Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Organizational Populations and Fields

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Organizational Populations and Fields

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Organizational Populations
and Fields
HEATHER A. HAVEMAN and DANIEL N. KLUTTZ

Abstract
This essay examines two major perspectives on organizations that have been prominent since the 1970s: ecology and institutionalism, both of which emerged as reactions against rationalist approaches to the study of organizations. Both take as their
primary units of analysis collections of organizations, rather than individual organizations: “populations” for ecologists (groups of organizations with the same form)
and “fields” for institutionalists (groups of organizations of different forms that interact with each other in some social sector). Ecologists seek to explain the changing
distribution of organizations (rates of founding, failure, growth, and change) in terms
of the features of organizations’ environments. Institutionalists seek to explain organizational legitimacy, variety, and change by reference to cultural norms, values, and
expectations about what is the “right” or “normal” way to organize. While ecologists seek general explanations that apply to all populations, institutionalists seek
explanations that are sensitive to the peculiarities of the field under study. Ecological
and institutional studies of organizations have converged in the past decade, which
has yielded studies that minimize the weaknesses of each perspective and maximize
their strengths. Ecologists have examined many explanatory factors, such as pressures to imitate legitimate organizational forms, which were originally highlighted
by institutionalists. In the same vein, institutionalists have turned their attention to
founding and failure, outcomes that were ecologists’ original focus, and have used
factors such as the number of organizations, much studied by ecologists, to explain
these outcomes. We conclude by suggesting potential fruitful avenues for further
integration between these perspectives.

INTRODUCTION
This essay examines two major perspectives on organizations that have been
prominent since the 1970s: ecology and institutionalism. Rooted primarily
in sociology, scholars working in these two perspectives have often debated
their strengths and weaknesses. But in recent years, many scholars have
incorporated features of each perspective into their studies, which represents
a fruitful trend in organizational scholarship. In this essay, we first situate
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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the core tenets of ecology and institutionalism with respect to one another.
We then summarize foundational research in each perspective and identify
their strengths and weaknesses. Next, we discuss recent research that has
extended each perspective and then describe work that has integrated them
to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. We conclude
with a discussion of key issues for future research, as well as important
theoretical and methodological questions that will motivate future studies
integrating ecology and institutionalism.
There are fundamental differences between the two perspectives. Perhaps
the most obvious divide stems from the fact that ecologists investigate highly
abstract models of how organizational populations evolve and focus on a
narrow set of outcomes (organizations’ vital rates), while institutionalists
seek nuanced explanations that are sensitive to the specifics of time and
place, and study a wider array of outcomes. This divergence stems from
a profound difference in theoretical base: Organizational ecology focuses
on demography (the numbers of organizations and their vital rates), while
institutional analysis focuses on culture and its empirical manifestations
(conceptual schemas, norms and values, rules and regulations, and structures
and practices). And this divergence yields, by necessity, different relationships between theory and data: Ecological research seeks to test and extend
formal models that have general applicability, while institutional research
seeks to apply general theoretical principles to explain particular empirical
phenomena.
Despite these differences, ecology and institutionalism have much
in common. Both perspectives emerged as reactions against rationalist
approaches to the study of organizations that focused on efficiency as the
key explanatory variable. Both perspectives investigate many of the same
phenomena—organizational form, legitimacy, homogeneity (or, conversely,
heterogeneity), and change (or, conversely, stability). To explain these
phenomena, both perspectives direct attention toward the external environment and away from internal functioning. Both perspectives take as their
primary units of analysis collections of organizations, rather than individual
organizations: “populations” for ecologists (groups of organizations with
the same form) and “fields” for institutionalists (groups of organizations
of different forms that interact with each other in some arena of social life).
Finally, there has been some theoretical convergence in the past decade, as
ecologists have begun to conceive of organizational populations and forms
as cultural constructions and organizations’ vital rates as determined by
the cultural expectations of internal and external audiences. For their part,
institutionalists have begun to use explanatory variables from ecological
theory in their own analyses.

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FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
ECOLOGY
Some refer to organizational ecology as the demography of organizations
and industries because it emphasizes demographic analysis of the distribution of populations and their vital rates; others call it the population ecology
of organizations because it focuses on populations of organizations more
than individual organizations. Whatever the label, scholars working within
this perspective propose that organizations’ positions in social and physical
space determine opportunities for and constraints on their action (Carroll
& Hannan, 2000; Hannan & Freeman, 1977). In other words, ecologists
seek to understand the distribution of organizations across such important
dimensions as age, size, location, and production technology. Introducing
ecology, Michael Hannan and John Freeman (1977, p. 936) wondered,
“Why are there so many kinds of organizations?” To answer this question,
ecologists adapted Darwinian models of biological evolution and applied
them to explain the evolution of organizational systems—that is, to explain
rates of organizational founding, failure, growth, and change in terms of
the material and cultural features of organizations’ environments. A second,
more purely sociological, progenitor of organizational ecology is human
ecology, which involves the study of relationships between humans and
their economic, social, and political organization.
Ecologists assume that understanding organizational diversity requires
scholars to think about organizational populations as fundamental units of
analysis. Populations are aggregates of organizations that share a common
dependence on the environment and are instances of a single organizational
form. Empirically, populations have been identified as sets of organizations
that produce similar goods or services, use similar resources, and have
similar identities. The populations studied by ecologists are diverse: they
include breweries and wineries, labor unions, women’s and minority rights
movement organizations, automobile and bicycle manufacturers, banks,
restaurants, insurance and telephone companies, art museums, day-care
centers, baseball teams, radio stations, and newspaper publishers.
Ecologists argue that scholars should focus on change rather than stability
in organizational populations; in particular, on what causes the array of
organizations to become more or less diverse. The diversity of organizations
increases when new organizational populations emerge and expand in size;
it declines when existing populations decrease in size and become extinct.
Thus, to understand how organizational diversity changes, ecologists study
organizations’ vital rates—rates of founding, failure, growth, and internal
change.

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Ecologists explain these vital rates in terms of selection rather than
adaptation. Under selection, organizational populations change through
the replacement of one kind of organization by another, while under adaptation, they change through the transformation of existing organizations.
Thus, under selection, foundings and failures drive population change,
while under adaptation, growth and internal organizational change drive
population change.
Ecologists’ focus on selection stems from the assumption that organizations are highly inert: Once founded, their structures and activities do
not change much over time. Such inertia is assumed to be necessary for
organizations to account for their performance to external observers such
as government agencies and perform reliably for their customers. Ecologists
do not assume that organizations never change—just that they change far
less than many scholars assume—and when organizations do change, their
members must learn to do new things and navigate new structures, and
unlearn old activities and abandon old pathways through structures. All
this learning and unlearning requires considerable resources to justify new
activities and structures which must be done to overcome resistance to
change. In turn, expending resources reduces organizational effectiveness
and increases the likelihood of failure. To test this argument, many ecologists
analyze the causes and consequences of organizational change. For example,
most change in California thrifts (savings and loan associations) occurred
through births of new types of thrifts and deaths of old ones, not through the
transformation of old kinds of thrifts into new kinds. American radio stations resisted changing formats, but did so when they performed poorly and
when competing stations had done so; however, format changes reduced
stations’ market share, especially for large and well-performing ones.
Other ecological studies analyze competitive (win/lose) and mutualistic
(win/win) interactions between organizations in a single population or
between multiple subpopulations defined by such things as market niche,
size, and location. For example, the survival of American minor-league
baseball teams was bolstered by being in a large league—but only up to
a point, as mutualism among league members broke down in leagues
with more than eight members. In contrast, baseball team survival was
reduced by competition from teams in leagues outside their own. Similarly,
Manhattan hotels competed most intensely against hotels of similar size: as
the number of similarly sized hotels increased, hotels’ failure rates increased.
And French automobile manufacturers competed with other French firms
but were legitimated by automobile manufacturers in other parts of
Europe.

