Since the 1970s, the dominant ecological perspective on organizational affairs have tended to downplay organizations' ability to adapt to changing environments. Instead, the relevant researchers have used a Darwinistic variation-selection-retention model to explain how some (populations of) organisations are "selected" for survival, while others are doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs, no matter how hard this or that individual firm may try to adapt. As an aside, the relevant article provides a nice illustration of a point that George Lakoff recently made on Cogling (13/08/2005), namely that "Metaphor is central to science because it preserves inference, and allows the results of the inferences to be tested on observations, when the math is metaphorically mapped to the scientific subject matter." In this particular instance, once Hannan and Freeman had made the basic ORGANIZATIONS ARE ORGANISMS mappings, they proceeded to also import a lot of mathematical stuff (e.g. the so-called Lotka-Volterra equations) from bio-ecological models, and applied it to e.g. problems pertaining to the rates of growth of competing organizations. Having said that, I also think Gilles Fauconnier got it right when he noted, in response to Lakoff's claim, that "it's too simple to say that 'metaphor preserves inference'." Thus in most texts attempting to apply ecological models imported from biology to organizational affairs, you'll find lengthy discussions of crucial differences between the two domains. Thus Hannan and Freeman mentions that "Organizational ecology and evolution are more complicated than comparable processes in bioecology for several reasons. We have already mentioned the fact that forms of organization are not coded in inert genetic material. Individual organizations can and sometimes do change their forms. In addition, information about building structure does not pass from parent to offspring. There is often no clear-cut parallel to a parent. Moreover, there is no reason why individual organizations cannot live forever. This means that an organization can contribute to future generations directly, by persisting" ([email protected])