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 | Organizations Evolving |
Review by Hayagreeva Rao (Hayagreeva_Rao@bus.emory.edu)
Two decades ago, Aldrich published his classic text Organizations and Environments (1979) which helped pioneer an evolutionary understanding of organizations. In this befitting sequel, Aldrich skillfully surveys advances in organizational evolution and masterfully consolidates cutting-edge research on the processes of organizational emergence. In this gem of a book, Aldrich ranges far and wide as he assesses the twenty-years of organizational research on variation, selection and retention in the world of organizations. The roughly 1000 plus references cited in the book, many of them from the 1990's, attest to Aldrich's catholicity and his emphasis on the state-of-the art research in organizational evolution. This exceptional accomplishment is compulsory reading for the budding organizational researcher and the experienced scholar.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the book and introduces it to the reader. Chapter 2 outlines the sub-processes of evolution, recounts and rebuts criticisms of evolution, and sets the stage for our understanding of evolution as a multi-level process. Chapter 3 casts evolutionary theory as a meta-theory underlying the institutional, interpretive, organizational learning, ecological, resource dependence, and transaction cost approaches to organizations. Chapter 4 unpacks how entrepreneurs create fledgling organization by pursuing knowledge and mobilizing resources. Chapter 5 asks how founders delineate the boundaries of the organization and reproduce organizational knowledge. Chapter 6 studies how members emerge out of the communities of practice that congeal around organizational tasks. Chapter 7 demarcates the scope conditions under which transformations occur and promote survival, and Chapter 8 makes 'history' rather than time, a key dimension for understanding population-level transformations. Chapter 9 shifts the level of discussion to the population level, and dimensionalizes the processes underlying the emergence of new populations. Chapter 10 unravels the processes that trigger the foundings and disbandings of organizations. Chapter 11 ratchets up the analysis to the level of organizational communities, and sketches the trajectory of community evolution. Chapter 12 closes the book with an invitation to scholars of organizational evolution to examine the problematic issues in the conceptualization and study of of variation, selection, and retention processes. In this last chapter Aldrich lays out a large research agenda for the years to come.
The book is meant to be read in the order of the chapters, and is a twelve-course meal with each course whetting the reader's appetite. Some courses/chapters stand out. Chapter 4 skillfully integrates principles from network analysis, social psychology and cognitive psychology to explain how the founding process unfolds. Chapter 5 superbly contrasts how users and supporters underpin the boundaries of organizations and details the processes of reproduction in organizations. Chapter 9 is notable for the detailed discussion of how new populations emerge and become legitimated. Chapter 11 provides a very cogent account of symbiosis and commensalism in communities and contains an engaging discussion of how new communities form around technical and institutional cores.
When one juxtaposes Aldrich's arguments with the contemporary landscape, important questions about the relationship between political change and patterns of organizational evolution come into view. During the past decade, post-socialist revolutions have dismantled state-owned enterprises, and spawned new organizational forms in the financial sectors of Central and Eastern European economies. What explains variety in variation in post-socialist countries? Are new variants built on the ruins of the old order or built with the ruins of the old order? How do revolutions affect the level at which organizational entities are selected? What explains the retention of organizations in societies convulsed in revolutions? The study of these and related questions promises to be one of the cutting edges of organizational evolution and they should be added to the research agenda articulated in the last chapter.
The book's emphasis on the processes of emergence suggests that we also need to pay attention to the other side of the coin of organizational change - the processes of collapse. Several problems beckon organizational evolutionists - the study of schisms and splits within organizations, the analysis of contagion in bankruptcies, and inquiries into the disintegration of communities. In turn, a deeper understanding of the processes of collapse leads to a renewed appreciation of how evolutionary processes also underlie conflict and disorder in social life.
In summary, Organizations Evolving is a timely and important addition to the literature on organizational evolution. It is essential reading for all organizational researchers.
References
Aldrich, Howard E. (1979). Organizations and Environments. Englewoods Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Zablocki, Benjamin David (1980). Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York, Free Press.