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INSTITUTIONALISM
Given its label, it is not surprising that central to this perspective are
institutions: social facts, phenomena perceived by people as both external
to themselves and coercive because they are backed by sanctions. Institutions develop over time, through real and superstitious learning, and they
become both highly legitimate and highly stable. This makes institutions
durable phenomena that do not require recurrent collective mobilization or
authoritative intervention to persist.
To study the institutions that are embodied by and shape organizations,
scholars working within this perspective focus on culture: they highlight
the norms, values, and expectations that actors inside and outside the organization (employees, oversight agencies, financiers, suppliers, distributors,
media, and customers) hold about what is the “right” or “normal” way to
operate (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Scott, 2008). These are cultural, not just
cognitive, phenomena because they are widely shared, although they may
be contested and not universally accepted. According to institutionalists,
cultural conventions, shared myths, and common schemas make collective
action possible by defining the opportunities and constraints organizations
face, thus determining organizations’ structures and activities.
Institutionalists study organizational fields, which are diverse communities composed of organizations that engage in common activities and
are subject to similar environmental pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;
Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Fields constitute recognized areas of social
life, such as health care, education, and financial services; they include
competitors, suppliers, customers, regulatory agencies, news media, and
advisors. Fields develop through four stages: (i) interaction among organizations involved in some area of social life increases, (ii) hierarchies and
coalitions develop, (iii) the amount of information with which field members must contend increases, and (iv) awareness among field members that
they are involved in a common enterprise develops. Thus, institutionalists
assume, fundamentally, that organizational fields and their constituent
elements (organizations and their structures, policies, and practices) are
socially constructed, products of social interactions that generate knowledge
and belief systems and are shared by most (if not all) participants.
Legitimacy is a central concept in institutionalism. Organizations are more
legitimate when they are more comprehensible and taken for granted as
natural ways to achieve collective goals, when they are more completely justified and explained on the basis of prevailing cultural accounts, and when
those involved have more difficulty conceiving of alternatives. Legitimacy
can rest on regulations, including the laws and administrative guidelines
that constitute the basic rules governing relationships within and between

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organizations, norms such as “expert” sources of information and value
judgments about the nature of organizations, and cognitions in the form
of shared perceptions of the value of organized social activity. Legitimacy
improves access to resources, including funding, employees, equipment
and raw materials, and distribution; legitimacy also improves acceptance by
customers, thus fueling product demand. For instance, California hospitals
that mirrored the prevailing logic of health care (early on, professional
dominance—doctors rule; later on, managed care—insurance companies
rule) performed better than those that did not. Thus, conformity with institutional expectations, and the legitimacy that organizations derive, contributes
to their ability to expand in numbers and facilitates their persistence. But
such conformity may conflict with efficient functioning, so organizations
try to limit the negative impact of conformity by decoupling what they say
they are and do from what they actually are and do. For example, when the
Roman Catholic Church in the United States faced a shortage of male priests,
women began to preach, counsel parishioners, and serve communion—all
activities that were, strictly speaking, the purview of the all-male priesthood.
Although institutionalism arose at the same time as ecology, its orientation is quite different. Rather than focusing on variety, institutionalists
focus on similarity, as Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell asked in their
seminal paper: “Why is there such startling homogeneity in organizational
structures and practices?” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). To answer
that question, institutionalists assess the level of isomorphism (literally,
“same shape”) among organizations in a field. They argue that as fields
evolve, organizations in those fields that play the same role or are tied to
each other become isomorphic; that is, they come to resemble one another.
The connection to legitimacy is clear: The more an organizational structure,
practice, or tactic diffuses across a field, the more legitimate it becomes.
Organizations become isomorphic through three processes: mimetic, coercive, and normative. Mimetic isomorphism is, quite simply, the achievement
of conformity through imitation. It can result from responses to uncertainty
(“when in doubt, do what other organizations facing the same environment
do”) or from bandwagon effects (“if many organizations adopt a structure
or practice, follow their lead”). For example, financial services firms imitated the actions of large and profitable firms. Similarly, hospitals adopted
standardized (as opposed to customized) quality management programs
when many other hospitals had done so. Coercive isomorphism stems
from regulations, administrative guidelines, or mandates from powerful
actors that authorize particular organizational structures and strategies
and prohibit others; it can also stem from pressure imposed by resource
dependencies. For instance, American cities were more likely to adopt
civil service reforms when they were mandated by their state legislatures.

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Finally, normative isomorphism involves pressures imposed by collective
actors such as professional and trade associations, which create informal
expectations, if not formal rules, about what organizations ought to be
and do. For example, new alternative-energy producers in New York and
California became more similar after industry associations began to spread
information about “best practices.”
Strengths and Weaknesses of these Perspectives on Organizations. Ecology has
benefited greatly from being highly paradigmatic: Ecologists agree on what
outcomes to study (founding, failure, growth, performance, and change),
what explanatory factors to consider (the number of organizations of various forms defined by size, location, technology, and/or niche), and what
analytical strategies to employ (quantitative analysis of data covering entire
populations over long periods of time). And ecology is arguably the most
logically rigorous perspective on organizations; indeed, it has benefited from
several logical tests, which have shown inconsistencies and incoherencies in
natural-language statements of theory and have paved the way for theoretical refinements. Finally, because ecologists have built on and refined each
other’s work, they have accumulated much knowledge. But these strengths
reveal a critical weakness: Precisely because it is such a “normal-science”
activity, some find it too narrow to interest anyone except ecologists themselves. Because much ecological research refines the basic theory without
extending it in new directions, this perspective is at risk of becoming ever
narrower and less influential.
The strength of the institutionalist perspective is its sweeping reach.
Because institutionalization is both an outcome and a process, institutionalists study both stability and change. They have identified a wide array
of mechanisms through which institutionalization occurs: habituation,
limitedly-rational imitation, normative conformity, accreditation, social
obligation, and coercion. In building theory, they have drawn not only on
sociology but also on psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. Finally, they
have used a wide array of methodologies: laboratory experiments, statistical
analyses of survey and archival data, ethnographies, and qualitative historical studies. But these strengths have also created critical weaknesses. Institutionalism has not adequately accounted for power and inequality. Moreover,
institutionalism consists of a loose collection of propositions, some seemingly incompatible and others only tenuously connected, which has made
debates unproductive feuds about intellectual origins and definitions rather
than substantive arguments about logic or evidence. Therefore, institutionalists have not built systematically on each other’s work to the same extent
that ecologists have, and so have not accumulated as much knowledge.

