Michael T. Hannan: Adaptation

Michael T. Hannan is US-American sociologist of Stanford University. Explore interesting quotes on adaptation.
Michael T. Hannan: 24   quotes 0   likes

“Once standards of procedures and the allocation of tasks and authority become the subject of normative agreements, the cost of change greatly increased. Normative agreements constrain adaptation in at least two ways. First, they provide a justification and an organizing principle for those elements that wish to resist reorganization (i. e. they can resist in terms of a shared principle). Second, normative agreements preclude the serious consideration of many alternative responses.”

Michael T. Hannan

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 931

Way , Change

“The existing literature usually stresses the capacity of organizations to learn about and adapt to uncertain, changing environments. We think this emphasis is misplaced. The most important issues about the applicability of evolutionary-ecological theories to organizations concern the timing of changes. Learning and adjusting structure enhance the chance of survival only if the speed of response is commensurate with the temporal patterns of relevant environments.”

Michael T. Hannan

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 70; About structural inertia.

Literature , Thinking , Learning , Change

“Legitimacy constraints also emanate from the environment. Any legitimacy an organization has been able to generate constitutes an asset in manipulating the environment. To the extent that adaptation (e. g., eliminating undergraduate instruction in public universities) violates the legitimacy claims, it incurs considerable costs. So external legitimacy considerations also tend to limit adaptation.”

Michael T. Hannan

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 932

Universe

“A system with greater organizational diversity has a higher probability of having in hand some form that does a reasonably satisfactory job of dealing with the changed environmental conditions. Adaptation in such a system means reallocating resources from one type of existing organization to another, either by command or by market mechanisms, rather than trying to identify and create appropriate organizational forms.”

Michael T. Hannan

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 8

Change

“We argue that in order to deal with the various inertial pressures the adaptation perspective must be supplemented with a selection orientation. We consider first two broad issues that are preliminary to ecological modelling. The first concerns appropriate units of analysis. Typical analyses of the relation of organizations to environments take the point of view of a single organization facing an environment.”

Michael T. Hannan

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 933

“A population ecology perspective on organization-environment relations is proposed as an alternative to the dominant adaptation perspective. The strength of inertial pressures on organizational structure suggests the application of models that depend on competition and selection in populations of organizations. Several such models, as well as issues arising in attempts to apply them to the organization-environment problem, are discussed.”

Michael T. Hannan

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 929; Article abstract

Problem , Dependency