Reasoning with Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory.logic of theory building;non-monotonicity;organizational mortality respectively;social science methodology

Foundations of a Theory of Social Forms

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and market dynamics - have resulted. We use a sample of commercial saving banks for the 1994-97 period. We conclude that there were important mobility barriers and that the removal of entry barriers did not lead to intensified competition.forms;foundation of organization theory;identity;populations

Oppositional Identities and Resource Partitioning: Distillery Ownership in Scotch Whisky, 1826–2009

We build on recent theory and research on the role of categories in resource partitioning. We analyze Scotch whisky making between 1826 and 2009—a case that seemed initially to fail to conform to the pattern of the beer industry now treated as prototypical. On close examination (both qualitative and quantitative), we find that high concentration in the center of the market is not sufficient to generate a partition. Rather, we see a long delay between the heightening of concentration in the industry and the emergence of a cluster of peripheral producers that claim an identity in opposition to the dominant generalists. We explain the source of the delay as a function of the nature of the audience, which until recently did not regard conglomerate or foreign ownership of distilleries as an impediment to producing authentic whisky. Only when critics started to question how ownership of distilleries related to authenticity did the revival of the traditional form of ownership begin to occur. By analyzing entries of focused firms in the recent period, we find that widespread ownership of distilleries of diversified corporations (but not foreign ownership) supported the formation of more traditional types of whisky distillers. But endurance of identity-based resource partitioning might require development of a collective identity and collective strategy by producers. In the case we studied, each focused producer has an idiosyncratic identity, which may be insufficient to cause audiences to agree on a code that excludes the mainstream producers from membership in the new category and thereby maintain a partitioned market

Conceptual spaces and the consequences of category spanning

A general finding in economic and organizational sociology shows that objects that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that the negative consequences of crossing boundaries are more severe when the categories spanned are distant and have high contrast. Available empirical strategies do not incorporate information on the distances among categories. Here we introduce novel measures of distance in conceptual space and derive measures for typicality, category contrast, and categorical niche width. Using the proposed measurement approach, we test our theory using data on online reviews of books and restaurants

Reasoning with Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory

Multistate Demography and Event History Analysis

In this paper, Michael Hannan explores a merger of two methodologies for the purpose of analyzing the direct and indirect long-run implications of behavioral responses to public policies: multistate demography and life history or event history analysis. He argues that such a combined approach allows one to project levels of well-being in heterogeneous populations facing changing social policies

Category signaling and reputation

We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality when low-quality producers face higher costs of gaining membership. The strength of membership as a collective signal increases with the sharpness of the category boundary, that is, contrast. Our empirical study focuses on biodynamic and organic viticulture in Alsace

The fog of change: opacity and asperity in organizations

Initial architectural change in organizations often induces other subsequent changes, generating lengthy cascades of changes in subordinate units. This article extends a formal model of cascading organizational change by examining the implications for organizational change of the limited foresight of those who initiate such change about unit interconnections (structural opacity) and the normative restrictiveness imposed on architectural features by organizational culture (cultural asperity). Opacity leads actors to underestimate the lengths of periods of reorganization and the associated costs of change, thereby prompting them unwittingly to undertake changes with adverse consequences. Increased opacity and asperity lengthen the total time that the organization spends reorganizing and the associated opportunity costs; and the expected effect of an architectural change on mortality hazards increases with the intricacy of the organizational design, structural opacity, and the asperity of organizational culture. We illustrate the theory with an interpretation of the 1995 collapse of Baring Brothers Bank

Foundations of a Theory of Social Forms

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and market dynamics - have resulted. We use a sample of commercial saving banks for the 1994-97 period. We conclude that there were important mobility barriers and that the removal of entry barriers did not lead to intensified competition

Age-Related Structural Inertia: A Distance-based Approach

This paper proposes a distance-based characterization of age-related structural inertia as an increasing constraint on the speed of change as organizations age. Our framework regards organizations as points in multidimensional metric spaces of architectures. Organizational change means movement in this space. The speed of change is the ratio of the distance between positions in a space and the time it took for the organization to make the move. We illustrate how our distance-based approach can be used to formulate theories of age-related organizational inertia by using this representation to develop a model for a possible mechanism: age-related cultural resistance to change based on the dynamics of exposure of organizational members to architectural features. Our proposed mechanism is distinct from prevailing explanations and leads to new predictions. We also illustrate the value of our distance-based approach in a reanalysis of Sørensen and Stuart’s study of age variations in firms’ patenting behavior [Sørensen JB, Stuart TE (2000) Aging, obsolescence, and organizational innovation. Admin. Sci. Quart. 45(1):81–112]. On the basis of patent citations, we construct a space that allows us to characterize the positions of organizations and the speed at which they change. We find that organizational age has a negative effect on the speed of change