ABSTRACT
A basic objective of modern sociological human ecology is to account for the organizational forms that arise in social systems as their populations adapt to varying environmental, technological, and demographic opportunities and constraints. Adaptation is construed as a structuring process by which analytically distinguishable subunits and routinized activities evolve in the system that serve to increase the productivity (or efficiency) of a given function or set of functions. The structuring process involves the differentiation or dedifferentiation of the system’s subunits and activities and their integration into a complex of relationships possessing unit character.
