Young, Ruth 1988 "Is Population Ecology a Useful Paradigm?"

Main Point: Young's article is a critique of Hannan and Freeman's concept of organizational ecology. She argues that biological concepts are difficult to apply to organizations. The bulk of the article is concerned with a critique of unclear definitions and concepts and the difficulty of their measurement.

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Basic concepts and their application

Species

According to Young, the definition of species (which Hannan and Freeman call population-which according to them is distinguished from other populations by formal structure) is too vague. H&F claim you can identify an organization by its "blueprint for organizational action" which can be inferred from a) its formal structure, b) patterns of activity within the organization c) the normative order. This is nothing like the biological rule of interbreeding as the defn of species.

Niche

Niche is defined by H&F as a "set of constraints in abstract space sufficient to maintain a species". Once they define a niche, they go on to talk about competition within it, which implies that niches have limits. This is fine when you are discussing a population like frogs, but more difficult when applied to organizations.

Births and Deaths of Organizations

Too many undefined gray areas. For example, when there's a merger, which organization dies? Further, H&F state that as an org changes form, say in response to growth, the organization should be considered a new org (rather than a changed org). This is too vague. Young argues that since H&F's empirical work is focused exclusively on survival of organizations (births and deaths), it is a major flaw in their approach to not be able to tell when an organization is born, or when it dies.

Problems with the Structure of the Theory

Essentially, H&Fs theory does not correspond to the biological model or make use of it in fruitful ways. They don't give clear, analogous (to the bio model) definitions for the important concepts (eg species, niche, birth), and they do not do empirical studies of species of orgs (they claim to look at populations).One of their basic tenants, the "liability of newness" hypothesis" that organizational death rates decrease with age is derived from Stinchcomb, not biological theory, and in fact is directly contrary to bio theory. Another problem is that orgs can change their environments and resource bases, biological species cannot do this.

Methodological Problems

Multiple measures should have been used, or the single measures of novel concepts should have been justified. There was too much missing data and bad sampling. Further, there were too many cases in some studies where coders disagreed on the classification of the case.