ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop a human ecological theory of structural dynamics in formal organizations. It presents an open-system model of morphological change and feedback in organizations and as a substantive contribution to human ecology. The chapter shows how variation in the environment, technology, and demography of an organization affects its emerging structure under the fundamental assumption that structuring is an adaptive process. It considers how the emergence of structure in an organization affects outputs to its environment. The objective of the structuralist version of closed-system theory is to explain variation in organizational form—the parts that an organization has and relationships among them. The prime source of imperfect information is the inscrutability of the organization’s environment and consequent costs of information-gathering. The availability of heterogeneous materials may foster technological innovation, if the aggregate marginal productivity of the production organization can thereby be increased, changing the optimum range of material heterogeneity.
