Carolina QuotesInertial pressures prevent most organizations from radically changing strategies and structures.
Michael T. Hannan Connected to the Carolinas
Source
p. 22
- work
- Organizational ecology, 1989
- year
- 1989
- locator
- p. 22
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“Inertial pressures prevent most organizations from radically…” Michael T. Hannan. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-29CF1B68D3. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/29cf1b68d3
More from Michael T. Hannan
Natural selection, as it is actually used in evolutionary population biology, serves mainly as an optimization process. In fact, the reasoning that underlies much evolutionary biology often strikes social scientists as strongly reminiscent of neoclassical economics.
Once standards of procedures and the allocation of tasks and authority become the subject of normative agreements, the cost of change greatly increased. Normative agreements constrain adaptation in at least two ways. First, they provide a justification and an organizing principle for those elements that wish to resist reorganization (i.e. they can resist in terms of a shared principle). Second, normative agreements preclude the serious consideration of many alternative responses.
We argue that in order to deal with the various inertial pressures the adaptation perspective must be supplemented with a selection orientation. We consider first two broad issues that are preliminary to ecological modelling. The first concerns appropriate units of analysis. Typical analyses of the relation of organizations to environments take the point of view of a single organization facing an environment.