IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/indcch/v13y2004i1p61-89.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

For whom the bell tolls: ecological perspectives on industrial decline and resurgence

Author

Listed:
  • Martin Ruef

Abstract

Over the last twenty-five years, research in organizational ecology has given rise to a proliferation of mechanisms that seek to explain processes of decline and resurgence in mature industries. In this article, I consider four of these mechanisms--including arguments concerning competitive intensity, temporal heterogeneity, population inertia, and community ecology--and apply them to explain the evolution of US medical schools between 1765 and 1999. For this population, mechanisms relying on organizational variation in competitive intensity--especially, mass dependence accounts--perform poorly in terms of theoretical and empirical adequacy. Models that incorporate temporal heterogeneity in industrial competition and legitimation explain more variation in patterns of growth and decline, but are sensitive to right-censoring and model specification. Ecological mechanisms that explicitly analyze population inertia or community ecology seem to be the most promising in terms of theoretical and empirical consistency. Ironically, this finding seems to vindicate the model of population growth advanced in Hannan and Freeman's seminal article, which has sometimes been discounted as failing to represent the evolution of mature industries in a realistic manner. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Ruef, 2004. "For whom the bell tolls: ecological perspectives on industrial decline and resurgence," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 13(1), pages 61-89, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:13:y:2004:i:1:p:61-89
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. ZHOU, Chaohong & VAN WITTELOOSTUIJN, Arjen, 2009. "Evolutionary game theory and organizational ecology: The case of resource-partitioning theory," Working Papers 2009002, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    2. Xu, Jin & Peng, Biyu & Cornelissen, Joep, 2021. "Modelling the network economy: A population ecology perspective on network dynamics," Technovation, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    3. Gavin M. Schwarz & Kuo-Pin Yang & Christine Chou & Yu-Jen Chiu, 2020. "A classification of structural inertia: Variations in structural response," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 37(1), pages 33-63, March.
    4. Alessandro Lomi & Erik R. Larsen & Filippo Carlo Wezel, 2010. "Getting There: Exploring the Role of Expectations and Preproduction Delays in Processes of Organizational Founding," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 21(1), pages 132-149, February.
    5. Luciana Lazzeretti & Francesco Capone, 2017. "The transformation of the Prato industrial district: an organisational ecology analysis of the co-evolution of Italian and Chinese firms," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 58(1), pages 135-158, January.
    6. Abatecola, Gianpaolo & Breslin, Dermot & Kask, Johan, 2020. "Do organizations really co-evolve? Problematizing co-evolutionary change in management and organization studies," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 155(C).
    7. Xiaoqing Wang & Brian S. Butler & Yuqing Ren, 2013. "The Impact of Membership Overlap on Growth: An Ecological Competition View of Online Groups," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(2), pages 414-431, April.
    8. Alessandro Lomi & Erik R. Larsen & John H. Freeman, 2005. "Things Change: Dynamic Resource Constraints and System-Dependent Selection in the Evolution of Organizational Populations," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 51(6), pages 882-903, June.
    9. ZHOU, Chaohong & VAN WITTELOOSTUIJN, Arjen, 2009. "Evolutionary game theory and organizational ecology: The case of resource-partitioning theory," ACED Working Papers 2009001, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:13:y:2004:i:1:p:61-89. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/icc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.