Content uploaded by Howard E. Aldrich
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Howard E. Aldrich on Oct 23, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Fifty Years in the Making: My Career as a Scholar of Organizations and Entrepreneurship
by
Howard E Aldrich
Department of Sociology
Campus Box 3210
University Of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA
Draft: Circulated for Comments. Please Do Not Quote.
Prepared for Companion to Makers of Modern Entrepreneurship. 2016. Edited by Erik E.
Lehmann & David Audretsch. London: Routledge. Thanks to Nicole Bown for her help and to
Ted Baker, Bill Gartner, Phil Kim, and Martin Ruef for their comments.
In this essay, I describe my five-decades-long journey from sociology graduate student
to small business researcher to, finally, a scholar of entrepreneurship. I begin with my four years
at the University of Michigan, where I learned the craft of sociological research from the masters
of the trade, and then cover briefly my early years as an assistant professor at Cornell
University. My early work on studies of business succession in the United States and England
heavily imprinted my subsequent work on organizational foundings and disbandings, and I
describe how I got involved in that research. The 1970s were a critical era for organizational
theory, and I review the major influences that shaped my thinking during that time, particularly
with regard to the evolutionary perspective and resource dependence theory with which I came
to be associated. My awakening as an entrepreneurship scholar occurred quite by accident, and
I review the circumstances that catalyzed that identity. Collaboration with graduate students and
like-minded colleagues has played a major role in all of my projects, and so I acknowledge
some of these contributors as well. Finally, I conclude by offering a few words of advice to junior
scholars still considering whether they want to make entrepreneurship research their life’s work.
Academic Beginnings
I graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1965, majoring in sociology
and minoring in psychology. (I came close to having minors in economics and English, as well.)
After graduation, I took a few weeks off to get married and then entered graduate school at the
University of Michigan. During my four years in Ann Arbor I felt I was on a constant learning
journey. The social sciences were in their glory: the psychology, sociology, economics, history,
and political science programs were all ranked in the top ten. An incredible infusion of federal
money in the mid-1960s had invigorated the social sciences, particularly studies of urban
environments, crime, and ethnic and race relations.
I was pursuing my PhD in Sociology and also earned a minor in social psychology. I took
courses in other departments, as well: mathematics, political science, and economics. For
example, I took “consumer behavior” with George Katona (1964), one of the leading lights of the
psychology of economic behavior, and two seminars with Phil Converse (1976), a leading
political behaviorist. In Converse’s seminar, I used three-wave panel data to study changes in
voters’ political identification. Writing that paper gave me my first taste of the value of panel
study data; many of the studies I subsequently carried out used that design.
During my graduate work, I was fascinated by the work of scholars such as Donald
Campbell and Walter Buckley, and also social psychologists such as Daniel Katz and Robert
Kahn. I took Katz’s graduate course on organizations in which we used his book, The Social
Psychology of Organizations, in manuscript form. Katz gave me some advice about the theory
building which I’ve never forgotten: “Design your theoretical framework so that other people’s
perspectives are a subset of yours.” Readers familiar with the evolutionary perspective and its
encompassing reach will appreciate how much I took Katz’s recommendation to heart. I have
always argued that the evolutionary perspective is a metatheory, an overarching framework that
permits comparison and integration of other social scientific theories. It does not provide a set of
law-like statements governing evolutionary processes, but rather takes what it needs from other
pro approaches. It is purposefully eclectic.
Michigan offered excellent research opportunities, including an opportunity to run
research projects through the Institute for Social Research (ISR). I was the study director for
projects based on nationally representative samples, and through them I gained experience in
designing surveys and working with interviewing and coding crews. In the summer of 1966, I
began working on a project that would eventually become a natural experiment driven by the
civil disorders of the late 1960s. Under the direction of my mentor Al Reiss, the Director of the
Center for Research on Social Organization, and with a grant from the US Crime Commission,
some fellow graduate students and I began the first wave of interviews for a study of
approximately 800 businesses and organizations in high-crime areas of three US cities: Boston,
Chicago, and Washington, DC. We were looking at areas that were undergoing very rapid
ethnic succession: Roxbury in Boston, the south and west sides of Chicago, and the
Georgia/7th Avenue and 14th St. corridors in Washington DC. All three cities were heavily
affected by the civil disorders of 1967 and 1968.
