Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "folk" categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory....</i>

This article examines some evolutionary consequences of architectural inertia in organizations. The main theorem holds that selection favors architectural inertia in the sense that the median level of inertia in a closed population of organizations increases over time. The other key theorems...

We demonstrate how organizational ecology can contribute to strategic management and managerial practice by using resource-partitioning theory to make predictions with respect to: (i) the short-run performance (i.e. growth and profitability) consequences of broad (generalist) vis-ý-vis focus...

This book presents a stock-taking of the work that has been done since the appearance of Oliver Williamson's seminal book Markets and Hierarchies (Free Press 1975), that gave new life to the concept of transaction cost analysis (introduced by Ronald Coase in the 1930s). It derives from an issue...

Neo-institutionalists have criticized organizational ecology's density-dependent theory of legitimation for being a "black box" leaving the details of the legitimation process unspecified, and ignoring the pre-eminently political nature of the creation of new organizational forms. In the present...