The Evolution of Organizational Niches: U.S. Automobile Manufacturers, 1885–1981

By Stanislav D. Dobrev, Tai-Young Kim, Glenn R Carroll. 2002

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the niche figures prominently in contemporary theories of organization, analysts often fail to tie micro processes within the niche to long-term changes in the broader environment. In this paper, we advance arguments about the relationship between an organization's niche and evolution in the structure of its organizational population over time. We focus on the technological niche and processes of positioning and crowding among firms in the niche space, relating them to the level of concentration among all firms in the market. Building on previous empirical studies in organizational ecology, we study the evolution of concentration in the American automobile industry from 1885 to 1981 and estimate models of the hazard of exit of individual producers from the market. The findings show that niche and concentration interact in complex ways, yielding a more unified depiction of organizational evolution than typically described or reported.

Subfields: Strategy and Management, Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd095b35c7a820cb774683ab7a50a41d4eed9bdd

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamics of Niche Width and Resource Partitioning1 (2001, background): “Overall, the use of the niche construct can be useful in explicating the intricacies in the relationship between organizational size, strategy, and resource partitioning (Dobrev, Kim, and Carroll 2001).”
Jacks of All Trades and Masters of None: Audiences' Reactions to Spanning Genres in Feature Film Production (2006, background): “Dobrev, Kim, and Carroll (2002) noted that in markets in which resources are highly concentrated, consumers’ preferences in the market center will be condensed within a relatively narrow range.”
The Liability of Good Reputation: A Study of Product Recalls in the U.S. Automobile Industry (2006, methodology): “The automotive market has been characterized as being competitive (Dobrev, Kim, and Hannan, 2001; Dobrev, Kim, and Carroll, 2002), with several automakers of relatively comparable reputations from which consumers may choose.”
Why are Some Organizations More Competitive than Others? Evidence from a Changing Global Market (2004, background): “Large organizations enjoy cost advantages in many industries, in which case competition favors larger organizations over smaller organizations when they occupy the same niche (Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000; Dobrev et al., 2002). In this light, it is not surprising that density-dependent competition ”
Dominant designs, innovation shocks, and the follower's dilemma (2015, unknown): “Horsepower was used as the basis for measuring organizational niches in organizational ecology studies using data upon which we draw (e.g., Dobrev, Kim, and Hannan, 2001; Dobrev et al., 2002).”