Michael Hannan

This article proposes a cognitive structural account of the emergence of social worlds that organize the expectations of producers and audiences. The proposed model considers the emergence process in three stages: (1) the arrival of distinctive clusters of objects and their producer, (2) conceptualization of the labeled clusters in high-energy social structures that we call a “scene,” and (3) whether a scene’s coordinating concept becomes generally taken for granted. We first develop an ontology for analyzing these processes. We then analyze the role of social structure in these stages and define the emergence process in terms of hazards, that is, the event rates of each stage. The proposed account can explain the emergence of worlds in a variety of social contexts, including organizational forms in markets, genres in creative industries, disciplines in science, and forms of social protest.

Although the concept of niche has been extremely useful in sociological theory and research, some aspects of the concept have not been clearly developed. This article advances a theoretical reconstruction of the concept of niche, with special application to organizations. The proposed formal model unifies several active lines of sociological theory. It also extends the notion of the niche from the realm of behaviors to apply to the rules coding social identities and organizational forms. The reconstruction gives deeper insight into the niche of an organizational population as well as individual organizations. Finally, the model analyzes the (thus far) tacit assumption that niches are convex, examines the implications of convexity for commonly used measures of niche width, and provides a general sociological argument for the predominance of convex niches.

This article applies two new criteria, desirability and faithfulness, to evaluate Péli et al.‘s (1994) formalization of Hannan and Freeman's structural inertia argument (1984, 1989). We conclude that this formalization fails to meet these criteria. We argue that part of the rational reconstruction on which this formalization builds does not reflect well the substantive argument in translating the natural language theory into logic. We propose two alternative formalizations that meet both of these criteria. Moreover, both derive the inertia theorem from much weaker, so much less constraining, premises. While both new formalizations draw information only from the original statement of the inertia theory, they reflect two different interpretations of inertia accumulation. The two new formalizations are compatible with some recent theory extensions in organizational ecology. However, they lead to substantially different consequences when additional sociological considerations are added to their premise sets. The interplay between logical formalization and sociological content is highlighted using the example of Stinchcombe's (1965) liability-of-newness theorem. Even modest extensions of the proposed models lead to contrary implications about the age dependence in organizational mortality rates. Even “faithful” logical formalizations of arguments ordinarily involve implicit theory building.

We propose a formal theory of multiple category memberships. This theory has the potential to unify two seemingly unconnected theories: typecasting and identity-based form emergence. Typecasting, a producer-level theory, considers the consequences of specializing versus spanning across category boundaries. Identity-based form emergence considers the evolution of categories and how the attributes of producers entering a category shape its likelihood of gaining legitimacy among relevant audiences. Both theory fragments treat the processes by which audience members assign category memberships to producers. This article develops this common foundation and outlines the arguments that lead to central implications of each theory. The arguments are formalized using modal expressions to represent key categorization processes according to the theory -building framework developed by Hannan et al.