Organizational ecology utilizes insights from biology, economics,[1] and sociology, and employs statistical analysis to try to understand the conditions under which organizations emerge, grow, and die.
He also advocated for organizational studies research to focus on populations and individual organizations as part of open rather than closed systems that have both bureaucratic (internal) regulation and ecological (community environment) regulation (see also Open and closed systems in social science).
The books The Demography of Corporations and Industries by Glenn Carroll and Michael T. Hannan (2000) and Logics of Organization Theory: Audiences, Codes, and Ecologies by Michael T. Hannan, Laszlo Polos, and Glenn Carroll (2007), provide the most comprehensive overview of the various theories and methods in organizational ecology.
A key prediction of organizational ecology is that the process of change itself is so disruptive that it will result in an elevated rate of mortality.
Hence organizational ecology has spent considerable effort on understanding the founding and mortality rates of organizations.
Hannan and Freeman define organizational inertia in terms of internal and external restraints.
On the other hand, generalist organizations accept a lower level of exploitation in return for greater security.
[2] Organizational ecology also predicts that the rates of founding and mortality are dependent on the number of organizations (density) in the market.
Another important difference concerns the question: What is selected by the environment-- 'organizational forms', as in organizational ecology, or 'routines' as in the evolutionary economics literature?
Authors like Joel Baum and Arjen van Witteloostuijn have argued for the potential of cross-fertilization between these two research strands.