Customer Reviews

Organizations Evolving

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Howard Aldrich's ORGANIZATIONS EVOLVING is truly a tour de force. Those who know his 1979 ORGANIZATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTS are familiar with his sharp insights into the field of organizations and his lucid writing. In ORGANIZATIONS EVOLVING, Aldrich develops a compelling, broadly evolutionary, perspective on organizations that integrates the best ideas from diverse organizational theories. He makes the best, most sophisticated, case yet for an evolutionary perspective on the organization.

Howard Aldrich's new book, Organizations Evolving, is a tour de force that reflects an impressive mastery of diverse literatures. Aldrich integrates theory and empirical findings from an array of fields to develop fundamental new knowledge about the conditions under which organizations emerge, evolve and transform themselves. The breadth of the book is striking. It is an elegant synthesis of findings from different disciplines, different levels of analysis and different types of organizations. The book reflects both the complexity and identifies the underlying regularites in the emergence and evolution of organizations. I would recommend the book to scholars and managers interested in organizations, strategy and entrepreneurship.

First, I found the book to be highly "readable" in a number of ways, including its integration of literature and examples related to organizations of all sizes and ages. This approach created a dynamic "feel" to the book and a sense that the organizations we study are much more "moving targets" than stationary ones. Second, I confess that I am one of those readers who peruses the last section or chapter of a publication first to see where the author is going. I found that the final "invitation" section piqued my interest on a number of intriguing issues for future scholarly work (e.g., challenges of human resources in emergent organizations; the impact of collective organizational action versus individual organizational action) and I am confident others will find this section useful as well in contemplating future research programs. The "invitation" section also offers useful ideas that appeal to a variety of disciplines...for instance, I am already contemplating how I might collaborate with some of my academic colleagues in human resource mgt. and/or org. behavior. Third, since I am currently working on projects related to organizational legitimacy and legitimacy building, I focused my initial reading on sections related to these subjects, and found that Aldrich has, not surprisingly, extended the literature on legitimacy in some interesting and useful ways. For instance, at one point he discusses the potential for tensions to arise between, on the one hand, individualistic action that builds the legitimacy of a new firm, and, on the other hand, mutualistic or collective action that builds the legitimacy of a new population or community of rganizations. Finally, speaking of legitimacy, his purposeful attention throughout the book to organizations at all stages of development (e.g., emergent and existing) helps further legitimize scholarly interest in smaller and/or newer organizations. This is a quality contribution to the field of organization research.

this book will revolutionize the way sociologists look at (evolving) organizations...lots of examples and an excellent organization of topics.

Organizations Evolving is a gem. Writing with grace and clarity, Professor Aldrich establishes how diverse literatures ranging from transaction-cost economics to intepretive theory are premised on evolutionary foundations, and explores their convergences. He deftly synthesizes cutting edge research to illuminate how variation, selection and retention processes unfold at multiple levels within and outside organizations. This book is an exceptional accomplishment and is compulsory reading for all organizational researchers.

This is a terrific book! Just as Howard Aldrich was the first to present an ecological framing for the field, this is the first comprehensive work to extend and integrate what so many have been talking about as important, but (maybe excepting Nelson and Winter's start) nobody has explained and worked out where the field should move with it. Which Aldrich has done here so clearly and articulately. For me, the book is especially timely. Putting emergence and dynamics out front is a great contribution.

`Organizations Evolving' is precisely what this book is about. In a richly textured way, Howard Aldrich gives the reader a distinctive feel for the subject and a way to think about and understand emergence and change in organizations. [The book] is informative and engaging. It is playful and rigorous. It is scholarly and quite practical. Aldrich writes with confidence and wisdom. He invites many theorists into the tent even as he sometimes re-casts their work within his frame. His book makes a fine contribution to the evolving field of organization studies' - Professor Peter J. Frost University of British Columbia

Aldrich is a leading figure in organizational sociology. The organization is, with no doubt, a domain of sociology. But organization is not the object only sociology, especially because the company is the dominant form of organization under capitalism. The firm has been the object of various disciplines. Since the firm is an organization, if one studies the company, he participates in organizational studies. Organizational sociology has also zeroed in on the firm, rather than other form of organization. So now organizational sociology is not much discernible from economic sociology in the empirical research. Both have focused on the firm and the market as research domain. Most universities in the States offer both specialties as one course rather than separate course. Moreover, such a blending of field is intensified as more and more researchers from various disciplines take the firm and market as their research agenda. we¡¯ve seen the ascendance of organizational economics over past decades, breaking decades of ignorance of firm in economics. One-of-a-kind move could be spotted even in political science. ¡®Varieties of Capitalism¡¯ (2001), edited by Peter Hall and David Soskice, for instance, is a example of such a trend. In this book they examine the influence of national regulatory system on the business system and competitive advantage. Now the organizational study is increasingly interdisciplinary affair in social sciences. The more come into play, the more divergent the field become. Aldrich identifies seven perspectives in organizational studies: ecological approach, institutionalism, interpretive approach, organizational learning approach, resource dependence approach, transaction cost economics, and evolutionary approach. The diversity of approaches is not only tolerable but also necessary, given the interdisciplinary nature of organizational studies. But seven perspectives in only one field is too much. So Aldrich attempts to launch the overarching framework based on evolutionary approach, while preserving the value of other approach. The advantage of evolutionary approach lies in its simplicity. It consists of only 4 principles: variation, se4lection, retention, and struggle. Each relates to the other with if-then clauses. But they are abstract in nature. The specific accounts of events should be provided by other niche approaches. Evolution is the name of process, not of substance or what takes place in the field. This is the overall architecture of the book. It seems Aldrich succeeds in the ambitious project to provide the umbrella framework linking competing perspectives under one roof. In doing so, he reviews tons of researches to validate the effectiveness of his proposal. It seems to work with empirical studies. But the devil lies in details. He dumps too many into the limited space in cursory manner. So reader has some difficulty in following through the lines. Overall framework of the book is reasonable, and that it must be the breakthrough in organizational studies. But reading through it is another matter. It¡¯s a painful travail.