Michael T. Hannan - Böcker

This book seeks to deepen and broaden the understanding of change in organization populations by examining the dynamics of numbers of organizations in populations. The authors have studied various kinds of organizations, including national labour unions, newspapers and newspaper publishers, brewing firms, life insurance companies, and banks.

Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions.In this book, 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. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another; vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data, Giacomo Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. They demonstrate how the concepts of genre and collective identity illuminate producers’ choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.Winemakers face a fundamental choice: produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be seen as an innovator. To explain this dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or shared understandings among producers and the public. Genres emerge through the social structure of production, including factors such as group solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key reference points for critics and consumers. Wine Markets features case studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a countermovement against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of producers of Brunello di Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear collective identity, and the emergence of the biodynamic wine movement in Alsace. This book not only offers keen sociological insight into the wine world but also sheds new light on the logic of markets and organizations more broadly.

The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another; vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data, Giacomo Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. They demonstrate how the concepts of genre and collective identity illuminate producers’ choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.Winemakers face a fundamental choice: produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be seen as an innovator. To explain this dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or shared understandings among producers and the public. Genres emerge through the social structure of production, including factors such as group solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key reference points for critics and consumers. Wine Markets features case studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a countermovement against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of producers of Brunello di Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear collective identity, and the emergence of the biodynamic wine movement in Alsace. This book not only offers keen sociological insight into the wine world but also sheds new light on the logic of markets and organizations more broadly.

Michael T. Hannan and John 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.

Most analysts of corporations and industries adopt the focal perspective of a single prototypical organization. Many analysts also study corporations primarily in terms of their internal organizational structures or as complex systems of financial contracts. Glenn Carroll and Michael Hannan bring fresh insight to our understanding of corporations and the industries they comprise by looking beyond prototypical structures to focus on the range and diversity of organizations in their social and economic setting. The result is a rich rendering of analysis that portrays whole populations and communities of corporations. The Demography of Corporations and Industries is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality.They review and synthesize the major theoretical mechanisms of corporate demography, ranging from aging and size dependence to population segregation and density dependence. The book also explores some selected implications of corporate demography for public policy, including employment and regulation. In this path-breaking book, Carroll and Hannan demonstrate why demographic research on corporations is important; describe how to conduct demographic research; specify fruitful areas of future research; and suggest how the demographic perspective can enrich the public discussion of issues surrounding the corporation in our constantly evolving industrial society. All researchers and analysts with an interest in this topic will find The Demography of Corporations and Industries an invaluable resource.