Dynamics Of Organizational Populations Research Articles

The expansion and contraction of the journalistic field and American online citizen journalism, 2000–2012

While previous research has considered patterns of homogeneity and heterogeneity in the journalistic field, existing literature has largely ignored the factors that contribute to the growth and contraction of the field. Using citizen journalism (CJ) as a case study, we examine how four forces – organizational population dynamics, technological innovations, exogenous political events, and endogenous disruptions elsewhere in the field – shaped the growth of CJ over time and, consequently, the journalistic field. Using a snowball sampling method, we collected a “near-population” of U.S.-based, English-language CJ sites (n=1829) to measure yearly density and rates of foundings and mortalities. The population of CJ sites increased through most of the period, foundings declined after a spike in 2005, and mortalities rose dramatically after 2010. The results provide evidence that organizational population and technological change affected the size of the population of CJ sites, while political upheaval and disruptions within professional journalism held less sway.

Contributors

Previous articleNext article FreeContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJoshua Murray is assistant professor of sociology and affiliated faculty at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. His research spans the fields of political, economic, and organizational sociology and focuses on understanding the structure and consequences of class warfare/corporate political action in global capitalism.Yanfei Sun is associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University. Her research interests include sociology of religion and political sociology. In addition, she also studies religious movements, the global expansion of Christianity, religious toleration, religious nationalism, and ethnoreligious violence.Yao Lu is associate professor in sociology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the impacts of social and demographic processes on political development and on the ways in which migration shapes inequalities in receiving and sending societies.Ran Tao is professor of economics at Renmin University of China. His research focuses on China’s economic growth in transition, urbanization and migration, local public finance and governance issues in development.Matthias Thiemann is assistant professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and currently a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in in Paris. Bringing together strands from political economy and economic sociology, he investigates the evolution of regulations in financial markets.Jan Lepoutre is associate professor at ESSEC Business School, France. Drawing on multiple disciplines, his research focuses on how organizations and institutions succeed or fail in creating solutions to complex and systemic, often societal issues.Anıl Divarcı Çakmaklı is assistant professor at the Department of Management at Istanbul Şehir University, Turkey. She holds master’s degrees from Istanbul Technical University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a Ph.D. from the University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on organization theory and strategy.Christophe Boone is professor of organization theory and behavior at the Faculty of Applied Economic Sciences at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). His research interests focus on the dynamics of organizational populations in local communities, team and organizational diversity, CEO values and cognition, and the neuroeconomics of decision making.Arjen Van Witteloostuijn is professor in the Department of Business, Economics, and Public Administration at Tilburg University and is affiliated with the Cardiff Business School and the management school at the University of Antwerp. He has published about 160 articles across a wide spectrum of journals and is currently area editor of the Journal of International Business Studies.Thomas A. DiPrete is the Giddings Professor of Sociology and the codirector of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. His research focuses on social inequality and the life course.Thijs Bol is assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and academic director of the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies. His current research projects investigate the role of occupations in shaping wage inequality and cumulative advantage in academic funding.Christina Ciocca Eller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research primarily focuses on educational inequality, examining the role of higher education institutions in shaping opportunities and outcomes for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds.Herman G. Van de Werfhorst is professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and director of the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS). His work concentrates on the comparison of educational systems with regard to inequalities in education, the labor market, and civic engagement.Christopher Browning is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and an affiliate of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. His research focuses on neighborhood and activity space influences on health and adolescent development, emphasizing the causes and consequences of social processes such as collective efficacy and network dynamics.Catherine Calder is professor of statistics at Ohio State University. Her research interests include spatial statistics, Bayesian modeling, and network analysis, with applications in the social, environmental, and health sciences.Brian Soller is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on health and well-being, with an emphasis on social networks and romantic relationships.Aubrey L. Jackson is assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Her scholarship centers on how economic, political, and social contexts influence individuals’ well-being, especially among women and girls.Jonathan Dirlam is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Ohio State University. His research interests include criminology, health, and quantitative methodology. He is currently completing his dissertation, which assesses how the determinants of police killings have changed over time. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 122, Number 6May 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692674 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Niche strategy: merging economic and marketing theories with population ecology arguments

