Search results

Recent theory and research have reconceptualized categories in markets and in other settings as part of the languages developed to characterize roles in a producer-audience interface. An important development in this work is the characterization of memberships in producer categories and in audiences as potentially partial. Producers often are regarded as members in a category to varying degrees, and audience members share to varying degrees in consensus about the applicability and meanings of category labels. Such partiality gives rise to fuzziness in boundaries, which has implications for the emergence and persistence of categories. A fast-developing literature has explored these implications empirically.

Existing theories of density dependence in organizational evolution treat the key processes as timeless functions of density. This paper revises the theory by specifying that the effects of density on legitimation and competition change systematically as organizational populations age. It argues that these changes in effects reflect population-level inertia due to institutionalization and the development of various forms of population structure. The proposed model of these processes implies a set of complex interactions between density and population age in effecting vital rates in organizational populations. These hypotheses are tested with data on entries of firms into the automobile indus tries of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy during 1886-1981. These tests generally support the revised model. The pattern continues to hold when entry rates in each country are allowed to depend upon density in the whole set of countries, following Hannan et al. (1995).

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis within organizational ecology on identity as a fundamental basis for the conceptualization and identification of organizational forms. This paper highlights the benefits of an identity-based conceptualization of organizational forms and outlines an identity-based agenda for organizational ecology. We begin by discussing fundamental properties of organizational identity, drawing extensively from the formal-theoretical conceptualization proposed by Pólos et al. (2002). We then build on this foundation by proposing a number of systematic ways in which forms can be specified and differentiated in terms of identity. We also address the challenge of measuring forms by discussing various approaches researchers may use to assess the beliefs contemporaneous audiences hold regarding organizational identities. This paper concludes with a discussion of research questions revolving around three issues core to an ecological approach to organizations: (1) the emergence of identities, (2) the persistence of identities, and (3) the strategic trade-offs among different types of identities.

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: Adding premises overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments, and it paves the way toward a complete classical theory. Observed inferential patterns which seem "wrong" according to one notion of inference might just as well signal that the speaker is engaged in correct execution of another style of reasoning. —Johan van Benthem (1996)

Der vorliegende Aufsatz plädiert für die Anwendung der modernen Populationsökologie zur Erforschung von Organisation-Umwelt-Beziehungen. Die zentrale Frage ist dabei: Warum gibt es so viele Arten von Organisationen? Die ökologische Frage eröffnet die Möglichkeit, zur Analyse der Effekte der Umweltvarianz auf organisatorische Strukturen eine Vielzahl formaler Modelle einzusetzen. Die Autoren zeigen, daß die Strukturen von Organisationen starken "Trägheitszwängen" unterworfen sind, die sowohl aus internen Arrangements (etwa interner Politik) als auch der Umwelt entstammen (zum Beispiel der öffentlichen Legitimation organisatorischer Tätigkeiten). Die strukturelle Trägheit von Organisationen wird weiterhin in Abhängigkeit von Alter, Größe und Komplexität der Organisation untersucht und letztendlich als Folge eines Selektionsprozesses begriffen. (pmb)