56 research outputs found
Organisational niche boundaries in the n-space
The paper investigates organizational boundary spanning from the point of view of
neighborhood relations. Neighborhood is defined with the closeness of organizations'
resource utilization patterns. The key resource is the clientele's demand for organizational
outputs (products, party programs, membership, etc.). Demand is characterized qualitatively
by n taste descriptors that span an n-dimensional resource space. Organizational niche
boundaries may take different forms and size. To avoid niche overlap over boundaries,
organizations can configure in the resource space in different clusterings. Which are the
densest arrangements that allow for the coexistence of maximal number of organizations?
How can these coexisting neighborhoods build up? How do competition, new entry and the
number of immediate neighbors change around the niche boundary with space dimension?
The paper applies results of the sphere packing problem in n-dimensional geometry to
answer these questions.
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