Though niche strategy is an acknowledged way of realizing better profits from the firm's resources and actions, its long-term viability is by no means ensured; the demand in the niche may diminish or even disappear, or the niche market may become attractive to broad-line firms and new entrants. In parallel to the attention niche strategy has received from economists and marketing researchers, the subject of the emergence and disappearance of niches has also become of interest to scholars in the areas of ‘population ecology’, ‘niche width and the dynamics of organizational populations’ and ‘the demography of corporations and industries’, who base their arguments on long time series studies. Disregarding the strategic, economic and cost–benefit aspects, they attribute the birth and death of niche firms to the concentration of the firms in the market. I argue that the economists and population ecologists differ in their approach to niche strategy not only with regard to the type of forces acting on the niche firm but also on their time horizons, and propose a way to combine the benefits of the two theories.

‘Built to last‘ or ‘new and improved’? Trajectories of industrial evolution in the European motorcycle industry, 1885–1993

Abstract Technological innovation is widely considered as one of the major determinants of industrial evolution and corporate change. The distinction between competence enhancing and competence destroying innovation provides a suggestive theoretical link between technological change and the dynamics of organizational populations and industries. Yet, empirical evidence in support of this theoretical distinction is relatively weak, and agreement is still lacking about the long‐term consequences of technological innovation for the demography of corporations and industries. In this paper we use data collected on the evolution of the motorcycle manufacturing industries in Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy during the period 1895 and 1993 to analyze the relationship between innovation and demographic rotation in organizational populations. The findings that we report corroborate selected aspects of the theoretical distinction between competence‐enhancing and competence‐destroying innovation. While we find the survival experience of organizations in different countries to be roughly similar, we also discover relevant elements of differentiation across them with respect to radical technological innovation, and to the competitive experience of incumbent companies.

INTEGRATING ECOLOGIES: POPULATION DYNAMICS AND INTERORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKS IN THE U.S. MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY, 1912-1970.

This paper studies the role of organizational networks in shaping the evolutionary dynamics of organizational populations. Building on social networks theory, we examine the influence of interorganizational networks on organizational exit rates by looking at the structural properties of the relational space in which organizations are located and the nature of their interaction over time. In particular, we look at the influence of two network mechanisms: the degree of fragmentation (or connectivity) of the larger organizational network field and the intensity of interaction (i.e., repeated ties) with the same partners. We situate our analysis in the Hollywood motion picture industry and trace the vital rates of movie production companies over the period 1912-1970. We found network fragmentation to reinforce density dependent processes, but tie repetition to moderate them. The results suggest the viability of a social network approach to the study of population ecology dynamics.

Models of growth in organizational ecology: a simulation assessment

Organizational ecologists investigate the dynamics of organizational populations. Ecological analysis has focused explicitly on organizational founding and mortality processes in these populations with notable success, but has lagged behind in its understanding of organizational growth, which plays an important role in ecological processes. Using computer simulation analysis, this paper examines four models for organizational growth: Gibrat's law, a proportional growth model; an extension of Gibrat's law that includes density and age effects on growth; a Schumpeterian growth model based on RD and a demographic growth model based on Poisson processes for the arrival and departure of individuals. The simulation findings are compared with empirical observations, and the implications of the findings for modeling organizational growth are discussed. In particular, I argue that it is unlikely that 'one growth model fits all', and suggest that separate growth models need to be developed for different industrial and organizational contexts. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Institutional Theory and Institutional Change: Introduction to the Special Research Forum

Institutional Theory and Institutional Change: Introduction to the Special Research Forum

Density Delay and Organizational Survival: Computational Models and Empirical Comparisons

