Abstract
All organizations depend on external resources. Population ecology (PE)—a classic theoretical approach of organization studies—claims that the environment as the provider of external resources selects within any group of organizations all those that best fit the environment’s requirements and/or functional needs. In this social-darwinistic approach, the environment exercises structural power over groups of organizations, so-called populations. Environments hence determine organizational survival via selection processes.
With reference to this organizational concept, this chapter will lay out the basic elements of PE and introduce and explain central theoretical ideas. In the course of this chapter, these ideas will be transferred and applied to international relations (IR) in general and inter-organizational relations (IOR) in particular.
PE perfectly lends itself to study a number of IOR aspects as it helps to understand why new organizations are created and established ones decease. Moreover, PE is suitable for all those approaches that try to analyze why not all populations evolve in the same direction and why every population of organizations appears to have its own genetic code.
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Ries, F. (2017). Population Ecology: How the Environment Influences the Evolution of Organizations. In: Koops, J., Biermann, R. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations in World Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36039-7_7
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