Dynamics of Organizational Populations

经过长时间的审查，不同人群中的组织数量一开始增长缓慢，然后在短时间内快速增长，达到顶峰，然后下降并稳定下来(最终往往会下降)。这个项目继续了一系列的研究，试图通过开发一套基于密度依赖进化的社会学理论的数学模型来解释这种模式，即组织的诞生、增长、衰落和死亡模式是人口中组织数量的函数。在这一项目面临的新问题中，有年龄与组织规模、人口密度与人口质量之间的关系，以及将密度理论应用于社区和个体人口。将收集关于金融机构和报纸出版公司的人口和社区的数据，以经验性地检查这些问题。这个项目不仅将有助于我们理解长期塑造组织结构的力量，而且还将有助于提供一个理论结构来解释组织变革如何在社会中产生变化。

When examined over long periods of time, counts of the number of organizations in diverse populations initially grow slowly, then grow rapidly for a short time, peak, then decline and stabilize (and often eventually decline). This project continues a line of research that seeks to explain this pattern by means of developing a set of mathematical models based on a sociological theory of density-dependent evolution, that is, the pattern of the birth, growth, decline, and mortality of organizations as a function of the number of organizations in a population. Among the new issues that are being confronted by this project are the disentanglement of the effects of age versus size of organizations and of density versus mass of populations and the application of density theory to the community level as well as to individual populations. Data will be collected on populations and communities of financial institutions and newspaper publishing firms to examine these issues empirically. This project will not only contribute to our understanding of the forces shaping organizational structures over long time spans, but also it will contribute to the provision of a theoretical structure for explaining how organizational change produces changes in society.