| This site is designed by |
 | Organizations Evolving |
| Response to Reviewers’ Comments by Howard E. Aldrich (Howard_Aldrich@UNC.EDU) |
I appreciate the opportunity ETSS has given me to increase awareness of my book's themes. Professors Rao and Stinchcombe have been generous in their description of the book's strengths, while also suggesting issues deserving more attention. I have only a few comments to make in response.
Rao's concise and cogent summary of the book's 12 chapters makes an important point: it was meant to be read in chapter order. I wanted to show the applicability of the evolutionary model to multiple levels of analysis, from organizations to communities. The chapter order also reflects my emergentist focus – communities are built on populations, which are built on organizations, which emerge from the actions of entrepreneurs.
Stinchcombe's review raises two issues that bedevil all studies of organizational change, not just evolutionary ones: the problem of endogeneity, and the problem of the missing organizational physiologists. He contrasted the clear distinction between what's exogenous and what's endogenous in biological ecology with the situation facing social scientists. A central theme in my book is the significant role of purposive collective action and the constructed nature of meaning in social life. Cacti in the Arizona desert cannot band together and demand more rainfall, nor can they observe how succulents in other deserts have dealt with the problem of conserving what little rainfall they get. No cacti ideologues create messianic visions that enable cacti to go without the pleasures of water for short spells. In contrast, the communes Zablocki studied were not only a product of their historical time -- the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s -- but also shaped it. Many, but not all, communes had charismatic leaders who helped members interpret why they had (temporarily) left the larger society. As Stinchcombe noted, members flowed freely through the communes, most not staying very long, and upon their return to the larger society, saw things differently. Popular culture made icons of some communal leaders and communal vocabulary worked its way into the mass media.
Zablocki was able to make sense of the emergent complexities of the modern communal era because he did not study it at arm's length. He began his research in 1965 and continued it until 1975, using a wide variety of data-gathering techniques: surveys, observation, gathering of documents, map-making, and analysis of census data. Fligstein, by contrast, was not alive in the 1920s when the multi-divisional form was born, and did not spend time in large corporations all across America, hanging out with corporate officers and getting them to answer his questions about what they were doing. Corporate officers' motives, their social networks, and what they really knew about what other corporations were doing remain a mystery to us.
In a similar line of argument, Rao noted that evolutionary theorists should be paying more attention to several contemporary developments that will eventually loom large in history. He listed two areas where my perspective could be applied: patterns of change in post-socialist countries, and processes of organizational collapse. I agree. As Rao described them, post-socialist nations are virtual laboratories for the study of evolutionary processes, with events unfolding in a short enough time span that researchers can actually document the emergence of new organizational forms. With regard to organizational, population, and community collapse, I agree with his implicit premise that too much contemporary research focuses on surviving and successful organizations and forms. If organizational scholars don't study the changes occurring in this era, 30 years from now they will confront the same problem that Fligstein faced in studying the M-form. The historical record will be incomplete and researchers will have to fill in the gaps with informed speculation.
As an exemplar, Zablocki is probably non-reproducible. Junior faculty who spent 10 years collecting their data and another five years writing it up would be heroic figures, indeed. But we need people willing to try. Such exemplars would be organizational physiologists, willing to spend inordinate amounts of time in the field, learning what goes with what -- what is endogenous, what is exogenous, and when the distinction makes no sense (except dynamically). Zablocki thanked dozens of people in the forward to his book, and I suspect that traditional research models of solo practitioners and cottage industry projects must give way to teams of researchers who divide up the task of a Zablocki-type study so that it becomes manageable. Senior scholars could become the leaders of such teams and manage the process for as long as it takes to create the data needed for evolutionary analyses.
In chapter 12 of my book, as Rao notes, I pose a series of questions for further reflection, including "do our research methods overstate organizational homogeneity?" and [are we] "leaving the past behind?" A sub-theme throughout the book is the need for more organizational ethnographers. I can only hope Stinchcombe's plug for Zablocki's book encourages the Free Press to reprint it. Perhaps we have a potential generation of organizational physiologists enrolled in our graduate schools now, as well as a core of senior leaders, awaiting the call.