Organisational niche boundaries in the n-space

Abstract

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.