Based on my work at ISR, by the time I was ready to begin my dissertation in 1968 I had
the skills I needed to actually assemble my own research crew. My research questions were
motivated by my interest in human ecology and population level thinking. In my thesis, I tried to
understand populations from an evolutionary point of view. I went back to the same high-crime
areas we had studied in 1966 and did a second wave of interviews. I hired interviewers from
Ann Arbor, flying them to the different cities, putting them up in YMCAs and cheap motels, and
supervising their daily schedules. Also doing a lot of the interviewing myself, I spent the summer
walking through decaying inner-city areas, interviewing business owners about their operations
and asking how they coped with difficult business conditions. The experience of running my own
study was incredibly instructive, compressing into those four years what many people spend five
or six years in graduate school to accomplish – almost like an extended post doc.
I finished my thesis, Organizations in a Hostile Environment, in 1969. I was able to do
my data collection and analysis and still finish in four years because I had full financial support
from the National Science Foundation, as well as a Danforth Foundation Fellowship and a
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. I didn’t use any of the Woodrow Wilson grant, but I did call upon
the Danforth Foundation to support the production of my dissertation: I typed my first draft on an
IBM Selectric typewriter, and then passed the pages onto a professional service that used them
to create masters, which in turn were used to produce multiple copies of the dissertation. It was
a cumbersome procedure, and toward the end I spent almost a week in my office at the Perry
School Building, correcting the masters used to make the copies. When people talk about “the
good old days,” they tend not to write about misfortunes like that!
Finding a Community of Scholars at Cornell
I took my first job at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at
Cornell University in 1969. I wish I could say that I’d crafted a well-designed strategy that
involved choosing Cornell as my first job, because it did work out so well, but I have to admit
that it was a fortuitous choice. Cornell had several things going for it when I got here. Bill
Starbuck left the year after I arrived, but there were other sociological colleagues in the ILR
School in the Organizational Behavior Department, including William Foote Whyte whose book
on Street Corner Society I had read as an undergraduate. I shared an office suite with Gerry
Gordon, and began to realize that my research interests could be described not just as
sociology and evolutionary thinking, but also in terms of organizational studies within sociology.
My writings in the early 1970s harkened back to a number of papers I had written in
graduate school, where I was trying to apply evolutionary thinking to organizations. Back then, I
had submitted one of my first attempts to Bill Starbuck at the Administrative Science Quarterly. I
knew about ASQ but I didn’t know about its stellar reputation in the field until much later, when I
became its associate editor. Accordingly, I was very surprised when two weeks later, the
manuscript came back, un-reviewed, with a letter from Bill, saying something like, “Dear Sir,
very sorry, we are not going to review this paper because it is off the main line of interest of our
journal.” (When I became associate editor, I learned this was just “Form Letter 2a”).
I rewrote the paper, called it “Organizational Boundaries and Interorganizational
Conflict,” and sent it to Human Relations, where it was accepted with minor revisions (Aldrich,
1971). In that paper, I argued that we can’t investigate organizations without paying attention to
the environments they inhabit. In fact, no explanations are complete until the explanation
includes the environments in which organizations acquire their resources. That paper became
the foundation on which I built my subsequent papers and my 1979 book, Organizations and
Environments. I went on to research other questions, but the response to my paper on
population-level thinking made me realize that “evolution” was a very powerful perspective.
Early Work on Business Succession in Cities in the United States and England
My experience in working with multi-wave panel studies at the University of Michigan
gave me the confidence to conduct several panel studies of my own on ecological succession in
inner city neighborhoods. The first was a follow-up of my dissertation research, and the second
extended my US research overseas.
The US project
In 1970 and 1972, I followed up with two more waves of the panel study I had begun in
graduate school. Al Reiss and I were studying representative, random samples of businesses in
environments that were incredibly challenging places to do business. Population composition
was shifting as the suburbanization of these cities was under way, and ethnic succession was
occurring as the white population was moving out and being replaced by African American and
Hispanic residents (Aldrich, 1975). The business population was adapting to these changes,
and our research design allowed us to relate the turnover in ownership to turnover in the
population. We coded residential composition down to the level of census tracts and because
we had 1960 and 1970 U.S. Census data, we knew the rate of residential population change at
a very micro level.
Normally, when opportunities for new owners occurred because of turnover in business
ownership, the next people in the queue to become owners would have been other whites. But
because of the increasing proportion of African American residents in these neighborhoods, as
well as relative neighborhood economic decline, whites no longer found this an attractive
proposition. Over time in these areas - first in the most heavily African American neighborhoods
and then gradually elsewhere - the white owners were replaced. This was a very orderly
process, as the proportion of whites slowly decreased and the proportion of blacks who were
becoming new owners slowly increased, occupying the vacancies that opened up as previous
owners retired, moved on to other jobs, or passed away (Aldrich & Reiss, 1976).
