In this article I attempted to answer what seemed to be a rudimentary question of “how organizations coevolve with their environment through time”. In doing so, organizations were conceived as members of interdependent species in an ecological community as a system of interrelated parts, where a change in any part leads to a certain degree of imbalance, which in turn results in changes in other parts of the system and to some extent to a reorganization of the system as a whole (Wallace & Wolf, 1999).
The proliferation of the paper also reflected the many different theoretical lenses and empirical methods to understand the role of the adaptation of organizations and their environments. Yet, in reality I observed that existing studies of simultaneous evolution or coevolution of organizations and their environments are sporadic and the prevailing empirical research is based on relatively short term events and single cases. Furthermore, the magnitude of the impact represented by organizational and social informatics[1] that is transforming today’s societies and institutions will influence many of the prominent organizational ecology theories of today. These transformative technological evolutions and revolutions are sowing the seeds of “the Internet society", and are already epitomizing the global informational capitalism.
For instance, as of January 2011 neither any government nor private agency predicted a sudden regime change and people movement in the Arab nations. The failure of such intelligence and strategic assessment to predict this expeditious revolution was because of the nature of the trigger that moved the people rapidly (i.e. cyber social networking). Nevertheless, these local events created a larger global political, social, economic reaction causing a tail risk event both for public and private sectors. Therefore, we can no longer avoid the potentials of the progresses in social informatics for advancing new forms of co-operation and competition in the various subsystems of society such as the ecological, the economic, the political, and the cultural systems. These environmental systems are becoming more fluid and dynamic, enlarging their borders to a transnational scale (Fuchs, 2008).
Inherently, in the contemporary “information society” immaterial labor[2] is becoming a singular global logic of capitalist domination and "the fundamental sources of productivity and power" (Castells, 2000), where the power is derived from a most proficient estimate of uncertain consequences of possible actions and an estimate of uncertain future preferences for those consequences (Feldman & March, 1981).
As a conclusive remark, for organizations the hypothesis:
Ɵ = ƒ(P x Ec x S x T x E x L x n)
μ = (Fμ + Cμ,) x ƒ(t)
Where; Fμ = ƒ (D x Pr x Ef x C x I) + Cμ, Therefore; Δ = ƒ (Ɵ x μ)
is not a theorem that legitimizes the existence of a unified model - a principle - a law that can consistently apply to all organizations to address the entirety of environmental conditions. Nonetheless “it is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all”, even “the use of hypotheses carries risk, yet often prove fruitful even if, perhaps especially if, they turn out to be flawed” (Poincaré, 1952).
[1]A serviceable working conception of ' organizational and social Informatics’ is that it identifies a body of research that examines the social aspects of computerization. A more formal definition is it he interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences off, information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts (Sawyer & Rosenbaum, 2000).
[2] Immaterial labor would be labor "that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response", or services, cultural products, knowledge (Hardt & Negri, 2005).
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