The Ecology of Organizational Size Distribution

组织种群生态学是近年来关于生态动力如何与组织种群演化中的组织成长相互作用的研究视角。这一方法侧重于社会结构变化和组织人口变化之间的关系。因此，它特别适合于发展组织理论和研究与广泛的宏观社会学问题之间的联系。组织人口的全部动态包括生死率(成立和死亡)以及个别组织的兴衰。然而，为了长期分析不同人群的数据，最近的组织生态学研究强调了生命比率，而忽视了组织层面的增长和收缩问题。本研究试图通过建立单个组织在其中成长和收缩的组织生态模型来纠正这种平衡。也就是说，它探索了将组织层面的增长添加到组织生态模型中的含义。将增长纳入现有的种群生态模型会遇到两种复杂的情况。第一个问题是缺乏适当的数据。现有的数据集没有提供完整人口中组织规模波动的时间路径，这是估计增长模型所需的。只使用大型组织的数据来估计增长模型的努力面临着样本选择偏差的严重问题，这些组织的规模记录往往可以找到。第二个困难涉及将微观动力学纳入生态模型的模型的复杂性。鉴于目前的知识状况，对组织群体的动态进行分析性表征是不可能的。虽然我们已经开始了解动态的各个方面，但我们还不知道如何在分析上整合这些方面。鉴于适当经验数据的缺乏和问题分析的复杂性，本研究将依靠微观模拟和实证分析相结合的方法。微观模拟将是了解各种生长机制和生态约束对组织种群进化的影响的主要工具。拟议的经验分析使用选定种群的大小分布序列，以了解在模拟中建立的模型是否符合经验情况。特别是，这些分析将探索这些模型是否能够解释经验横截面分布序列中观察到的随时间的变化。这项研究的结果将(1)证明生态过程是否对组织层面上关于增长和下降过程的假设敏感，以及(2)展示规模分布如何影响组织群体中的竞争和合法化过程。

Population ecology of organizations is a recent research perspective on how ecological dynamics interact with organizational growth in the evolution of organizational populations. This approach focuses on the relationships between changes in social structures and changes in populations of organizations. Thus it is especially well-suited for developing connections between theory and research on organizations and broad macrosociological concerns. The full dynamics of populations of organizations involve vital rates (of founding and mortality) as well as growth and decline of individual organizations. However, in the interest of analyzing data on diverse populations over long periods, recent research in organizational ecology has emphasized vital rates and has slighted issues of growth and contraction at the organizational level. The present research seeks to redress the balance by building models of organizational ecologies in which individual organizations grow and contract. That is, it explores the implications of adding growth at the organizational level to models of organizational ecology. Incorporating growth into existing population-ecology models encounters two kinds of complications. The first concerns the absence of appropriate data. Existing data sets do not provide time-paths of fluctuations in sizes of organizations in complete populations, which are needed to estimate growth models. Efforts to estimate models of growth using only data for large organizations, for which records on size can often be found, face serious problems of sample-selection bias. The second difficulty concerns the complexity of models that incorporate microdynamics into ecological models. Given the present state of knowledge, there is no serious prospect for analytic characterizations of the dynamics of organizational populations. Although we have begun to understand various aspects of the dynamics, we do not yet know how to integrate these aspects analytically. Given the paucity of appropriate empirical data and the analytic complexity of the problem, this research will rely on a combination of microsimulation and empirical analyis. Microsimulation will be the main tool for learning about the effects of various growth mechanisms and ecological constraints for the evolution of organizational populations. The proposed empirical analyses use sequences of size distributions on selected populations in order to learn whether the models developed in the simulations fit empirical situations. In particular, these analyses will explore whether the models can explain observed change over time in sequences of empirical cross-sectional distributions. The findings of the research will (1) demonstrate whether ecological processes are sensitive to assumptions about processes of growth and decline at the organizational level, and (2) show how size distributions affect processes of competition and legitimation within organizational populations.