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CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
ECOLOGY
Although they initially assumed that all organizations in a population were
alike in that all organizations in a population faced the same environmental
demands and had the same effects on other organizations, ecologists now recognize that the strategies and structures of organizations in a population may
vary, as may their effects on other organizations. A vibrant stream of recent
research has focused on differences between generalists, which serve a wide
range of clients with a diverse array of products, and specialists, which serve
a limited clientele with a narrower set of products. These differences emerge
when there are economies of scale and resources are concentrated in a single
rich center and spread thinly in the periphery; under these circumstances, the
resource “space” becomes partitioned, with generalists occupying the center
and specialists the periphery. Generalists compete on scale—the larger they
become, the lower their costs. Specialists avoid direct scale-based competition with generalists by serving market segments that are too small to be
exploited profitably by generalists. For example, specialist American newspapers proliferated when general-interest newspapers consolidated, as did
specialist American wineries when mass-producer wineries merged, both
by serving the particular needs of markets that were too small for generalists to serve profitably. Similarly, specialist audit firms in Holland thrived by
focusing on a particular customer segment with changing needs and tailoring
products to it.
Another fruitful line of recent ecological research has used concepts and
methods from network analysis to explain organizations’ vital rates. This
work has required conceiving of organizations as being connected by webs of
resource overlaps, rather than as independent entities. For example, semiconductor firms’ niches (the scientific knowledge on which they build products)
were defined in terms of their position in the web of citations among scientific papers; the closer firms were in these networks, the more intensely they
competed and the more they reduced each other’s survival chances. A more
complex case is that of New York garment manufacturers: Those that maintained strong (ongoing and exclusive) relations with contractors had better
survival chances than those that maintained weak (arms’ length) relations
because strong relationships made it easier to forecast demand, which in turn
improved manufacturers’ ability to match production schedules with those
of their contractors.
Institutionalism. Institutionalists have come to recognize that organizations
do not just react to environmental demands—they are often proactive and
try to control their environments. Accordingly, they now place conformity

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on a continuum of responses that includes compromise, avoidance, defiance,
and manipulation. Continuing to emphasize culture, this newer research
often examines rhetorical strategies to capture these responses to environmental demands. For example, when the Canadian accounting profession
was framed as being under threat, a few elite firms successfully presented
the expansion of accountants’ professional scope as a “natural” solution to
evolving client demands through appeals that emphasized the consistency
of the proposed new activities with long-held professional values. Similarly,
after several widely publicized events reduced its legitimacy, the California
beef industry strategically used verbal accounts to repair the damage;
accounts acknowledging responsibility were more effective than those
denying it.
Strategic action is especially obvious in fields where people are trying to
create new kinds of organizations. Such “institutional entrepreneurship”
requires the skillful use of social resources to overcome skepticism and
persuade others to believe entrepreneurs’ representations of social reality
and support their new ventures. For example, American art historians and
their wealthy patrons cooperated in the late nineteenth century to develop
art museums as a distinct form of organization; they succeeded in creating a
framework that distinguished vulgar art from high art. Research has shown
that even individuals and groups that were marginalized and have little
power—such as American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—could develop new and powerful kinds of organizations; these
ventures were successful to the extent they embodied familiar structures
and practices.
At the level of the organizational field, recent studies have moved beyond
what was originally a very structural view of fields and have shown how
fields are structured by meaning systems. For instance, the field of corporate
finance was fundamentally restructured by the development of new mathematical models that allowed financial services firms to expand their activities and gain power vis-à-vis their clients through selling complex derivative
securities. Recent scholarship has also shown that fields are often characterized not by single coherent schemas but often by multiple, sometimes competing, logics. For example, in the field of medical education, two competing
logics—science and care—have waxed and waned throughout the twentieth
century. Finally, similar to ecologists, institutionalists have adapted concepts
and tools of network analysis to bring the issue of power and inequality into
their work. For instance, when American and French bankers had social (not
just business) relations with clients, they offered lower interest rates on loans
because the former promoted sharing of private information and increased
trust.

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Integrating the Perspectives. To maximize the strengths and minimize the
weaknesses of the ecological and institutional approaches, some researchers
have combined them. Recall that ecologists originally defined populations
as groups of organizations that depend on the same resources and identified them empirically through observation of their inputs and outputs.
In contrast, institutionalists originally classified organizations according
to the cultural schemas they embodied—the shared beliefs and values on
which they were based. The sharp distinction between resource flows and
cultural underpinnings is disappearing, however, as ecologists have come
to conceive of organizational forms as identities evaluated by internal and
external audiences, which is much closer to the conception of form used by
institutionalists. For instance, American microbreweries were able to defend
their turf against mass-producer breweries by closely connecting their
identities to the values held dear by their core customers—people who loved
“craft” beer and shunned “factory” beer. And American film companies,
whose films targeted multiple genres (such as science fiction, comedy,
and Western) attracted larger audiences but were less appealing to those
audiences than those marketed in a single genre. Audiences’ perceptions of
a film’s fit with targeted genres drove this trade-off: multigenre films were
more difficult for audiences to make sense of.
Ecologists have also considered many determinants of organizational
founding and failure, such as isomorphic pressures, that were originally
highlighted by institutionalists. For example, a study of change and inertia
among California thrifts found that these firms were more likely to enter new
markets when large and profitable firms were active there—they overcame
inertia by “following the leader.” For their part, institutionalists have turned
their attention to founding and failure, outcomes that were ecologists’ original focus, and have used factors such as the number of organizations, much
studied by ecologists, to explain these outcomes. For instance, founding
rates of Finnish newspapers depended on both the number of newspapers
in print and rising nationalist sentiments. And the impact of the number of
existing railroads on founding rates of new American railroads varied across
periods defined by government regulation. Similarly, differences in state
regulation of alcohol shaped the geographic distribution of the founding
and failure of American breweries.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Further integration of ecological and institutional research on organizations
will require both ecologists and institutionalists to move in new directions.
One potentially productive direction that scholars in both camps could take
involves shifting the level of analysis up to study entire organizational fields

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or communities. For ecologists, this would entail studying communities composed of multiple populations that interact in some region, rather than a
single population and/or its subpopulations. For institutionalists, this would
require studying fields as a whole, rather than groups of organizations within
fields.
Shifting the level of analysis up would be a novel move for both ecologists
and institutionalists. There have been very few recent ecological studies
of the properties of communities, except by the few urban sociologists
who study formal organizations in big-city neighborhoods. They have
shown, for example, that poor neighborhoods in American cities tend to
contain more organizations than rich ones, but that this is more likely for
neighborhoods that are home to immigrants than those that are home to
blacks. Differences in organizational density across communities composed
of different racial/ethnic groups may explain why ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods where immigrants congregate, are prolific producers of new
enterprises. Similarly, the vast majority of institutional studies have tested
organization-level hypotheses, and very few have tested any field-level
hypotheses—even though DiMaggio and Powell’s foundational paper,
written in 1983, proposed a slew of field-level hypotheses. One exception is
a study of the independent power field in California and New York, which
found that state financial support, a supportive court ruling, and positive
media coverage of the field all increased the diversity of entrants while the
establishment of a trade association reduced diversity.
Shifting the level of analysis up would bring scholars in the two camps
closer together because communities of organizational populations are
similar to organizational fields in all but one respect: community boundaries
are defined by geography, field boundaries by interaction within some
arena of social life. But a more careful view of these two constructs reveals
that this difference is inconsequential. Although modern transportation
and communication systems have reduced spatial barriers to interaction,
people and organizations remain situated in distinct places characterized
by local laws and cultures, site-specific resource constraints, and localized
information flows. As a result, organizational fields tend to be bounded
in space just like organizational communities. Moreover, the different
populations in an organizational community will interact to the extent
that their activities overlap in some social arena. Thus, for all intents and
purposes, communities and fields are identical; recognizing this, we use
them interchangeably in the rest of this essay.
Shifting the level of analysis up—studying entire fields rather than
groups of organizations within fields and communities rather than single
populations—would require much more data. Although in the past that
may have been a formidable barrier, such data are becoming increasingly

