Based on the coevolutionary theoretical perspective, this article aims to analyze organizational evolution. We view this evolution as a nested phenomenon which therefore cannot be analyzed separately from the changes that emerge at the levels of the organizational population as well the environment. Based on this theoretical concept, we carried out a qualitative and longitudinal case study which enabled us to identify three interdependent trajectories that represented the macro (environment), meso (organizational population) and micro (focal organization) levels. The results of this research indicate that organizational evolution is infl uenced by multiple causal levels as well as by the alteration of the roles of the three trajectories in terms of the causal direction. In addition, we found that these alterations were manifested in different temporal lags. At the theoretical level, these results shed some light on how the mechanisms of selection and adaptation influence organizational evolution.
Coevolution; Trajectory; Organizational adaptation; Organizational selection