How Niche Construction Shapes Organizational Fields and Populations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7514944 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Søren Lund Frandsen (0000-0002-5439-6093, Copenhagen Business School), Jacob Hasselbalch (0000-0001-5491-7023, Copenhagen Business School), Leonard Seabrooke (0000-0001-5581-3293, Copenhagen Business School), Kevin L Young (0000-0003-4783-0266, Amherst College) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 51-80 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Organizational Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2752-2997 • E-ISSN: 2752-2997 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/joso-2025-0002 |
| OpenAlex | W7130504089 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 85 |
Niche Construction Theory (NCT), a recent offshoot of evolutionary biology, emphasizes how agents modify their surroundings and create organizational variation in an environment. Here we discuss how NCT can enrich the theorization of organization-environment interactions. As the global ecological situation continues to deteriorate, we must understand the capacity of organizations to both shape and adapt to their environments. NCT endogenizes the environment, making environmental change a key explanatory feature of a system. It emphasizes that actors not only seek protection but take action to build local systems of protection. We demonstrate NCT’s value added through an example of market evolution not caused by exogenous shocks or new norms, but niche construction strategies that alter environmental selection pressures through both intentional short-term interventions and unintentional long-term feedback effects. NCT’s emphasis on material and cultural selection pressures provides a better understanding of the role of the environment in organizational sociology, including feedback between fields and populations
Action (physics · Field (mathematics · Key (lock · Natural selection · Niche · Niche construction · Organizational structure · Selection (genetic algorithm · Value (mathematics · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Language and cultural evolution
The Power of Organizations
Darwin's Unfinished Symphony
Abductive Analysis
The Demography of Corporations and Industries
Institutions and Institutional Work
Fools Rush in? The Institutional Context of Industry Creation
An introduction to niche construction theory
Microfoundations of Institutional Theory
Niche Construction
How Actors Change Institutions
Organizing the in-Between
Linking Organizational and Field-Level Analyses
Coevolution as a Research Framework for Organizations and the Natural Environment
Climate Change, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
Regenerative Organizations
Varieties of Sociological Field Theory
Leftism Reinvented
From Pabst to Pepsi
A Theory of Fields
Replacing actual political activism with ethical shopping
Organizational theory
Contemporary organizational theory
They Are All Organizations”
Three Kinds of Niche Construction
Social Systems of Flexible Production
Meta-organizations for Sustainability Transformations
Strategy is Structure. A Systems Theory-Based Definition of Strategy
Hybrid Organizations – What’s in a Name
Orders of the Division of Labor
Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance
Rage against the regime
Structural Inertia and Organizational Change
The Iron Cage Revisited
Cross-Field Effects and Ethnic Classification
The Niche as a Theoretical Tool
The Emergence of Organizational Forms
Structuring a Theory of Moral Sentiments
On the Edge or In Between
Organizational Niches and the Dynamics of Organizational Mortality
Concentration and Specialization
Niche Width and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations
Institutionalized Organizations
The Population Ecology of Organizations
The Organizational Niche
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |