Bøger af Michael T. Hannan

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and data analysis, this book provides an unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. It shows how the concepts of genre and collective identity explain producers' choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.

Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "e;folk"e; categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. Logics of Organization Theory sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences. Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "e;bank,"e; "e;hospital,"e; or "e;university."e; These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

A team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts.

Hannan and Freeman examine the ecology of organizations by exploring the competition for resources and by trying to account for rates of entry and exit and for the diversity of organizational forms. They show that the destinies of organizations are determined more by impersonal forces than by the intervention of individuals.