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accessible through the Internet. For example, organizational scholars could
study the entire field of educational organizations in the United States or
another industrialized country. In the United States, they could use data from
the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, http://nces.ed.gov/),
which range from preschool institutions to graduate and professional
schools. Within the subfield of higher education, organizational scholars
could take a cue from some sociological studies of the professions and trace
the rise and fall of individual disciplines over time, as well as relations
between them. They could also link NCES data on higher education (the
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS) with data
on prestige rankings of educational institutions and college sports team
standings and titles, which would allow them to pinpoint the positions of
various members of this subfield. Within the subcommunity of primary
and secondary educational organizations, scholars could trace how the
boundaries of school districts have shifted, and the impact of such shifts on
school enrollment levels, funding, teacher characteristics, student demography, and student achievement. They could also examine relationships
between regular public, charter public, secular private, and religious private
schools.
Thinking more macroscopically, beyond a single nation, scholars could
use existing data on from the Correlates of War databases (http://www.
correlatesofwar.org/), which detail all wars fought between 1816 and 2007.
They could assess interactions among states as actors in a worldwide
community of nations by analyzing inter- and intrastate conflicts; whether
the combatants were states or other groups; which states were involved;
the duration of the conflict; the geographic location and scope of conflict;
whether there was a winner or the conflict ended in stalemate; if there was a
winner, who won and who lost; whether the conflict was ended by a treaty
and if so, who signed the treaty, and so on.
The outcomes of such macroscopic analyses would be very different from
the outcomes of current institutionalist, ecological, and hybrid research. Ecological work on organizational communities might highlight the rise and
fall of various interdependent organizational populations (what bioecologists call population succession) or the shifting diversity of organizations
in the community. Institutionalist studies of fields might study the similarity of organizations in the focal field—the flip side of ecological analysis of
organizational diversity. Institutionalists might also trace the rise and fall of
institutional logics, which could be framed as the cultural analog to the rise
and fall of organizational populations studied by ecologists.
Such macroscopic analyses could also assess the positions held and roles
played by different types of organizations, and see how those positions and
roles have changed in response to internal or external forces. For example, a

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study of the financial services field, which includes financial services firms,
regulatory agencies, and retail and commercial customers, might trace the
falling prominence of commercial banks and the rise of investment banks
and privately held investment firms (private equity firms and hedge funds).
Such a study might assess the impact of prominence in the field on profits
or other performance measures. Similarly, a study of higher education in the
United States might assess the consequences of declining state support for
public education and the rise of for-profit colleges and universities.
Finally, we note that studying organizational diversity in communities and
similarity in fields will require scholars to grapple with interorganizational
power structures and stratification processes, which will be necessary to
delineate community and field cores and peripheries. One possible consequence of attending to power and stratification processes more closely is
an incorporation of ideas about how community and field structures affect
entire nation-states or stratify substate regions. For example, a study of shifts
in the field of higher education in the United States might also shed light
on how attractive different regions are to “knowledge” industries, such as
high-technology research and manufacturing firms or professional service
firms. Such a study might also explain regional differences in socioeconomic
stratification.
CONCLUSION
Although organizational ecology and institutionalism have both shown us
important things about organizations, their full potential has by no means
been realized yet. Working more closely together, ecologists and institutionalists could continue to develop even more useful insights.
Ecologists and institutionalists are not the only scholars studying organizations. Many scholars outside sociology—most notably, strategy researchers,
industrial-organization economists, and social psychologists—also often
study organizations. All of these outside research traditions are highly
rationalist compared to the two sociology-based perspectives discussed
here. When scholars in these outside traditions study organizations, they
usually focus on assessing and improving organizational performance. Both
institutionalists and ecologists care deeply about theory, methodological
rigor, and building an understanding of organizations that goes beyond
a narrow focus on optimizing performance. Because institutionalism and
ecology arose as antidotes to rationalism within the sociological study of
organizations, they might very well be seen as allies within the multidisciplinary study of organizations. As such, scholars in both traditions should
continue to forge alliances and expand their knowledge of organizations,
both within the discipline of sociology and across disciplines.

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REFERENCES
Carroll, G. R., & Hannan, M. T. (2000). The demography of corporations and industries.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological
Review, 48, 147–160.
Fligstein, N., & McAdam, D. (2012). A Theory of Fields. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1977). The population ecology of organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 929–964.
Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure
as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340–363.
Scott, W. R. (2008). Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests (3rd ed.). Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.

FURTHER READING
Baum, J. A. C., & Shipilov, A. V. (2006). Ecological approaches to organizations. In
S. Clegg, C. Hardy & W. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp.
55–110). London, England: Sage.
DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. (Eds.) (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational
analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Suddaby, R., & Sahlin-Andersson, K. (2008). The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism. London, England: Sage.
Hannan, M. T., Pólos, L., & Carroll, G. R. (2007). Logics of organization theory: Audiences,
codes, and ecologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

HEATHER A. HAVEMAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Heather A. Haveman is Professor of Sociology and Business at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows
Hall, Berkeley, CA 9472–1980, e-mail haveman@berkeley.edu, web page
www.heatherhaveman.net. She studies how organizations, industries, and
employees’ careers evolve, and is currently working on several papers
tracing the evolution of the American magazine industry. Her work has
appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, the American Sociological
Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Poetics, and Organization
Science, among others. She received a BA in history and an MBA from
the University of Toronto, as well as a PhD in organizational behavior and
industrial relations from UC Berkeley,

Organizational Populations and Fields

15

DANIEL N. KLUTTZ SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel N. Kluttz is a graduate student in the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 9472–1980,
e-mail dkluttz@berkeley.edu. He is studying the formation and evolution of
American law schools, with an emphasis on how law faculty have shaped
and been shaped by particular institutional arrangements. More generally,
his areas of study include the sociology of law, organizations, culture, and
the professions. He received a BA in sociology and psychology and a JD
from UNC Chapel Hill, and an MA in sociology from UC Berkeley.
RELATED ESSAYS
Inefficiencies in Health Care Provision (Economics), James F. Burgess et al.
Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
Stability and Change in Corporate Governance (Sociology), Gerald F. Davis
and Johan S. G. Chu
Institutions and the Economy (Sociology), Carl Gershenson and Frank
Dobbin
Interdependence, Development, and Interstate Conflict (Political Science),
Erik Gartzke
Modeling Coal and Natural Gas Markets (Economics), Franziska Holz
Search and Learning in Markets (Economics), Philipp Kircher
Domestic Political Institutions and Alliance Politics (Political Science),
Michaela Mattes
Rationing of Health Care (Sociology), David Mechanic
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow
The Institutional Logics Perspective (Sociology), Patricia H. Thornton et al.



