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- Title
COMBINING INSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND POPULATION ECOLOGY: NO LEGITIMACY, NO HISTORY.
- Authors
Zucker, Lynne G.
- Abstract
This article presents a commentary on the article Density Dependence in the Evolution of Populations of Newspaper Organizations written by Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan published in the August 1989 issue of the American Sociological Review. Amid signs of increasing rapproachement between areas in organization theory, a number of major differences in both theory and method have emerged that threaten convergence. These differences in some cases are simply matters of emphasis and non-overlapping development that is to be expected in areas that derive from disparate intellectual traditions. Population ecology as an area has been productive of insights research. In the Carroll and Hannan paper, theoretical connection between population ecology and institutional theory rests on hypothesized relations between organizational births and deaths and two major theoretical variables. When the organizational population is well-established, having reached a point of high density competition is expected to decrease density by causally producing low founding rates and high mortality rates. As a theoretical formulation this meets the test of parsimony and is intuitively appealing but in their article there is no real test of these formulations.
- Subjects
CRITICISM; ORGANIZATION; POPULATION; ORGANIZATIONAL sociology; STOCHASTIC convergence
- Publication
American Sociological Review, 1989, Vol 54, Issue 4, p542
- ISSN
0003-1224
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2095876