How the Organizational Ecology Approach Can Enrich Business Research on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises – Three Areas for Future Research

Following the basic paradigms of the organizational ecology approach, we propose three fields for further research that have relevance for business administration and management. (1) We argue that to better understand organizational life cycles, it is important to analyze the influence of fundamental change in the governance structure of an organization on its survival chances. (2) We propose to investigate the effect of organizations’ population density and the effect of interdependencies between the density and the size of organizations on the life expectancy of newly founded organizations in more detail in order to better understand organizational life cycles. (3) Based on the strong effect legitimacy has on the survival chances of organizations, we propose to focus on how different degrees of legitimacy influence organizational survival chances.