seeking to develop a more complete Darwinian evolutionary research program, one that accounts for changes in organizational form that result from the intertwined processes of adaptation (including learning and the intentional decision making of organizational leaders) and evolutionary selection. And so, in response to Lemos's (2009) final musings where he ponders the Darwinian research program and a perceived problem with the accommodation of intentionality, the view here is that Darwinism is assuredly not an "unnecessary extravagance. "…”

“…While Reydon and Scholz do not deny that populations thus conceived will display variation among types, they stress the critical difference in conceptualization of populations when it comes to explaining evolutionary change by Darwinian natural selection. In a response to Lemos (2009), who sought to defend the Darwinian credentials of organizational ecology, they explain, It is a mistake to define organizational populations typologically-as sets of organizations with a shared form-because this does not allow for the variation between the members of a population that is required for evolution to occur. (Scholz and Reydon 2010, 506) On the contrary, in their elaboration of the variation and inheritance link, they explain that populations need to be defined in terms of "structural cohesion" or "lineages."…”

Organizational Ecology: No Darwinian Evolution After All. A Rejoinder to Lemos

“…In our view, the "evolution" of organizational populations by means of selection (which is put forward in organizational ecology as the mechanism that produces the diversity of organizational forms that we find in the world) is not evolution in the biological sense, as organizational "populations" lack crucial properties required to function as evolutionary units. Lemos (2009) recently criticized our argumentation on various counts. While Lemos agreed that there are disanalogies between biological evolution and organizational "evolution," he defended organizational ecology as a Darwinian research program, claiming that our interpretation of the organizational ecology program "is not sufficiently charitable in its understanding of the Darwinian nature of organizational ecology" (Lemos 2009, 12).…”