Organizational Populations
and Fields
HEATHER A. HAVEMAN and DANIEL N. KLUTTZ

Abstract
This essay examines two major perspectives on organizations that have been prominent since the 1970s: ecology and institutionalism, both of which emerged as reactions against rationalist approaches to the study of organizations. Both take as their
primary units of analysis collections of organizations, rather than individual organizations: “populations” for ecologists (groups of organizations with the same form)
and “fields” for institutionalists (groups of organizations of different forms that interact with each other in some social sector). Ecologists seek to explain the changing
distribution of organizations (rates of founding, failure, growth, and change) in terms
of the features of organizations’ environments. Institutionalists seek to explain organizational legitimacy, variety, and change by reference to cultural norms, values, and
expectations about what is the “right” or “normal” way to organize. While ecologists seek general explanations that apply to all populations, institutionalists seek
explanations that are sensitive to the peculiarities of the field under study. Ecological
and institutional studies of organizations have converged in the past decade, which
has yielded studies that minimize the weaknesses of each perspective and maximize
their strengths. Ecologists have examined many explanatory factors, such as pressures to imitate legitimate organizational forms, which were originally highlighted
by institutionalists. In the same vein, institutionalists have turned their attention to
founding and failure, outcomes that were ecologists’ original focus, and have used
factors such as the number of organizations, much studied by ecologists, to explain
these outcomes. We conclude by suggesting potential fruitful avenues for further
integration between these perspectives.

INTRODUCTION
This essay examines two major perspectives on organizations that have been
prominent since the 1970s: ecology and institutionalism. Rooted primarily
in sociology, scholars working in these two perspectives have often debated
their strengths and weaknesses. But in recent years, many scholars have
incorporated features of each perspective into their studies, which represents
a fruitful trend in organizational scholarship. In this essay, we first situate
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the core tenets of ecology and institutionalism with respect to one another.
We then summarize foundational research in each perspective and identify
their strengths and weaknesses. Next, we discuss recent research that has
extended each perspective and then describe work that has integrated them
to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. We conclude
with a discussion of key issues for future research, as well as important
theoretical and methodological questions that will motivate future studies
integrating ecology and institutionalism.
There are fundamental differences between the two perspectives. Perhaps
the most obvious divide stems from the fact that ecologists investigate highly
abstract models of how organizational populations evolve and focus on a
narrow set of outcomes (organizations’ vital rates), while institutionalists
seek nuanced explanations that are sensitive to the specifics of time and
place, and study a wider array of outcomes. This divergence stems from
a profound difference in theoretical base: Organizational ecology focuses
on demography (the numbers of organizations and their vital rates), while
institutional analysis focuses on culture and its empirical manifestations
(conceptual schemas, norms and values, rules and regulations, and structures
and practices). And this divergence yields, by necessity, different relationships between theory and data: Ecological research seeks to test and extend
formal models that have general applicability, while institutional research
seeks to apply general theoretical principles to explain particular empirical
phenomena.
Despite these differences, ecology and institutionalism have much
in common. Both perspectives emerged as reactions against rationalist
approaches to the study of organizations that focused on efficiency as the
key explanatory variable. Both perspectives investigate many of the same
phenomena—organizational form, legitimacy, homogeneity (or, conversely,
heterogeneity), and change (or, conversely, stability). To explain these
phenomena, both perspectives direct attention toward the external environment and away from internal functioning. Both perspectives take as their
primary units of analysis collections of organizations, rather than individual
organizations: “populations” for ecologists (groups of organizations with
the same form) and “fields” for institutionalists (groups of organizations
of different forms that interact with each other in some arena of social life).
Finally, there has been some theoretical convergence in the past decade, as
ecologists have begun to conceive of organizational populations and forms
as cultural constructions and organizations’ vital rates as determined by
the cultural expectations of internal and external audiences. For their part,
institutionalists have begun to use explanatory variables from ecological
theory in their own analyses.

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FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
ECOLOGY
Some refer to organizational ecology as the demography of organizations
and industries because it emphasizes demographic analysis of the distribution of populations and their vital rates; others call it the population ecology
of organizations because it focuses on populations of organizations more
than individual organizations. Whatever the label, scholars working within
this perspective propose that organizations’ positions in social and physical
space determine opportunities for and constraints on their action (Carroll
& Hannan, 2000; Hannan & Freeman, 1977). In other words, ecologists
seek to understand the distribution of organizations across such important
dimensions as age, size, location, and production technology. Introducing
ecology, Michael Hannan and John Freeman (1977, p. 936) wondered,
“Why are there so many kinds of organizations?” To answer this question,
ecologists adapted Darwinian models of biological evolution and applied
them to explain the evolution of organizational systems—that is, to explain
rates of organizational founding, failure, growth, and change in terms of
the material and cultural features of organizations’ environments. A second,
more purely sociological, progenitor of organizational ecology is human
ecology, which involves the study of relationships between humans and
their economic, social, and political organization.
Ecologists assume that understanding organizational diversity requires
scholars to think about organizational populations as fundamental units of
analysis. Populations are aggregates of organizations that share a common
dependence on the environment and are instances of a single organizational
form. Empirically, populations have been identified as sets of organizations
that produce similar goods or services, use similar resources, and have
similar identities. The populations studied by ecologists are diverse: they
include breweries and wineries, labor unions, women’s and minority rights
movement organizations, automobile and bicycle manufacturers, banks,
restaurants, insurance and telephone companies, art museums, day-care
centers, baseball teams, radio stations, and newspaper publishers.
Ecologists argue that scholars should focus on change rather than stability
in organizational populations; in particular, on what causes the array of
organizations to become more or less diverse. The diversity of organizations
increases when new organizational populations emerge and expand in size;
it declines when existing populations decrease in size and become extinct.
Thus, to understand how organizational diversity changes, ecologists study
organizations’ vital rates—rates of founding, failure, growth, and internal
change.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Ecologists explain these vital rates in terms of selection rather than
adaptation. Under selection, organizational populations change through
the replacement of one kind of organization by another, while under adaptation, they change through the transformation of existing organizations.
Thus, under selection, foundings and failures drive population change,
while under adaptation, growth and internal organizational change drive
population change.
Ecologists’ focus on selection stems from the assumption that organizations are highly inert: Once founded, their structures and activities do
not change much over time. Such inertia is assumed to be necessary for
organizations to account for their performance to external observers such
as government agencies and perform reliably for their customers. Ecologists
do not assume that organizations never change—just that they change far
less than many scholars assume—and when organizations do change, their
members must learn to do new things and navigate new structures, and
unlearn old activities and abandon old pathways through structures. All
this learning and unlearning requires considerable resources to justify new
activities and structures which must be done to overcome resistance to
change. In turn, expending resources reduces organizational effectiveness
and increases the likelihood of failure. To test this argument, many ecologists
analyze the causes and consequences of organizational change. For example,
most change in California thrifts (savings and loan associations) occurred
through births of new types of thrifts and deaths of old ones, not through the
transformation of old kinds of thrifts into new kinds. American radio stations resisted changing formats, but did so when they performed poorly and
when competing stations had done so; however, format changes reduced
stations’ market share, especially for large and well-performing ones.
Other ecological studies analyze competitive (win/lose) and mutualistic
(win/win) interactions between organizations in a single population or
between multiple subpopulations defined by such things as market niche,
size, and location. For example, the survival of American minor-league
baseball teams was bolstered by being in a large league—but only up to
a point, as mutualism among league members broke down in leagues
with more than eight members. In contrast, baseball team survival was
reduced by competition from teams in leagues outside their own. Similarly,
Manhattan hotels competed most intensely against hotels of similar size: as
the number of similarly sized hotels increased, hotels’ failure rates increased.
And French automobile manufacturers competed with other French firms
but were legitimated by automobile manufacturers in other parts of
Europe.

