Legitimacy constraints also emanate from the environment. Any legitimacy an organization has been able to generate constitutes an asset in manipulati… - Michael T. Hannan

For wide classes of organizations there are very strong inertial pressures on structure arising from both internal arrangements (for example, internal politics) and from the environment (for example, public legitimation of organizational activity). To claim otherwise is to ignore the most obvious feature of organizational life. Failing churches do not become retail stores nor do firms transform themselves into churches.

The concept of "niche," initially borrowed by biologists from early social science, plays a central role in ecological theory... The niche... consists of all those combinations of resource levels at which the population can survive and reproduce itself.

Natural selection, as it is actually used in evolutionary population biology, serves mainly as an optimization process. In fact, the reasoning that underlies much evolutionary biology often strikes social scientists as strongly reminiscent of neoclassical economics.