Research

Research on how organizations change in response to performance below the aspiration level has grown to be a major part of organizational learning research. I published a book on this topic in 2003, and have also published many research articles. 

Research on how organizational networks change over time is an important area of research, inspired by the older (and very large) research record on the advantages of organizational networks. Together with Tim Rowley and Andrew Shipilov I have published a book on this topic, and have also published many research articles. 

Research on how organizations and people imitate each other when making decisions is a very old and large part of social science, but there is still room for important discoveries. I started this work by examining how market exits and entries by firms were a result of imitation, and have since done significant work on issues such as the slow diffusion of competitive advantage, the surprising diffusion of mistakes, and the diffusion of blame resulting in bank panics. 

Institutional Legacies

A new kind of research in organization theory looks at how communities are shaped by the organizations that are founded and operate in them, and how these communities in turn influence the organizations that do business in them. We have shown that effects persist over a very long time.