Organizational Ecology Theory: Review Past for Directing the Future Development

Abstract

Research on organizational ecology theory (OET) focuses on the effects of environmental constraints and competition within and between populations to explain the expansion and decline of organizational populations. While OET utilization has gained tremendous momentum over the past four decades, the literature remains fragmented. The integration of existing OET studies is important and timely. Thus, following a systematic process, we select 332 papers identified from the Web of Science database and perform a document-level bibliographic coupling analysis that explores the OET literature through clustering algorithms. This analysis reveals four thematic clusters within OET applications: (1) the antecedents of organizational vital rates (founding, mortality, change), (2) the structure of organizational populations and communities, (3) the intrapopulation and interpopulation evolutionary processes, and (4) the consequences of the intrapopulation and interpopulation evolutionary processes. Then, we supplement this in-depth analysis with a review of the literature, which enhances our understanding of the research themes related to OET applications, helping to develop an integrative framework and formulate new research questions that support the development of this promising theory. Therefore, this review suggests avenues for a more productive route to coherent theoretical and methodological development and promising topics for OET research.