ABSTRACT
Social ecology is a forerunner of ecologically rooted theory and practice in socio-organisational domains, introducing the concept of organisational ecology. Organisational ecology is the field created by several organisations whose inter-relations compose a system at the level of a field or domain. The overall domain becomes the object of inquiry, not the single organisation, and is characterised by environments of increasing complexity, at an increasing rate, and is more interdependent. Like socio-technical systems, the development of social ecology involves wider social systems than single organisations. The environment is conceived as an extended social field with a causal texture, which affects the behaviour of all systems within it. Social ecology studies are based on an open-systems view of the nature of internal and external dialogues between organisations and their environments. Environments have causal textures and take on lives of their own, which no organisation could hope to fully control or predict. The ‘turbulent field’ signifies the contextual interdependencies of organisations in rapidly changing environments. Causal textures theory is part of the social ecology school that studies environmental types, and helps to analyse how organisations and their environments intersect.