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INSTITUTIONALISM
Given its label, it is not surprising that central to this perspective are
institutions: social facts, phenomena perceived by people as both external
to themselves and coercive because they are backed by sanctions. Institutions develop over time, through real and superstitious learning, and they
become both highly legitimate and highly stable. This makes institutions
durable phenomena that do not require recurrent collective mobilization or
authoritative intervention to persist.
To study the institutions that are embodied by and shape organizations,
scholars working within this perspective focus on culture: they highlight
the norms, values, and expectations that actors inside and outside the organization (employees, oversight agencies, financiers, suppliers, distributors,
media, and customers) hold about what is the “right” or “normal” way to
operate (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Scott, 2008). These are cultural, not just
cognitive, phenomena because they are widely shared, although they may
be contested and not universally accepted. According to institutionalists,
cultural conventions, shared myths, and common schemas make collective
action possible by defining the opportunities and constraints organizations
face, thus determining organizations’ structures and activities.
Institutionalists study organizational fields, which are diverse communities composed of organizations that engage in common activities and
are subject to similar environmental pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;
Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Fields constitute recognized areas of social
life, such as health care, education, and financial services; they include
competitors, suppliers, customers, regulatory agencies, news media, and
advisors. Fields develop through four stages: (i) interaction among organizations involved in some area of social life increases, (ii) hierarchies and
coalitions develop, (iii) the amount of information with which field members must contend increases, and (iv) awareness among field members that
they are involved in a common enterprise develops. Thus, institutionalists
assume, fundamentally, that organizational fields and their constituent
elements (organizations and their structures, policies, and practices) are
socially constructed, products of social interactions that generate knowledge
and belief systems and are shared by most (if not all) participants.
Legitimacy is a central concept in institutionalism. Organizations are more
legitimate when they are more comprehensible and taken for granted as
natural ways to achieve collective goals, when they are more completely justified and explained on the basis of prevailing cultural accounts, and when
those involved have more difficulty conceiving of alternatives. Legitimacy
can rest on regulations, including the laws and administrative guidelines
that constitute the basic rules governing relationships within and between

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

organizations, norms such as “expert” sources of information and value
judgments about the nature of organizations, and cognitions in the form
of shared perceptions of the value of organized social activity. Legitimacy
improves access to resources, including funding, employees, equipment
and raw materials, and distribution; legitimacy also improves acceptance by
customers, thus fueling product demand. For instance, California hospitals
that mirrored the prevailing logic of health care (early on, professional
dominance—doctors rule; later on, managed care—insurance companies
rule) performed better than those that did not. Thus, conformity with institutional expectations, and the legitimacy that organizations derive, contributes
to their ability to expand in numbers and facilitates their persistence. But
such conformity may conflict with efficient functioning, so organizations
try to limit the negative impact of conformity by decoupling what they say
they are and do from what they actually are and do. For example, when the
Roman Catholic Church in the United States faced a shortage of male priests,
women began to preach, counsel parishioners, and serve communion—all
activities that were, strictly speaking, the purview of the all-male priesthood.
Although institutionalism arose at the same time as ecology, its orientation is quite different. Rather than focusing on variety, institutionalists
focus on similarity, as Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell asked in their
seminal paper: “Why is there such startling homogeneity in organizational
structures and practices?” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). To answer
that question, institutionalists assess the level of isomorphism (literally,
“same shape”) among organizations in a field. They argue that as fields
evolve, organizations in those fields that play the same role or are tied to
each other become isomorphic; that is, they come to resemble one another.
The connection to legitimacy is clear: The more an organizational structure,
practice, or tactic diffuses across a field, the more legitimate it becomes.
Organizations become isomorphic through three processes: mimetic, coercive, and normative. Mimetic isomorphism is, quite simply, the achievement
of conformity through imitation. It can result from responses to uncertainty
(“when in doubt, do what other organizations facing the same environment
do”) or from bandwagon effects (“if many organizations adopt a structure
or practice, follow their lead”). For example, financial services firms imitated the actions of large and profitable firms. Similarly, hospitals adopted
standardized (as opposed to customized) quality management programs
when many other hospitals had done so. Coercive isomorphism stems
from regulations, administrative guidelines, or mandates from powerful
actors that authorize particular organizational structures and strategies
and prohibit others; it can also stem from pressure imposed by resource
dependencies. For instance, American cities were more likely to adopt
civil service reforms when they were mandated by their state legislatures.

