Population ecology

Population ecology is the application of Darwinian selection logic to organizations rather than organisms. Hannan and Freeman (1977) argued that organizations are structurally inert — bound by sunk costs, reputational commitments, and internal politics — and therefore cannot adapt quickly to environmental change. Selection operates on populations of organizations, winnowing out those whose structures mismatch their environments, while the survivors persist not because they adapted but because they happened to fit. The approach revolutionized organizational theory by shifting attention from individual adaptation to population-level dynamics, but it risks reducing organizations to passive phenotypes and missing the strategic agency that resource dependence theory would later restore.