Browsing by Subject "INDUSTRY"

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    Boom and Bust: The Effect of Entrepreneurial Inertia on Organizational Populations
    (Advances in Strategic Management, 2006) Ruef, M
    Although recent public attention has focused on boom-and-bust cycles in industries and financial markets, organizational theorists have made only limited contributions to our understanding of this issue. In this chapter, I argue that a distinctive strategic insight into the mechanisms generating boom-and-bust cycles arises from a focus on entrepreneurial inertia - the lag time exhibited by organizational founders or investors entering a market niche. While popular perceptions of boom-and-bust cycles emphasize the deleterious effect of hasty entrants or overvaluation, I suggest instead that slow, methodical entries into an organizational population or market may pose far greater threats to niche stability. This proposition is explored analytically, considering the development of U.S. medical schools since the mid-18th century. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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    The Emergence of Organizational Forms: A Community Ecology Approach
    (American Journal of Sociology, 2000) Ruef, M
    This article introduces a new ecological approach to the study of form emergence based on the notion of an organizational community - a bounded set of forms with related identities. Applying the approach to 48 organizational forms in the health care sector, this study suggests that the development of novel forms is affected by the positioning of their identities with respect to existing form identities in the community, by the aggregate density and size of organizations matching those existing identities, and by the amount of attention directed at identity attributes by sector participants. Findings show that the process of form emergence is subject to population-dependent effects akin to those noted previously for organizational entries within established populations. The aggregate density and size of organizations with similar identities increase the probability of form emergence to a point (cross-form legitimation), but highly saturated regions of the identity space tend to be uninviting to new forms (cross-form competition).