Introduction to special section honoring John Freeman

摘要

John Freeman was an organizational sociologist who became a leader in developing an evolutionary approach to understanding and studying organizations. Along with Mike Hannan, John was a founder of the theoretical perspective known originally as "the population ecology of organizations" and eventually as "organizational ecology." At the time it was introduced, organizational ecology was a radical departure from conventional wisdom, even considered heretical by some. Dismissing the dominant adaptationist view of organizations, Hannan and Freeman (1977) instead assumed organizations were inertial; they proposed a view of organizational change as driven by the environmental selection of organizational forms rather than the adaptability of individual organizations. The initial inertia assumption they invoked was strong, but used for analytical purposes rather than as a behavioral statement, a point not well understood until Hannan and Freeman (1984). Organizational ecology went on to attract legions of students and supporters who pursued a variety of related but separate theoretical directions, all embedded within the framework of organizational ecology (see Carroll and Hannan, 2000, for an overview). John Freeman's interests in organizational ecology spanned a wide range of topics but from the outset he maintained an abiding interest in entrepreneurship and strategy. He pursued this interest in a study of semiconductor producers and the ways in which organizational structures produced entrepreneurs (Freeman, 1986). Other work of his focused on age dependence (Freeman et al, 1983), niche width (Freeman and Hannan, 1983) and density dependence (Hannan and Freeman, 1987, 1988), main topics of organizational ecology. He subsequently analyzed venture capital firms (Freeman, 2005), and the geographic basis of organizational communities (Freeman and Audia, 2006).