Organizational Populations and Fields

7

Finally, normative isomorphism involves pressures imposed by collective
actors such as professional and trade associations, which create informal
expectations, if not formal rules, about what organizations ought to be
and do. For example, new alternative-energy producers in New York and
California became more similar after industry associations began to spread
information about “best practices.”
Strengths and Weaknesses of these Perspectives on Organizations. Ecology has
benefited greatly from being highly paradigmatic: Ecologists agree on what
outcomes to study (founding, failure, growth, performance, and change),
what explanatory factors to consider (the number of organizations of various forms defined by size, location, technology, and/or niche), and what
analytical strategies to employ (quantitative analysis of data covering entire
populations over long periods of time). And ecology is arguably the most
logically rigorous perspective on organizations; indeed, it has benefited from
several logical tests, which have shown inconsistencies and incoherencies in
natural-language statements of theory and have paved the way for theoretical refinements. Finally, because ecologists have built on and refined each
other’s work, they have accumulated much knowledge. But these strengths
reveal a critical weakness: Precisely because it is such a “normal-science”
activity, some find it too narrow to interest anyone except ecologists themselves. Because much ecological research refines the basic theory without
extending it in new directions, this perspective is at risk of becoming ever
narrower and less influential.
The strength of the institutionalist perspective is its sweeping reach.
Because institutionalization is both an outcome and a process, institutionalists study both stability and change. They have identified a wide array
of mechanisms through which institutionalization occurs: habituation,
limitedly-rational imitation, normative conformity, accreditation, social
obligation, and coercion. In building theory, they have drawn not only on
sociology but also on psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. Finally, they
have used a wide array of methodologies: laboratory experiments, statistical
analyses of survey and archival data, ethnographies, and qualitative historical studies. But these strengths have also created critical weaknesses. Institutionalism has not adequately accounted for power and inequality. Moreover,
institutionalism consists of a loose collection of propositions, some seemingly incompatible and others only tenuously connected, which has made
debates unproductive feuds about intellectual origins and definitions rather
than substantive arguments about logic or evidence. Therefore, institutionalists have not built systematically on each other’s work to the same extent
that ecologists have, and so have not accumulated as much knowledge.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
ECOLOGY
Although they initially assumed that all organizations in a population were
alike in that all organizations in a population faced the same environmental
demands and had the same effects on other organizations, ecologists now recognize that the strategies and structures of organizations in a population may
vary, as may their effects on other organizations. A vibrant stream of recent
research has focused on differences between generalists, which serve a wide
range of clients with a diverse array of products, and specialists, which serve
a limited clientele with a narrower set of products. These differences emerge
when there are economies of scale and resources are concentrated in a single
rich center and spread thinly in the periphery; under these circumstances, the
resource “space” becomes partitioned, with generalists occupying the center
and specialists the periphery. Generalists compete on scale—the larger they
become, the lower their costs. Specialists avoid direct scale-based competition with generalists by serving market segments that are too small to be
exploited profitably by generalists. For example, specialist American newspapers proliferated when general-interest newspapers consolidated, as did
specialist American wineries when mass-producer wineries merged, both
by serving the particular needs of markets that were too small for generalists to serve profitably. Similarly, specialist audit firms in Holland thrived by
focusing on a particular customer segment with changing needs and tailoring
products to it.
Another fruitful line of recent ecological research has used concepts and
methods from network analysis to explain organizations’ vital rates. This
work has required conceiving of organizations as being connected by webs of
resource overlaps, rather than as independent entities. For example, semiconductor firms’ niches (the scientific knowledge on which they build products)
were defined in terms of their position in the web of citations among scientific papers; the closer firms were in these networks, the more intensely they
competed and the more they reduced each other’s survival chances. A more
complex case is that of New York garment manufacturers: Those that maintained strong (ongoing and exclusive) relations with contractors had better
survival chances than those that maintained weak (arms’ length) relations
because strong relationships made it easier to forecast demand, which in turn
improved manufacturers’ ability to match production schedules with those
of their contractors.
Institutionalism. Institutionalists have come to recognize that organizations
do not just react to environmental demands—they are often proactive and
try to control their environments. Accordingly, they now place conformity

Organizational Populations and Fields

9

on a continuum of responses that includes compromise, avoidance, defiance,
and manipulation. Continuing to emphasize culture, this newer research
often examines rhetorical strategies to capture these responses to environmental demands. For example, when the Canadian accounting profession
was framed as being under threat, a few elite firms successfully presented
the expansion of accountants’ professional scope as a “natural” solution to
evolving client demands through appeals that emphasized the consistency
of the proposed new activities with long-held professional values. Similarly,
after several widely publicized events reduced its legitimacy, the California
beef industry strategically used verbal accounts to repair the damage;
accounts acknowledging responsibility were more effective than those
denying it.
Strategic action is especially obvious in fields where people are trying to
create new kinds of organizations. Such “institutional entrepreneurship”
requires the skillful use of social resources to overcome skepticism and
persuade others to believe entrepreneurs’ representations of social reality
and support their new ventures. For example, American art historians and
their wealthy patrons cooperated in the late nineteenth century to develop
art museums as a distinct form of organization; they succeeded in creating a
framework that distinguished vulgar art from high art. Research has shown
that even individuals and groups that were marginalized and have little
power—such as American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—could develop new and powerful kinds of organizations; these
ventures were successful to the extent they embodied familiar structures
and practices.
At the level of the organizational field, recent studies have moved beyond
what was originally a very structural view of fields and have shown how
fields are structured by meaning systems. For instance, the field of corporate
finance was fundamentally restructured by the development of new mathematical models that allowed financial services firms to expand their activities and gain power vis-à-vis their clients through selling complex derivative
securities. Recent scholarship has also shown that fields are often characterized not by single coherent schemas but often by multiple, sometimes competing, logics. For example, in the field of medical education, two competing
logics—science and care—have waxed and waned throughout the twentieth
century. Finally, similar to ecologists, institutionalists have adapted concepts
and tools of network analysis to bring the issue of power and inequality into
their work. For instance, when American and French bankers had social (not
just business) relations with clients, they offered lower interest rates on loans
because the former promoted sharing of private information and increased
trust.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Integrating the Perspectives. To maximize the strengths and minimize the
weaknesses of the ecological and institutional approaches, some researchers
have combined them. Recall that ecologists originally defined populations
as groups of organizations that depend on the same resources and identified them empirically through observation of their inputs and outputs.
In contrast, institutionalists originally classified organizations according
to the cultural schemas they embodied—the shared beliefs and values on
which they were based. The sharp distinction between resource flows and
cultural underpinnings is disappearing, however, as ecologists have come
to conceive of organizational forms as identities evaluated by internal and
external audiences, which is much closer to the conception of form used by
institutionalists. For instance, American microbreweries were able to defend
their turf against mass-producer breweries by closely connecting their
identities to the values held dear by their core customers—people who loved
“craft” beer and shunned “factory” beer. And American film companies,
whose films targeted multiple genres (such as science fiction, comedy,
and Western) attracted larger audiences but were less appealing to those
audiences than those marketed in a single genre. Audiences’ perceptions of
a film’s fit with targeted genres drove this trade-off: multigenre films were
more difficult for audiences to make sense of.
Ecologists have also considered many determinants of organizational
founding and failure, such as isomorphic pressures, that were originally
highlighted by institutionalists. For example, a study of change and inertia
among California thrifts found that these firms were more likely to enter new
markets when large and profitable firms were active there—they overcame
inertia by “following the leader.” For their part, institutionalists have turned
their attention to founding and failure, outcomes that were ecologists’ original focus, and have used factors such as the number of organizations, much
studied by ecologists, to explain these outcomes. For instance, founding
rates of Finnish newspapers depended on both the number of newspapers
in print and rising nationalist sentiments. And the impact of the number of
existing railroads on founding rates of new American railroads varied across
periods defined by government regulation. Similarly, differences in state
regulation of alcohol shaped the geographic distribution of the founding
and failure of American breweries.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Further integration of ecological and institutional research on organizations
will require both ecologists and institutionalists to move in new directions.
One potentially productive direction that scholars in both camps could take
involves shifting the level of analysis up to study entire organizational fields

