Co-blogger Jacques Delacroix writes the following (in 1995!):
Organizational ecology is the other major open system school of thought. Organizational ecology (sometimes called “population ecology”) is built around the concept of structural inertia. In the ecological view, organizations in general have little latitude for effective structural change. Indeed, accoriding to some ecologists, important structural forms are often recipes for disaster and more likely lead to organizational demise than to organizational adaptation, as assumed by managerial schools of thought […]
The efficient mechanism of change invoked by organizational ecologists is therefore not adaptation but selective elimination, or simply ‘selection’. A selection viewpoint, in turn, necessarily requires a research interest in organizational dissolution […]
The counterintuitive logic of organizational ecology demands that a high replacement rate prevail within categories of organization […] Several studies place this replacement rate at about 10 percent annually. To detect the effects of such moderately high rates, in turn, requires reasonably long periods of observation; deep longitudinal studies rather than cross-sectional ones.
This is a fairly famous (in scholarly circles) methodology that Dr. Delacroix helped lay the groundwork for in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Unfortunately, access is denied online, so you will have to go to your nearest university’s business school and read the entire article yourself. The article that this except appeared in can be found in Organizational Theory and the Multinational Corporation.
Notes On Liberty 