Howard E. Aldrich Quotes

Howard E. Aldrich is an American sociologist and Kenan Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a Faculty Research Associate at the Department of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business; and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge University. He is a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University. Aldrich's main research interests are entrepreneurship, team formation, evolutionary theory, economic sociology and inequality, and gender issues in entrepreneurship.

Aldrich is best known for his work in applying an evolutionary perspective to organizational emergence and change. One of his seminal works is the 1999 book Organizations Evolving, which won the Academy of Management George Terry Award and was the co-winner of the Max Weber Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work. Wikipedia

✵ 1943

Howard E. Aldrich: 5 quotes0 likes

Famous Howard E. Aldrich Quotes

“Organizations are goal-directed, boundary-maintaining, activity systems.”

Howard E. Aldrich

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 4

“Active loose coupling occurs when a subsystem of an organization is more tightly coupled to an environmental sector than other subsystems, and a feedback loop connects environmental conditions with organizational responses. A feedback loop is present when an organizational mechanism for monitoring the environment exists, and when the state of the environment (or intended target of the organization's action) is compared to some desired state by members of the organization.”

Howard E. Aldrich

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 85

“In general, growth is an intrinsic source of change with potentially unintended effects and some subunits are better positioned than others to protect themselves against such effects. Oligarchical tendencies are present in almost all membership-based organizations, such as unions and voluntary associations, and if unchecked, can lead to transformations. Organizations with diffuse goals or innovative leadership are sometimes able to survive the crisis of complementing their original mission by moving onto other goals.”

Howard E. Aldrich

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 204

“Organizational forms — specific configurations of goals, boundaries, and activities — are the elements selected by environmental criteria, and change may occur either through new forms eliminating old ones or through the modification of existing forms. Environmental niches are distinct in combination of resources and other constraints that are sufficient to support organizational form. Organizational forms, then, are organized activity systems oriented toward exploiting the resources within a niche.
Selection pressures may favour or eliminate entire groups of organizations, such as industries, and the changing population distribution of organizations in a society reflects the operation of such selection pressures.”

Howard E. Aldrich

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 28

“A niche is created by the intersection of resource constraints— an abstract resource space consisting of a unique combination of resources (information, access to materials, customers, and so on) that could permit a form to survive there. Forms thus either take advantage of a niche resource space" or fail.”

Howard E. Aldrich

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 40; cited in: Frank Marutollo (1990). Organizational Behavior in the Marine Corps. p. 33

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