Why do organizations generally lose their competitive edge as they get older? Recent theory and research on the dynamics of audiences and categories in markets sheds some new light on issues of organizational obsolescence

This paper introduces modal logics to a sociological audience. We first provide an overview of the formal properties of this family of models and outline key differences with classical first-order logic. We then build a model to represent processes of perception and belief core to social...

We develop a unifying framework to integrate two of organizational sociology's theory fragments on categorization: typecasting and form emergence. Typecasting is a producer-level theory that considers the consequences producers face for specializing versus spanning across category boundaries....

Chinese entrepreneurs innovatively manage organisations in the absence of strong economic institutions, under conditions of high environmental and technological uncertainty. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate how Chinese entrepreneurs can be successful...

Deregulation has stimulated much economic and political interest. This paper develops a framework for understanding the effects of deregulation from an ecological perspective and reports empirical studies of financial institutions (banks, thrifts and mutual funds) at two levels of analysis: the...

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...

This article assesses the robustness of recent estimates of the effect of density on the founding rates in organizational populations. It reports reanalyses of data on founding rates of six populations of organizations using a generalization of quasi-likelihood estimation that allows...

This paper presents the authors' opinion on claims of Petersen and Koput (PK) regarding a problem in the usual interpretation of tests of the theory of density-dependent legitimation and competition as applied to rates of organizational mortality. PK argue that the negative first-order effect of...

Hannan, West, and Barron investigate the development of credit unions over time, focusing on organizational processes that shaped and continue to determine the evolution of credit unions. They clarify how the potential for future development of the credit union movement is shaped by the past...