Michael T. Hannan

The Population Ecology of Organizations

A population ecology perspective on organization-environment relations is proposed as an alternative to the dominant adaptation perspective. The strength of inertial pressures on organizational structure suggests the application of models that depend on competition and selection in populations of organizations. Several such models as well as issues that arise in attempts to apply them to the organization-environment problem are discussed.

Structural Inertia and Organizational Change

Considers structural inertia in organizational populations as an outcome of an ecological-evolutionary process. Structural inertia is considered to be a consequence of selection as opposed to a precondition. The focus of this analysis is on the timing of organizational change. Structural inertia is defined to be a correspondence between a class of organizations and their environments. Reliably producing collective action and accounting rationally for their activities are identified as important organizational competencies. This reliability and accountability are achieved when the organization has the capacity to reproduce structure with high fidelity. Organizations are composed of various hierarchical layers that vary in their ability to respond and change. Organizational goals, forms of authority, core technology, and marketing strategy are the four organizational properties used to classify organizations in the proposed theory. Older organizations are found to have more inertia than younger ones. The effect of size on inertia is more difficult to determine. The variance in inertia with respect to the complexity of organizational arrangements is also explored. (SRD)

Networks, Knowledge, and Niches: Competition in the Worldwide Semiconductor Industry, 1984-1991

The authors develop a conceptions of an organization-specific niche in a technological network. This niche is defined by two properties: crowding and status. The authors hypothesize that crowding suppresses and organizations life chances and that status enhances life chances, especially for those organizations in uncrowded niches. They operationalize this conception of the niche using patents and patent citations, and they find support for these hypotheses in an examination of technological competition in the worldwide semiconductor industry. In the conclusion, they compare these findings to earlier research and highlight some of the particular advantages of this conception of the niche.

Dynamics of organizational populations : density, legitimation, and competition

This book seeks to deepen and broaden the understanding of change in organization populations by examining the dynamics of numbers of organizations in populations. The authors have studied various kinds of organizations, including national labour unions, newspapers and newspaper publishers, brewing firms, life insurance companies, and banks.

A Time to Grow and a Time to Die: Growth and Mortality of Credit Unions in New York City, 1914–1990

One vision of organizational evolution suggests that old and large organizations become increasingly dominant over their environment. A second suggests that as organizations age they become less able to respond to new challenges. In this article the authors investigate which of these visions best characterizes the evolution of state-chartered credit unions in New York City from 1914 through 1990 by analyzing the effects of organizational age, size, and population density on rates of organizational failure and growth. The authors find evidence that old and small institutions are more likely to fail, while young and small organizations have the highest growth rates.

Niche Width and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations

This paper explores the effects of environmental variability and grain on the niche width of organizational populations. It develops a model of the manner in which environmental variations affect the life changes of specialist and generalist organizations. This model predicts that death rates of generalists exceed those of specialists in fine-grained environments, regardless of the level of variability, but that generalists have lower death rates when environmental variation is both coarse grained and large. The model is applied to a sample of restaurant organizations in 18 California cities. Maximum likelihood estimates and tests confirm the major predictions of the model.

Identities, Genres, and Organizational Forms

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 Polos 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.

Building the Iron Cage: Determinants of Managerial Intensity in the Early Years of Organizations

Considers the impact of founding conditions on the later administration and management of technology startups in Silicon Valley. Data were collected in 1994-1995 by survey and interviews with 173 technology firms that had at least 10 employees and were no more than 10 years old. This research draws on the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies. The interviews with firm founders identified three dimensions along which work and employment are organized. These are: attachment, basis of coordination and control, and selection. Within these three dimensions, founders created employment models related to their views about desired organizational culture, strategies for employee selection, or perceptions of employee motivation. These three organizational dimensions are used to explain the five basic employment models - engineering, star, commitment, bureaucracy, and autocracy. Results show that the bureaucratic model is the most administratively intense with autocracy in second place, then engineering, star, and commitment. Both the model that is chosen by the founder and the gender balance in these firms affected the level of managerial intensity that resulted in the firms. Firms with a higher proportion of women in the first year became less bureaucratized than other firms. Administrative intensity is found to increase drastically when a firm goes public. This likely results from the need for more financial reporting, regulatory compliance, and investor relations management. Overall, this analysis demonstrates the path-dependence in bureaucratization. (SRD)

The Ecology of Organizational Mortality: American Labor Unions, 1836-1985

This paper analyzes the founding rate of national labor unions in the United States for the period 1836-1985. It investigates the effects of competitive processes and environmental effects on this rate. A number of stochastics models embodying different assumptions about the ecology of foundings are estimated. The best-fitting models posit that the effect of density (the number of unions in existence) and the number of recent foundings on the foundig rate is curvilinear. Analysis of more complicated models reveals that the growth of industrial unions inhibited the founding rate of craft unions. However, the founding rate of industrial unions was unaffected by the number of craft unions in existence.

Density Dependence in the Evolution of Populations of Newspaper Organizations

A model of density dependence is proposed to explain regularities in the growth and decline of organizational populations. Density -the number of organizations is assumed to be a function of the social processes of legitimation and competition. At low density, the model predicts that the legitimation process will dominate and will lead to high organizational founding rates and low organizational mortality rates. At high levels of density, competition will dominate, and consequently founding rates will decline and mortality rates will rise. The model is tested with hazard function models using data from nine newspaper populations spanning the 19th and 20th centuries and covering over 5200 newspapers. Analysis offounding rates provides strong empirical support for the model. Analysis of mortality rates reveals that the model holds for large populations.