Rethinking organizational ecology in light of developments in cognitive science and natural language processing

Theory and research on the ecology of organizations has taken a cognitive turn over the past fifteen years. The most recent development in organizational ecology builds explicit bridges to cognitive science. This reconstructs the core of the original theories in light of the new knowledge. It builds on a probabilistic view of concepts and categories. It turns out that the cognitive-based reformulation effort reveals unexpected connections to language models and natural-language processing. In particular, the leading probabilistic classifier BERT provides new and powerful ways to measure core concepts.