Organizations face tradeoffs when they adopt strategies in changing resource environments. The type of tradeoff depends on the type of resource change. The paper gives an organizational tradeoff model for quantitative change. I call that the "Cricket and Ant" (CA), because the pertaining strategies resemble to the cricket and ant behavior in La Fontaine’s famous fable. I demonstrate that organizational ecology’s niche theory and U-.-strategist theory obtain as special cases of CA; their predictions on selection derive as theorems, if their respective boundary conditions are represented in the formal model. New selection conclusions also derive, prone to empirical testing.
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Paper provided by University of Groningen, Research Institute SOM (Systems, Organisations and Management) in its series Research Report with number
00B13.