Organizational Populations and Fields

11

or communities. For ecologists, this would entail studying communities composed of multiple populations that interact in some region, rather than a
single population and/or its subpopulations. For institutionalists, this would
require studying fields as a whole, rather than groups of organizations within
fields.
Shifting the level of analysis up would be a novel move for both ecologists
and institutionalists. There have been very few recent ecological studies
of the properties of communities, except by the few urban sociologists
who study formal organizations in big-city neighborhoods. They have
shown, for example, that poor neighborhoods in American cities tend to
contain more organizations than rich ones, but that this is more likely for
neighborhoods that are home to immigrants than those that are home to
blacks. Differences in organizational density across communities composed
of different racial/ethnic groups may explain why ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods where immigrants congregate, are prolific producers of new
enterprises. Similarly, the vast majority of institutional studies have tested
organization-level hypotheses, and very few have tested any field-level
hypotheses—even though DiMaggio and Powell’s foundational paper,
written in 1983, proposed a slew of field-level hypotheses. One exception is
a study of the independent power field in California and New York, which
found that state financial support, a supportive court ruling, and positive
media coverage of the field all increased the diversity of entrants while the
establishment of a trade association reduced diversity.
Shifting the level of analysis up would bring scholars in the two camps
closer together because communities of organizational populations are
similar to organizational fields in all but one respect: community boundaries
are defined by geography, field boundaries by interaction within some
arena of social life. But a more careful view of these two constructs reveals
that this difference is inconsequential. Although modern transportation
and communication systems have reduced spatial barriers to interaction,
people and organizations remain situated in distinct places characterized
by local laws and cultures, site-specific resource constraints, and localized
information flows. As a result, organizational fields tend to be bounded
in space just like organizational communities. Moreover, the different
populations in an organizational community will interact to the extent
that their activities overlap in some social arena. Thus, for all intents and
purposes, communities and fields are identical; recognizing this, we use
them interchangeably in the rest of this essay.
Shifting the level of analysis up—studying entire fields rather than
groups of organizations within fields and communities rather than single
populations—would require much more data. Although in the past that
may have been a formidable barrier, such data are becoming increasingly

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

accessible through the Internet. For example, organizational scholars could
study the entire field of educational organizations in the United States or
another industrialized country. In the United States, they could use data from
the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, http://nces.ed.gov/),
which range from preschool institutions to graduate and professional
schools. Within the subfield of higher education, organizational scholars
could take a cue from some sociological studies of the professions and trace
the rise and fall of individual disciplines over time, as well as relations
between them. They could also link NCES data on higher education (the
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS) with data
on prestige rankings of educational institutions and college sports team
standings and titles, which would allow them to pinpoint the positions of
various members of this subfield. Within the subcommunity of primary
and secondary educational organizations, scholars could trace how the
boundaries of school districts have shifted, and the impact of such shifts on
school enrollment levels, funding, teacher characteristics, student demography, and student achievement. They could also examine relationships
between regular public, charter public, secular private, and religious private
schools.
Thinking more macroscopically, beyond a single nation, scholars could
use existing data on from the Correlates of War databases (http://www.
correlatesofwar.org/), which detail all wars fought between 1816 and 2007.
They could assess interactions among states as actors in a worldwide
community of nations by analyzing inter- and intrastate conflicts; whether
the combatants were states or other groups; which states were involved;
the duration of the conflict; the geographic location and scope of conflict;
whether there was a winner or the conflict ended in stalemate; if there was a
winner, who won and who lost; whether the conflict was ended by a treaty
and if so, who signed the treaty, and so on.
The outcomes of such macroscopic analyses would be very different from
the outcomes of current institutionalist, ecological, and hybrid research. Ecological work on organizational communities might highlight the rise and
fall of various interdependent organizational populations (what bioecologists call population succession) or the shifting diversity of organizations
in the community. Institutionalist studies of fields might study the similarity of organizations in the focal field—the flip side of ecological analysis of
organizational diversity. Institutionalists might also trace the rise and fall of
institutional logics, which could be framed as the cultural analog to the rise
and fall of organizational populations studied by ecologists.
Such macroscopic analyses could also assess the positions held and roles
played by different types of organizations, and see how those positions and
roles have changed in response to internal or external forces. For example, a

Organizational Populations and Fields

13

study of the financial services field, which includes financial services firms,
regulatory agencies, and retail and commercial customers, might trace the
falling prominence of commercial banks and the rise of investment banks
and privately held investment firms (private equity firms and hedge funds).
Such a study might assess the impact of prominence in the field on profits
or other performance measures. Similarly, a study of higher education in the
United States might assess the consequences of declining state support for
public education and the rise of for-profit colleges and universities.
Finally, we note that studying organizational diversity in communities and
similarity in fields will require scholars to grapple with interorganizational
power structures and stratification processes, which will be necessary to
delineate community and field cores and peripheries. One possible consequence of attending to power and stratification processes more closely is
an incorporation of ideas about how community and field structures affect
entire nation-states or stratify substate regions. For example, a study of shifts
in the field of higher education in the United States might also shed light
on how attractive different regions are to “knowledge” industries, such as
high-technology research and manufacturing firms or professional service
firms. Such a study might also explain regional differences in socioeconomic
stratification.
CONCLUSION
Although organizational ecology and institutionalism have both shown us
important things about organizations, their full potential has by no means
been realized yet. Working more closely together, ecologists and institutionalists could continue to develop even more useful insights.
Ecologists and institutionalists are not the only scholars studying organizations. Many scholars outside sociology—most notably, strategy researchers,
industrial-organization economists, and social psychologists—also often
study organizations. All of these outside research traditions are highly
rationalist compared to the two sociology-based perspectives discussed
here. When scholars in these outside traditions study organizations, they
usually focus on assessing and improving organizational performance. Both
institutionalists and ecologists care deeply about theory, methodological
rigor, and building an understanding of organizations that goes beyond
a narrow focus on optimizing performance. Because institutionalism and
ecology arose as antidotes to rationalism within the sociological study of
organizations, they might very well be seen as allies within the multidisciplinary study of organizations. As such, scholars in both traditions should
continue to forge alliances and expand their knowledge of organizations,
both within the discipline of sociology and across disciplines.

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

REFERENCES
Carroll, G. R., & Hannan, M. T. (2000). The demography of corporations and industries.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological
Review, 48, 147–160.
Fligstein, N., & McAdam, D. (2012). A Theory of Fields. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1977). The population ecology of organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 929–964.
Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure
as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340–363.
Scott, W. R. (2008). Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests (3rd ed.). Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.

FURTHER READING
Baum, J. A. C., & Shipilov, A. V. (2006). Ecological approaches to organizations. In
S. Clegg, C. Hardy & W. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp.
55–110). London, England: Sage.
DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. (Eds.) (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational
analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Suddaby, R., & Sahlin-Andersson, K. (2008). The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism. London, England: Sage.
Hannan, M. T., Pólos, L., & Carroll, G. R. (2007). Logics of organization theory: Audiences,
codes, and ecologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

HEATHER A. HAVEMAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Heather A. Haveman is Professor of Sociology and Business at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows
Hall, Berkeley, CA 9472–1980, e-mail haveman@berkeley.edu, web page
www.heatherhaveman.net. She studies how organizations, industries, and
employees’ careers evolve, and is currently working on several papers
tracing the evolution of the American magazine industry. Her work has
appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, the American Sociological
Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Poetics, and Organization
Science, among others. She received a BA in history and an MBA from
the University of Toronto, as well as a PhD in organizational behavior and
industrial relations from UC Berkeley,

Organizational Populations and Fields

15

DANIEL N. KLUTTZ SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel N. Kluttz is a graduate student in the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 9472–1980,
e-mail dkluttz@berkeley.edu. He is studying the formation and evolution of
American law schools, with an emphasis on how law faculty have shaped
and been shaped by particular institutional arrangements. More generally,
his areas of study include the sociology of law, organizations, culture, and
the professions. He received a BA in sociology and psychology and a JD
from UNC Chapel Hill, and an MA in sociology from UC Berkeley.
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