Research on the ecological dynamics of organizational populations has demonstrated that competitive conditions at the time of founding have enduring effects on organizational survival. According to ecological theories, organizational life chances are systematically affected by density (the number of organizations in a population) at the time of founding because the lower resource endowments that characterize organizations appearing in periods of high population density tend to become self-reinforcing, and—over time—amplify differences in mortality rates of organizations founded under different conditions. However, credible arguments have been offered that could justify both positive and negative effects of the delayed effects of population density on organizational mortality rates, and received empirical research in part reflects this ambiguity. To develop new insight into this issue and to explore the boundaries of received empirical results, in this study we present a computational model of organizational evolution according to which the global dynamics of organizational populations emerge from the iteration of simple rules of local interaction among individual organizations. We use the synthetic data produced by simulation to estimate event history models of organizational mortality, and compare the parameter estimates with those reported in the most recent empirical studies of actual organizational populations. The conclusions supported by the model qualify and extend received empirical results, and suggest that delayed effects of density are highly sensitive the details of local structure of connections among members of organizational populations.

Interacting Locally and Evolving Globally: A Computational Approach to the Dynamics of Organizational Populations

We present a computational model of organizational evolution according to which the global dynamics of organizational populations emerge from simple rules of local interaction among individual orga...

INTERACTING LOCALLY AND EVOLVING GLOBALLY: A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH TO THE DYNAMICS OF ORGANIZATIONAL POPULATIONS.

We present a computational model of organizational evolution according to which the global dynamics of organizational populations emerge from simple rules of local interaction among individual orga...

The Population and Community Ecology of Organizational Founding: Italian Co-operative Banks, 1936–1989

Ecological models of organizational founding are proposed in order to investigate the effect of competitive and institutional processes on the founding rates in two populations of co-operative banks in Italy for the period 1936–1989. A number of stochastic specifications of organizational founding rates are estimated to test the effects of density dependence, resource partitioning and community interdependence on the vital dynamics of the organizational populations under study. Processes of density dependence and resource partitioning are shown to have a different impact on the founding rate of generalist and specialist organizations. The empirical analysis reveals the existence of community-level patterns of asymmetric mutualism between the two populations of banking organizations. While the proliferation of Rural Cooperative banks accelerated the founding rate of Popular Co-operative banks, the founding rate of Rural Co-operative banks was unaffected by the number of Popular Co-operative banks in existence. The results generally support the view that institutional constraints encoded in organizational forms shape the vital dynamics of organizational populations over long time periods.

Organizational Niches and the Dynamics of Organizational Mortality

Departing from the population-level emphasis of density dependence research in organizational ecology, the authors examine how organizational niches within populations influence patterns of competition and mutualism. Organizational niches characterize intrapopulation variation in productive capacities and resource requirements and are operationalized for a population of day care centers (DCCs) based on the ages of children they are licensed to enroll. The authors find competitive effects of overlap density, the aggregate overlap of a DCC's organizational niche with those of all others, and mutualistic effects of nonoverlap density, the aggregate nonoverlap, which are strongest among neighboring DCCs. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for studying organizational population dynamics.

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition. By Michael T. Hannan and Glenn R. Carroll. Oxford University Press, 1992. 286 pp. $29.95

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition. By Michael T. Hannan and Glenn R. Carroll. Oxford University Press, 1992. 286 pp. $29.95

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition.

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition.

Dynamics of Organizational Populations.

Dynamics of Organizational Populations.

Book Reviews : Michael T. Hannan and Glenn R. Carroll: Dynamics of Organiza tional Populations—Density, Legitimation, and Competition

Book Reviews : Michael T. Hannan and Glenn R. Carroll: Dynamics of Organiza tional Populations—Density, Legitimation, and Competition

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and CompetitionDynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition by Hannan Michael T. Carroll Glenn R.. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 278 pp.

The article reviews the book “Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimacy and Competition,” by Michael T. Hannan and Glen R. Carroll.

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition

Dynamics of Organizational Populations: Density, Legitimation, and Competition

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.

Institutional Embeddedness and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations

Institutional Embeddedness and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations