Structural Inertia and Organizational Change Michael T. Hannan; John Freeman American Sociological Review, Vol. 49, No. 2. (Apr., 1984), pp. 149-164. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28198404%2949%3A2%3C149%3ASIAOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R American Sociological Review is currently published by American Sociological Association.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/asa.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]
http://www.jstor.org Thu Mar 13 10:47:40 2008
STRUCTURAL INERTIA AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE*
MICHAELT. HANNAN Stanford University
JOHNFREEMAN University of California, Berkeley
Theory and research on organization-environment relations from a population ecology perspective have been based on the assumption that inertial pressures on structure are strong. This paper attempts to clar~fythe meaning of structural inertia and to derive propositions about structural inertia from an explicit evolutionary model. The proposed theory treats high levels of structural inertia as a consequence of a selection process rather than as a precondition for selection. It also considers how the strength of inertial forces varies with age, size, and complexity.
Most prominent organization theories explain variability in organizational characteristics, that is, diversity, through reference to the history of adaptations by individual organizations, Earlier (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), we challenged this view and argued that adaptation of organizational structures to environments occurs principally at the population level, with forms of organization replacing each other as conditions change. This initial statement of population ecology theory rested on a number of simplifying assumptions. A major one was the premise that individual organizations are subject to strong inertial forces, that is, that they seldom succeeded in making radical changes in strategy and structure in the face of environmental threats. How strong are inertial forces on organizational structure? This question is substantively interesting in its own right. It is also strate~icallv because the claim that - im~ortant. . adaptation theories o