William P. Barnett

Why Are Some Organizations More Competitive Than Others? Evidence from a Changing Global Market

In this paper, we question the idea that large organizations have advantages that make them particularly potent rivals. We argue that the ability of large organizations to ameliorate competitive constraints insulates them from an important source of organizational development and protects them from being selected out if unfit. Consequently, we predict that although large organizations are likely to do well in technology contests, they also are likely to become weak competitors over time compared with small organizations. We specify this prediction in an explicit model of “Red Queen” competition, in which exposure to competition makes organizations both more viable and stronger competitors. We find support for our ideas in empirical estimates of the model obtained using data on hard disk drive manufacturers. Large organizations led the technology race in this market yet failed to develop into stronger competitors through Red Queen competition compared with their small counterparts. We also find evidence that all organizations in this market generated increasingly global competition, regardless of the competitiveness of their home markets. In these ways, our model elucidates important reasons why some organizations are stronger competitors and reveals how strategies that isolate organizations from competition may backfire. *

Avenues of Attainment: Occupational Demography and Organizational Careers in the California Civil Service1

This article outlines a comprehensive approach to analyzing organizational career inequality, emphasizing interdependencies among multiple �avenues of attainment�: job shifts and lateral moves, within and between organizations; changes in salary and salary ceilings associated with job shifts; and within‐job salary advancement. Hypotheses regarding how occupational sex and race composition affect these career outcomes are tested with data describing work histories of California state government employees. Although female‐ and minority‐dominated occupations were disadvantaged in many respects, their incumbents moved among state agencies more frequently (and reaped greater economic benefit) than did employees in occupations dominated by white males. Intraorganizational promotions yielded roughly comparable salary gains for incumbents of male‐ and female‐dominated occupations, but through distinct paths: male‐dominated occupations had less frequent promotions with larger salary increases; female‐dominated occupations experienced more frequent job shifts with smaller pay changes. Men in female‐dominated occupations were shielded from many of the adverse career outcomes experienced by their female counterparts.

The Evolution of Collective Strategies among Organizations

Many organizations are made up of other organizations that have decided to act collectively as with research and development consortia, industrial alliances, trade associations, and formal political coalitions. These collective organizations can be characterized by their differing strategies: some are general in scope, while others specialize on a more narrow purpose. What explains the prevalence of generalism and specialism among collective organizations? We develop an ecological model in which collective organizations compete over member organizations. Assuming that an organization joins a collective when its objectives match that of the collective, our model predicts a generalism bias in the ecology of founding and growth among collective organizations. This outcome is predicted to be path dependent, however, emerging over time according to relatively minor differences in initial conditions. These predictions are supported in an analysis of founding and growth rates among US R&D consortia, and the model helps to account for the numbers, sizes, and strategic diversity of these consortia.

From Red Vienna to the Anschluss: Ideological Competition among Viennese Newspapers during the Rise of National Socialism

This article proposes that competition among ideologies can be understood and modeled as an ecology of organizations. It presents a theory of ideological competition among organizations that predicts that competition is strongest among ideologically adjacent organizations—those too different ideologically to enjoy esprit de corps but similar enough to vie for the same base of support. Such competition, the article argues, involves contention over identity, favoring organizations that maintain a distinct ideological position. These ideas are investigated by reference to qualitative and quantitative data from Viennese newspapers over the period 1918 to 1938, a period of considerable social and political change in Vienna. The quantitative evidence is obtained by estimating ecological models of organizational failure and growth. There is also qualitative evidence that actors from various ideological perspectives engaged in strategic framing activity.

The Persistence of Lenient Market Categories

Research across disciplines presumes that market categories will have strong boundaries. Categories without well-defined boundaries typically are not useful and so are expected to fade away. We suggest many contexts contain lenient market categories, or less-constraining market categories, that persist and become important. We argue that this fact can be explained by looking at market categories from the producer perspective. Lenient market categories have more flexibility and allow for a wider range of fit. As a result, we expect to see high rates of entry into lenient categories. At the same time, lenient market categories have drawbacks: they do not clearly convey what an organization does and do not identify specific sets of potential consumers. This means organizations are more likely to exit. When entry rates are higher than exit rates, lenient market categories will endure over time. We also predict that organizations exiting lenient categories will enter other lenient categories, further fueling the persistence of such categories. Finally, this trend is exaggerated when influential external agents favor leniency. We find support for these ideas in a longitudinal analysis of organizational entry into and exit from market categories in the software industry.

