Population Ecology and Evolutionary Economics

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify complementarities between the approaches of population ecology and evolutionary economics in order to contribute to a synthesis of organizational evolutionary dynamics and its implications for a strategic management research model. Using the metatriangulation technique to construct theories, we attempt to entwine these two perspectives. The proposed model is structured in two dimensions: the environmental selective system and the corporate adaptation process. The environmental selective system gathers together the complementary factors presented by evolutionary economics and ecology: technological innovation, demographic processes, environmental dynamism, population density and other institutional processes, and interpopulation dynamics. As ecology does not encompass the corporate adaptation process (generation, selection, and propagation of variations), the proposed model adopts the theoretical grounds underpinning evolutionary economics. The model offers three main contributions for future research into strategic management. First, it allows the development of descriptive and normative studies of the relationship among the environmental selection factors and the different types of enterprise strategies. Second, the proposed conceptual framework may be very beneficial for studies of interorganizational learning. Third, the model has the advantage of responding to the criticism of strategy theories in terms of their inability to generalize.

Keywords: population ecology of organizations, evolutionary economics, environmental dynamism, strategic management

JEL Classification: M10, O30, A12