Pilgrim’s Progress: Trends and Convergence in Research on Organizational Size and Environments

Abstract

This article reviews the research conducted on organizational size and environments from 1980 through 1992. Specifically, the environmental research based on the traditional environmental contingency model is reviewed and trends over the review period are identified. The organizational size literature is reviewed in a similar fashion. Suggestions for empirical and theoretical extensions of trends identified in both research streams a represented. An especially salient finding in the review is the emerging theoretical convergence of the size and environment research streams on the topic of organizational life cycles, which seems to particularly involve the population ecology model. Possible theoretical convergence between the institutional, population ecology, interorganizational relations, and environmental enactment perspectives and other fundamental organization theory areas (e.g., culture and strategy) are then proposed. Overall, traditional organizational size and environment research continued at a steady pace over the review period, and new approaches and perspectives, especially in the area of environment research, have developed and are surpassing the traditional approaches in the volume of research they generate.