Disruptive Selection and Population Segmentation: Interpopulation Competition as a Segregating Process

Abstract

Abstract “Why are there so many kinds of organizations?” Hannan and Freeman (1977:936) posed this question in their seminal article on population ecology. Essentially they are asking why we observe variability among organizations. At first, the answer to this question appears obvious: Organizations have different purposes, goals, building blocks, and so on. But this response is incomplete-it does not explain the causal mechanism underlying the process of organizational heterogeneity. To understand organizational heterogeneity fully, two additional components need to be introduced: the assertion of organizational evolution and the theory of natural selection. We refer to organizational evolution as an assertion because it is essentially a descriptive statement about change at multiple levels. Organizations are assumed to come from a common “pool”; over time they “descend with modifications.” Consequently, we see changes occur within populations of organizations (microevolution), or the emergence of different and distinct sub-groups of organizations (speciation), or the evolution of entire populations (macroevolution).1 While evolutionary change is a useful framework, it does not address how the process occurs-for that we need the theory of natural selection.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.