The UK project
In 1975, when my wife and I were deciding where to take our upcoming sabbatical, I
discovered that the Ford Foundation was funding scholars to study contemporary issues in
England. I realized this could be an opportunity to test some of the business succession ideas I
had developed in the American context. I applied for the grant, describing that I was curious
about the effect of civil disorders in English cities on their business populations. I had read
about popular objections in the UK to the immigration from the New Commonwealth areas;
many immigrants were Pakistani, Indian, or Caribbean. I said it would be really interesting to
see whether the turnover in the residential population of UK cities was having an impact on the
business population, in a process similar to what I had observed in the US.
I proposed this to the Center for Environmental Studies in London, which was running
the grant program, and the first thing they said, in so many words, was, “This is preposterous.
You can’t make an assumption that relations between the races in the UK are anything like in
the US; we don’t have your problems. This is a foolish endeavor, don’t bother us.” I thought they
were wrong, and so I wrote back politely and said, “Look, give me a chance to prove who is
right. Let me put this to an empirical test.” So they relented, awarded me a grant, and I spent the
fall of 1975 in London doing a pilot project.
I assembled a research small team and did about 250 interviews in a part of London
called Wandsworth, which had sizable West Indian and Asian populations. I discovered that
many of the concepts of succession that I’d used in my US work fit the UK beautifully. I learned
some of these businesses had owners who no longer knew how to deal with their customers
and that white owners seemed uninterested in buying shops in Wandsworth. That was sufficient
evidence to convince a few scholars in social geography at Liverpool Polytechnic to join with
me. We submitted a grant application to the Social Science Research Council, which awarded
us funding to do a comparison study of the United States and the UK.
Working with three social geographers, we designed a four-wave panel study that
followed hundreds of small firms, mostly retail and service establishments. We started planning
the project in 1976, and went into the field for survey interviews in three cities in 1978, 1980,
1982, and 1984 (Aldrich, Cater, Jones, & McEvoy, 1983). Using voter registration lists, we were
able to code down to the level of 100 meter by 100 meter square areas of residential
composition and so we had incredible micro data, even better than I had used for the United
States. The surveys lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours and gave us richly detailed
data.
The dynamics of ecological succession that I observed in the United States fit the
pattern we found in England very well. As in the American context, business turnover rates were
quite high, as one set of business owners, mainly white, were replaced by another set of
business owners, mainly South Asian. We were ultimately able to put together a portfolio of
about a dozen articles from the data we collected (Aldrich, Cater, Jones, McEvoy, & Velleman,
1985).
Lesson learned
My two small business succession studies exemplify my general research strategy: I like
to pick a project where I spend some time getting to know the lay of the land, explore ideas that
might be testable, conduct a pilot project, and then build a comprehensive research design. I
abhor cross-sectional research. It’s anathema to me. I tell my students that if you want to study
something, you have to watch it change (Aldrich, 1992). Such projects take a long time to
design and bring to fruition. For example, the two small business projects involved designing
questionnaires, pre-testing them in the field, selecting a representative sample, and conducting
a four-wave panel study using face-to-face interviews. Many of my projects have taken a
decade from the beginning to end, from setting up the design to writing for publication. In fact, in
the case of the UK study, I was writing papers in the late 1980s from a project that began in the
late 1970s. Later, in 1990, my colleagues and I did a book on ethnic entrepreneurs that came
out of the UK project (Waldinger, Aldrich, & Ward, 1990). I like to use a long-term dynamic
design that permits me to measure the same indicators over time and then be able to describe
and explain analytically why things have changed (Aldrich, 2001).
My Evolutionary Views Were Further Developed in the 1970s
While my education at the University of Michigan had laid the groundwork for my
evolutionary views, these ideas were further refined by several opportunities that came my way
in the 1970s, at Stanford and Cornell universities.
Stanford University
A summer spent at Stanford University in 1973 contributed significantly to my emerging
perspective on organizations and ultimately generated the spark I needed to begin working on
what eventually became Organizations and Environments (Aldrich, 1979). Dick Scott invited me
to be a visiting scholar in the Stanford Research Training Program on Organizations and Mental
Health, following my Cornell colleague, Karl Weick, who’d done it the year before. Dick was
away in Europe, I believe, and so I spent a lot of time with his students. I taught an
organizational theory course to a class that included Chuck Snow, Kaye Schoonhoven, and a
number of Mike Hannan and John Meyers’ students. In addition to studying the health care
system, their students were working on a variety of “world systems” topics and I found their
projects fascinating.
Despite the mismatch between my empirical interests and those of the students, the
Stanford experience rekindled my interest in a more comparative and political view of
organizations, an interest that had lain dormant since I’d left Ann Arbor in 1969. I suspect that I
learned as much over those three months as did the students in my course. Through these
students, I also met Jane Weiss and we began a collaboration that was cut short by her
premature death in 1981. Jane challenged me to rise above the fairly empirical approach I was
schooled in at Michigan and broadened my horizons, as reflected in the papers we published on
class analysis (Aldrich and Weiss, 1981) and world systems theory (Weiss and Aldrich, 1977).
To put my Stanford experience into the context of the early 1970s, I would say that the
type of organization theory popular in the 1960s emphasized structure at the expense of
genesis and process. During the mid-1970s, additional approaches to organizational analysis
were flowering in other parts of the world, and the paradigm shift challenged earlier approaches,
as theorists on both US coasts developed distinctive ideas about organizational analysis.
Curiously enough, I found that my Stanford experience was better preparation for understanding
these new approaches that what I was exposed to on the East Coast, in Ivy League sociology.
At Stanford and UC-Berkeley, three new views of organizational analysis had emerged:
resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), population ecology (Hannan & Freeman,
1989), and “new” institutional theory (Scott 2008). My introduction to these schools of thought
during my time at Stanford helped to shape the evolutionary approach to entrepreneurship
which I ultimately became associated with, and which I further developed throughout the course
of my career at Cornell and beyond.
Developing an appreciation of evolutionary thinking
The evolutionary approach is a generic framework for understanding social change; the
evolutionary approach to entrepreneurship is an overarching framework permitting comparison
and integration of other social scientific theories. At the heart of evolutionary thinking is the
assumption that evolutionary processes are driven by entrepreneurs and organizations’
struggles to obtain scarce resources, both social and physical (Aldrich & Ruef, 2006a). The
approach is applicable at multiple levels of analysis and directs our attention to the processes of
variation, selection, retention, and struggle that jointly produce patterned change in evolving
systems. In organizational communities, populations with different characteristics enter into
relationships of competition and cooperation; those populations better able to deal with the
environment are more likely to survive, and characteristics of the successful population may
then be diffused to other populations in the same community.
During the 1970s, the thinking around such evolutionary models had more or less
exploded, mainly as a result of the open-system revolution in organization theory and
management studies. Scholars from different disciplines presented evolutionary theories,
inspired by the seminal work of Donald T. Campbell (1969), to explain phenomena ranging from
the micro to the macro levels of organization. When I was at Michigan, I had had the good
fortune to be exposed not only to the work of sociologists but also people like Campbell, so I
knew about the variation-selection-retention approach. I discovered as I began working on
projects in the 1970s that this framework was a very powerful generic framework. It wasn’t a
detailed mechanism perspective, but once you understood the ideas of selective retention and
variation, you could apply this to about anything -- that was a real revelation to me.
For example, on the individual level, Karl Weick (1979) developed his landmark
statement, Social Psychology of Organizing, a social psychological theory of how individuals
coordinate their actions, which drew on the variation, selection, and retention reasoning
developed by Campbell. With Karl at Cornell, I had on campus another person who also
appreciated an evolutionary approach, but at a micro level. Karl and I met regularly, mainly
through our students, as I would be on committees he chaired and vice versa. Also, we shared
people who enrolled in our courses. We didn’t see eye to eye on everything, I discovered. But
looking back, I realized we shared a common “home base,” which was an appreciation for
evolutionary thinking.
Michael Hannan and John Freeman (1977; 1984) also used a selection-based
explanation in their work on the population ecology of organizations, in which they emphasized
the founding and closure of organizations in populations, relative to the distribution of available
environmental resources. On the macro level, Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter (1982) were
pioneers in the application of evolutionary models of economic change. However, unlike me,
they were more influenced by the Carnegie School of routine-based models of organizational
action (Herbert Simon, James March, and Richard Cyert) as well as by Joseph Schumpeter,
who was a prominent exponent of the idea that economic change could be conceptualized as
an evolutionary process.