THE RED QUEEN: HISTORY-DEPENDENT COMPETITION AMONG ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract We argue that competition among organizations is history-dependent, so that each organization’s competitiveness at a given point in time hinges on the organization’s historical experience leading up to that point. Specifically, we summarize the theory of “Red Queen” competition, where competition de-selects weak organizations and stimulates organizational learning, which in turn further increases the intensity of competition and so further strengthens survivors in an ongoing dynamic of reciprocal causality. Empirical evidence of Red Queen competition is summarized from various analyses of two organizational populations. We conclude that theories and empirical models of competition may be seriously mis-specified, and that the analytic tools of the field of strategic management may lead to incorrect conclusions, if they do not explicitly allow for this form of history dependence in competition.

The Non-consensus Entrepreneur Organizational Responses to Vital Events

Salient successes and failures, such as spectacular venture capital investments or agonizing bankruptcies, affect collective beliefs about the viability of particular markets. Using data on software start-ups from 1990 to 2002, we show that collective sense-making in the wake of such vital events can result in consensus behavior among entrepreneurs. Market search is a critical part of the entrepreneurial process, as entrepreneurs frequently enter new markets to find high-growth areas. When spectacular financings result in a collective overstatement of the attractiveness of a market, a consensus emerges that the market is resource-rich, and the path is cleared for many entries, including those that do not have a clear fit. When notorious failures render a market unpopular, only the most viable entrants will overcome exaggerated skepticism and enter, taking the non-consensus route. Venture capitalists likewise exhibit herding behavior, following other VCs into hot markets. We theorize that vital events effectively change the selection threshold for market entries, which changes the average viability of new entrants. We find that consensus entrants are less viable, while non-consensus entrants are more likely to prosper. Non-consensus entrepreneurs who buck the trends are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.

Differentiation, Variation and Selection: Evolutionary Implications of Technical Change Among the Worldwide Population of Hard Disk Drive Makers, 1956-1998

This paper describes a dynamic analysis of technological advances among hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the areal density of their products across the history of the industry. The study provides (additional) evidence supporting a view of technological racing with leap-frogging rather than with persistent leadership domination in the HDD context - like others, we find that technology leaders in one year are less likely to innovate in the next year than those firms right behind them in technology. We also uncover new evidence that technological laggards do not disappear as quickly as expected by technology racing metaphors where a winner-take-all outcome is expected. Our efforts to explain this pattern of persistent heterogeneity with the usual kind of strategic positioning stories and specifications were not notably successful. But we did find evidence that technological innovation in HDD follows a trajectory consistent with a proportionate random process (akin to a Gibrat process) that favors technology leaders but only stochastically. We demonstrate through simulation that evolution in a population with selection favoring a characteristic evolving as a proportionate random process generates increased variation. This contrasts with a common social science framework for viewing evolution that assumes a fixed characteristic and implies decreasing variation.

Ideologischer Wettbewerb zwischen Wiener Tages-zeitungen im Zeitraum von 1918 bis 1938

Zeiten politischen und sozialen Wandels zeichnen sich haufig durch Auseinandersetzungen zwischen konkurrierenden Ideologien aus. Angesichts der Bedeutung von formalen Organisationen fur derartige Auseinandersetzungen gehen wir in der vorliegenden Arbeit davon aus, dass Konkurrenzverhaltnisse zwischen einzelnen Ideologien als Wettstreit von Organisationen, die diese Ideologien transportieren, verstanden und analysiert werden konnen. In diesem Sinn entwickeln wir hier ein Model des ideologischen Wettbewerbs zwischen Organisationen und uberprufen unsere Ideen anhand von Daten uber Wiener Tageszeitungen im Zeitraum von 1918 bis 1938. Wien ist in diesem Zeitraum durch erhebliche soziale und politische Veranderungen gekennzeichnet. Die Ergebnisse unserer Schatzungen verschiedener Wachstumsregressionen und Scheiterratenmodelle bestatigen unsere Vorhersagen, auf welche Art und Weise das Schicksal von Organisationen von ideologischen Gleichartigkeiten und Unterschieden abhangt.

STANDING ON THE SHOULDER OF OTHERS: INSTITUTIONAL INTERDEPENDENCE IN JOB MOBILITY.

This paper investigates career interdependence. Specifically, we predict how hiring temporary workers affects the mobility of permanent workers. Theory suggests that hiring temporaries slows permanent-worker mobility at lower levels but speeds mobility at advanced levels. These hypotheses are supported by models estimated using event-history data on 6,850 workers.