Why Organizational Ecology Is Not a Darwinian Research Program

Abstract

Organizational ecology is commonly seen as a Darwinian research program that seeks to explain the diversity of organizational structures, properties and behaviors as the product of selection in past social environments in a similar manner as evolutionary biology seeks to explain the forms, properties and behaviors of organisms as consequences of selection in past natural environments. We argue that this explanatory strategy does not succeed because organizational ecology theory lacks an evolutionary mechanism that could be identified as the principal cause of organizational diversity. The "evolution" of organizational populations by means of selection, which organizational ecologists put forward as the mechanism responsible for the extant diversity of organizational forms, is not evolution in any proper sense, because organizational populations do not have what it takes to participate in evolutionary processes. This implies that organizational ecology is not a Darwinian research program and that it cannot explain organizational diversity.

On the Explanatory Power of Generalized Darwinism: Missing Items on the Research Agenda

“…In the case that these explananda are in focus and the explanatory scope of generalized Darwinism is not intended to be narrower than that of other evolutionary lines of investigation, the next step would be to establish that generalized Darwinism has the resources to explain the phenomena it is intended to explain. Elsewhere (Reydon & Scholz, 2009;Scholz & Reydon 2008 we have criticized organizational ecology for not being able to provide proper evolutionary explanations of its explananda and we believe that our basic criticism of organizational ecology holds against generalized Darwinism too. (We will turn to this issue in the next section.)…”

The Claims of Generalized Darwinism

“…She presents these as remedying the defects in a previous attempt to apply Darwinian ideas to the domain of organizational science: the research programme of so-called 'organizational ecology' (Dollimore 2014a). For whereas the programme of 'organizational ecology' had failed to demonstrate its Darwinian credentials proper because it had no counterpart to the genetic and reproductive relations that are required to produce a properly Darwinian process of population-level change through biological natural selection (Reydon and Scholz 2009), GD claims that it is able, in a fashion, to do precisely this (Dollimore 2014a). Moreover, GD claims that it is also able to accommodate the change brought about in an individual organization's characteristics by intentional adaptation to environmental factors at the level of the individual organization, via, for instance, managerial deliberation and volition (Hodgson 2013a;Dollimore 2014a).…”

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

“…First, it will distinguish a business species from a biological species and hence reduce the current definitional confusion in the literature concerning the use of the word species. Second, given that the species definition in biology is restrictive in terms of reproductive and evolutionary processes, -a species may only mate with members of its own species -using technospecies will remove this constraint as it does not hold for business species able to recombine into diverse hybrid forms (Nelson, 2007;Reydon & Scholz, 2009). In a manner similar to biological species, technospecies could exchange routines resulting in genetically different offspring.…”