My interest in world systems theory that had been sparked at Stanford was further
refined during my time at Cornell. Coincidentally, down the road in Binghamton, Immanuel
Wallerstein (2004) had set up shop. I’d begun reading his work and I discovered that some of
his disciples were on the Cornell campus. Accordingly, I decided to try offering a course on
world systems theory. Looking back, I am shocked at my naïveté and boldness, as I had no
formal training in in world systems theory. I did it on a chance that there’d be people interested,
and it turned out there were. Some of Wallerstein’s students visited as guest lecturers, and
Wallerstein himself drove up once from Binghamton to participate. The world systems
perspective finally completed the levels of analysis that I was working toward: individual,
organizational, population, and community/society.
It was thus in this intellectual context that I published Organizations and Environments
(1979) in which I wrote about organizations and how they changed over time. It was arguably
the first book-length statement of this perspective – not just thinking in evolutionary terms, but
also on multiple levels, thinking about issues of selection. I argued that organizations flourish or
fail because they are more or less suited to the particular environment in which they operate. My
early work on evolutionary theory built on my ecological framework and emphasized how little
control small business owners had over their environments, and so my writings tended to
privilege context as a driving force in organizational change. Later, as I drew more from
resource dependence theory, I took more account of human agency and collective action.
The resource dependence perspective
Looking back, I realize that the other perspective I was working on but didn’t emphasize
enough was resource dependence. My book emphasized an evolutionary argument and using
multiple levels of analysis, but I also discussed power, politics, dominance, governance, and the
way in which two parties in a relationship strategically jockey for positions. The dynamics of that
relationship are driven by resource dependence dynamics. Indeed, my papers in the early
1970s had drawn heavily upon the concept of resource dependence. For example, in our 1975
paper in ASQ, Sergio Mindlin and I wrote that "the major axiom of the resource dependence
perspective on the study of organizational behavior is that organizations must be studied in the
context of the population of organizations with which they are competing and sharing resources”
(Mindlin and Aldrich, 1975: 382).
While at Stanford the summer of 1973, I began collaborating with Jeff Pfeffer on what
became the first synthetic statement combining an evolutionary perspective and a resource
dependence perspective. We laid out the premises of a resource dependence model, building
on Stanford graduate Karen Cook’s (1977) work and on work by Dick’s mentor, Peter Blau
(1964). Published in the Annual Review of Sociology (Aldrich & Pfeffer, 1976), it is one of my
most cited papers. In that collaboration with Jeff, I was able to see that really it made no sense
to talk about resource dependence or evolutionary theory as two separate ways of looking at the
world. Even though the 1979 book and my subsequent work tend to be seen as evolutionary,
the actual micro-mechanisms, the explanations of how things actually happen between people
and organizations or between organizations, mostly concern power and exchange dynamics
(Wry, Cobb, & Aldrich, 2013).
Jeff and Jerry Salancik (who was ultimately one of the associate editors with me at ASQ)
went on to write The External Control of Organizations (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Their book
was published in 1978 and my book was published in 1979 – two statements which offered
complementary views of the world of organization theory. While Pfeffer and I combined the
ideas of “populations” and “resource dependence,” – and I tended to be seen as somebody who
was associated with ecology (at that time it was called “population ecology”) – Jeff and Jerry
tended to downplay evolutionary thinking (though there’s some selection logic in their book).
Thus, I don’t think people recognized that our two books were actually part of the same
programmatic move in the organization studies’ community to get away from the old simple
contingency view, the old rational choice view, to a more dynamic, political evolutionary way of
thinking.
All through the 1980s, I struggled to differentiate my evolutionary approach from the
ecological approach. I didn’t talk about "population ecology" until after Hannan and Freeman’s
article was published in 1977. Before that I called it the natural selection process or the
population perspective. In Organizations and Environments, perhaps subtly influenced by the
Stanford group’s terminology, I rather carelessly used the label "population ecology"
interchangeably with "natural selection." Looking back, I regret that I used the label “population
ecology,” because I think it confused people. Most of my work was rather different from
population ecology reasoning, and my views would have been better described as a sociological
approach, strongly informed by evolutionary principles. Therefore, in the book Organizations
Evolving (1999) I adopted the label “evolutionary perspective” or “evolutionary approach.”
Becoming an Entrepreneurship Scholar
Throughout the 1970s, I thought of myself as an organizational sociologist studying
organizations from an evolutionary point of view. I discovered I was an “entrepreneurship
scholar” totally by accident. Like Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman, who
discovered that he had "been speaking prose all my life, and didn't even know it," it was not until
a fortuitous conjuncture of circumstances that I realized I was actually studying
"entrepreneurship." Two events converged to change my self-identity: (1) an invitation to write a
paper for a conference on social indicators, and (2) an invitation to attend a state-of-the-art
conference on entrepreneurship.
