On the existence of mixed industries: an ecological theoretical model of the survival of cooperatives and social economy enterprises
Résumé
This communication is a proposition of a simple theoretical model of the creation, evolution and persistence of various organizational forms (cooperatives, social economy enterprises, family businesses, fi rms...) in some industries (agro-food industry, creative industries). This organizational ecological model is inspired by recent developments in ecological theory (Pacala & Rees 1998; Turnball et al. 2005). Evolutionary economics and organizational ecology proposed various models of growth and mortality (see Harrison 2004 for a literature survey). Although a main interest of ecological organizational is the diversity ("Why are there so many kinds of organizations?" (Hannan 2005: 51)), few researches develop theoretical models describing the coexistence or the succession of different organizational forms (Safarznska & van den Bergh 2009), while it is a main stylised fact of the economic history of a huge number of industries. In order to take into account this problem, we extend the previous successional niche models (Pacala & Rees 1998) with the introduction of a changing environment (with random or autocorrelated macroeconomic changes; a decreasing or increasing supply...), different survival or development capacities of the organizational forms and capacities to create barriers to entry. Focusing on the consequences of the niche overlap, this evolutionary approach leads us to explain the stylised facts of the coexistence of cooperatives and fi rms in the agro-food industry.