How Niche Construction Shapes Organizational Fields and Populations

Niche Construction Theory (NCT), a recent offshoot of evolutionary biology, emphasizes how agents modify their surroundings and create organizational variation in an environment. Here we discuss how NCT can enrich the theorization of organization-environment interactions. As the global ecological situation continues to deteriorate, we must understand the capacity of organizations to both shape and adapt to their environments. NCT endogenizes the environment, making environmental change a key explanatory feature of a system. It emphasizes that actors not only seek protection but take action to build local systems of protection. We demonstrate NCT’s value added through an example of market evolution not caused by exogenous shocks or new norms, but niche construction strategies that alter environmental selection pressures through both intentional short-term interventions and unintentional long-term feedback effects. NCT’s emphasis on material and cultural selection pressures provides a better understanding of the role of the environment in organizational sociology, including feedback between fields and populations.