The Ecology of Organizational Size Distribution

组织的种群生态学是一个新的研究领域 生态动态如何与 组织演进中的组织成长 人口。 这种方法侧重于关系 社会结构的变化和人口的变化 的组织。 因此，它特别适合于 发展理论和研究之间的联系， 组织和广泛的宏观社会问题。 充分 组织的人口动态涉及生命率 (of成立和死亡率）以及增长和下降的 个别组织。 然而，为了 分析长期以来不同人群的数据，最近 组织生态学的研究强调生命率 并忽略了增长和收缩的问题， 组织层面。 本研究旨在纠正 通过建立组织生态模型， 个体组织的成长和收缩。 即它 探讨了增加增长的影响， 组织生态学模型。 将增长纳入现有的种群生态学模型 遇到了两种并发症。 一是关于 缺乏适当的数据。 现有数据集不提供 组织规模波动的时间路径 估计增长所需的完整人口 模型 仅使用数据估计增长模型的努力 对于大型组织，其规模记录通常可以 发现，面临严重的样本选择偏差问题。 的 第二个困难涉及模型的复杂性， 将微观动力学纳入生态模型。 鉴于 就目前的知识状况而言，没有严重的前景， 组织动力学的分析特征 人口。 虽然我们已经开始了解各种 在动态方面，我们还不知道如何整合 这些方面进行分析。 由于缺乏适当的 经验数据和问题的分析复杂性，这 研究将依赖于微观模拟和 实证分析 微观模拟将是主要的工具， 了解各种生长机制的影响， 组织演化的生态约束 人口。 建议的实证分析使用序列 在选定的人口规模分布，以了解 模拟中开发的模型是否符合经验 situations. 具体而言，这些分析将探讨 这些模型可以解释观察到的序列随时间的变化 经验的横截面分布。 的调查结果 该研究将（1）证明生态过程是否 对有关增长过程的假设很敏感， 在组织层面下降，（2）显示规模如何 分配影响竞争和合法化的过程 在组织人口中。

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.