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Organizational ecology is regarded by many to be a theory of small organizations. Perrow (1986) observes that most organizations are small, so most variation and selection are among small organizations. Furthermore, large organizations are seen to be less susceptible to selection pressures, since they are capable of altering their environments (Scott, 1987). For these reasons, it is thought that ecological models can be applied to large numbers of small organizations, but cannot inform our understanding of individually large firms. As Winter concludes elsewhere in this volume:“population ecology models may be particularly relevant when opportunities or incentives for organizational growth are absent. In such cases one would not expect to see the highly skewed size distributions characteristic of business firms, and numbers of organizations should be a good proxy for the burden placed on the carrying capacity of the environment”(Chapter 12).