The Ecology of Organizational Size Distribution

组织规模分布的生态学

• 批准号: 8809006
• 负责人: Michael Hannan
• 金额: $ 7.67万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1988
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1988-08-15 至 1991-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8809006&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Ecology; Organizational; Size; Distribution

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.

组织群体生态学是一个最新的研究视角，研究组织群体演化中生态动力学如何与组织增长相互作用。 这种方法侧重于社会结构变化与组织群体变化之间的关系。 因此，它特别适合发展组织理论和研究与广泛的宏观社会学关注之间的联系。 组织群体的完整动态涉及生命率（成立和死亡率）以及单个组织的增长和衰退。 然而，为了分析长期不同人群的数据，组织生态学的最新研究强调了生命率，而忽视了组织层面的增长和收缩问题。 本研究旨在通过建立组织生态模型来纠正这种平衡，在该模型中各个组织会成长和收缩。 也就是说，它探讨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情况。 首先是缺乏适当的数据。 现有数据集不提供完整群体中组织规模波动的时间路径，而这是估计增长模型所需的。 仅使用大型组织的数据（通常可以找到有关规模的记录）来估计增长模型的努力面临着严重的样本选择偏差问题。 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，对组织群体动态进行分析表征的前景并不乐观。 尽管我们已经开始了解动态的各个方面，但我们还不知道如何分析地整合这些方面。 鉴于缺乏适当的经验数据以及问题分析的复杂性，本研究将依赖于微观模拟和经验分析的结合。 微观模拟将成为了解各种增长机制和生态约束对组织群体演化的影响的主要工具。 所提出的实证分析使用选定群体的规模分布序列，以便了解模拟中开发的模型是否适合经验情况。 特别是，这些分析将探讨模型是否可以解释观察到的经验横截面分布序列随时间的变化。 研究结果将（1）证明生态过程是否对组织层面的增长和衰退过程的假设敏感，（2）表明规模分布如何影响组织群体内的竞争和合法化过程。