Engaging firms and populations in ecosystem web: deploying a multi-paradigmatic construct to resolve pluralism in organizational theory

Abstract Strategic management theorists, organizational ecologists, organizational theorists, and ecosystem theorists deploy different perspectives to theorize, model, and analyze organizational forms. Organizational constructs, independent of the unitary or aggregate level, can be seen along the duality of social determinism and free will. The four configurations of organizational forms, namely, system structure, strategic choice, natural selection, and collective action view, adapted from organizational theory literature, are modeled from the business ecosystem perspective. Disruptive forces in the environment warrant organizational forms that can withstand the disruption. Deploying business ecosystems as an integrative organizational theory construct can provide meaningful insights in the form of a novel architecture that can consolidate multi-paradigmatic perspectives appropriate for all organizational forms. This study leverages the power of analogy, transverses the conceptual underpinning of the term business ecosystem, reveals the intricacies of firm and population behavior, and explains relationships across various organizational forms within the ecosystem construct. Toward the end, the authors propose a business ecosystem as a multi-paradigmatic, meta-theoretical construct to map and navigate diverse organizational forms, thereby guiding the thoughts and actions of thinkers and practitioners in organizational theory.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  International Studies of Management & Organization

• Publication date

  2024-11-22

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/00208825.2024.2421658
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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