CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 401Management and Organizational StudiesOrganizational Management and ChangeOrganizational Management and Leadership

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 23 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Organizational Adaptation and Environmental Selection-Interrelated Processes of Change

Levinthal, Daniel A.·1991·Organization Science
DOI 10.1287/orsc.2.1.140
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Research on organizational change has been animated by two conflicting perspectives. One line of research has emphasized organizational adaptation (Cyert and March 1963, Lawrence and Lorsch 1967, Child 1972), while Hannan and Freeman (1977) have posed an alternative paradigm in which variation in organizational forms within a population is explained by differential rates of birth and death. Astley and Van de Ven (1983) and Scott (1987) have offered a reconciliation of these divergent perspectives, suggesting that they are in fact complementary. In particular, Scott (1987) argued that a selection perspective is useful in explaining core features of organizations, survival rates of relatively small organizations, and in accounting for changes over long periods of time. In contrast, Scott proposed that adaptation perspectives are a useful complement in examining peripheral features of organizations, survival of larger and more powerful organizations, and change over shorter periods of time. Much recent research has pursued an empirical agenda consistent with this idea that each approach has its own appropriate domain. Both variation in frequency with which change occurs (Amburgey, Kelley and Barnett 1990; Baum 1990; Haveman 1990) and in impact of change on survival rates of organizations (Singh, House and Tucker 1986; Miner, Amburgey and Stearns 1990; Amburgey, Kelly and Barnett 1990) have been examined. As Winter (1990, pp. 292-293) notes, the emerging consensus is not on a particular sweeping generalization about levels of adaptability/rationality or inertia/irrationality that organizations display, but an emerging agreement that arguing about generalizations is less interesting than sorting out cases and testing strength of competing interpretations. This essay proposes a different conception of relationship of adaptation and selection processes. In reviewing some of most recent advances in literature, essay uncovers a view of adaptation and selection not as mutually exclusive alternatives, each with its own domain of applicability, but rather as fundamentally interdependent processes. On one hand, organizational learning contributes, in part, to organizational inertia, which, in turn, is basis of selection processes. On other hand, far from being incompatible with adaptive learning, inertial forces are a prerequisite for intelligent adaptation. In complex decision problems discovery of optimum is an extremely difficult task, with an astronomical numbers of alternatives. This makes it imperative to use building blocks derived from previous good solutions (Holland 1975) even though so doing contributes to inertia. Retaining elements of prior solutions enhances organizational reliability, as suggested by Hannan and Freeman (1984, 1989), and it also facilitates intelligent adaptation in that it allows for clearer inferences to be made regarding efficacy of any experiment in organizational change. But presence of such inertia implies that organizations cannot adapt perfectly to their

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1287/orsc.2.1.140

Cites

23 of 23 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 25 references

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Levinthal, D. A.
Affiliations
University of Pennsylvania (US)
Corresponding author
Levinthal, Daniel A.
ORCID
Levinthal, Daniel A.
Venue
Organization Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Published
1991-02
Volume
2
Issue
1
Pages
140-145
ISSN
  • 1047-7039 (ISSN-L)
  • 1526-5455
DOI
10.1287/orsc.2.1.140
OpenAlex
W2031011089
Cited by
401
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 7 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 19 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 25 · 2012: 17
FWCI
5.93
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Organization Science (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Organizational Management and Change
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management of Technology and Innovation › Organizational Management and Leadership
Keywords
organizational adaptation, environmental selection, organizational change, organizational learning, organizational inertia, organizational survival, organizational forms, organizational complexity

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review