First, in the early 1980s, I began working with several graduate students at Cornell
University, studying the origins of organizational forms. I was invited to Washington DC to give a
paper at a conference and in preparation for the conference, I read David Birch’s book, The Job
Generation Process. I subsequently visited him on a very cold and snowy winter day at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston to learn more about the data set he had
created, using the proprietary Dun & Bradstreet Market Indicators Database. After spending a
day with him, I began to see the potential of integrating ideas from organizational ecology with
those from evolutionary theory to understand business dynamics. One of my Cornell students,
Ellen Auster, was then teaching at Columbia Business School and she joined with me in writing
a paper about the problems facing new and small firms (Aldrich & Auster, 1986).
Second, in 1985, as Ellen and I were finishing our paper, I received an invitation from
Don Sexton to attend his state-of-the-art conference on entrepreneurship in Austin, Texas. I was
scheduled to comment on a paper presented by Al Shapero, but Al became ill and so Don
called me on the Friday before the conference began (which was on a Monday!) and asked me
if I would instead be willing to present an original paper. I had already been thinking about social
networks because of my research on ethnic businesses, and decided to accept his invitation.
Over the weekend, I wrote a short paper called “Entrepreneurship through Social Networks” with
one of my PhD students, Catherine Zimmer (Aldrich & Zimmer, 1986).
The Texas conference was an eye opening experience for me. The scholars I met – Neil
Churchill, Alan Carsrud, Karl Vesper, Arnold Cooper, and others – were passionate about their
work, energized about what they were finding, and cared deeply about the phenomena. Unlike
the careerist and petty gossip that I heard at most professional meetings, the people studying
entrepreneurship seemed to be genuinely interested in the research itself and eager to initiate
new members into their group. The paper I presented struck a responsive chord in the
entrepreneurship community, because it was a way of bridging networks and entrepreneurship
and making the study of entrepreneurship more sociological. It is still widely cited today and I
still get requests for copies, 30 years later.
At that conference, I also discovered that there was a whole world out there of people
studying entrepreneurship that I had been isolated from because I was in the organization
studies community. Entrepreneurship was clearly not a central issue for organizations’ people
back in those days. The leading textbooks and highly cited papers, such as DiMaggio and
Powell’s (1983) paper on institutional isomorphism, contain no mention of entrepreneurs, the
role of new organizations, new businesses, or where variation comes from. Suddenly
discovering that there were dozens of people, mainly in business schools, studying
entrepreneurship and associating my work with the concept, was a revelation to me.
Because of contacts I made in Austin, I began attending the Babson College
Entrepreneurship Conference and gave my first paper at the 1987 meeting at Pepperdine
University. (The paper was on a study of social networks among entrepreneurs in the Research
Triangle Area of North Carolina, carried out with Ben Rosen and the late Bill Woodward.) I have
missed very few meetings since then and became a “lifetime member” of the Babson
conference in 2013. Thus, starting in the mid-1980s, my research agenda shifted from talking
about business and organizational change to talking about entrepreneurship; entrepreneurial
strategies, activities, and variation.
Many of the phenomena that interested me as an organizational scholar were actually
much easier to study in the entrepreneurial context, where things are fresh, new, and small and
constituted an instant organizational laboratory with thousands of replications every day. I wrote
several works on business formation and the role of networks in entrepreneurship. In this
respect my collaboration with Marlena Fiol (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994) was really important for me. In
the article “Fools rush in? The institutional context of industrial creation,” I started to describe my
ideas in multi-level terms, and saw more clearly that I could look at entirely new industries at the
individual, group, organizational, and population level. This multi-level approach became a key
characteristic in my book Organizations Evolving (Aldrich, 1999), and in the revision I later
published with Martin Ruef.
Beginning in the late 1980s, my involvement in evolutionary theory grew hand-in-hand
with a series of large-scale entrepreneurship projects. With Pat Ray Reese, I conducted a panel
study of several hundred potential and actual entrepreneurs in the Research Triangle area of
North Carolina. My students Linda Renzulli and Amy Davis subsequently used that data set for
their masters’ projects. Nancy Langton and I carried out a multi-wave panel study of small firms
in the Vancouver, British Columbia region; in collaboration with Jennifer Cliff Jennings, I also
wrote a number of papers from that project. In North Carolina, Arne Kalleberg, Peter Marsden,
and I obtained an NSF grant to study different methods of sampling organizations, one part of
which included an attempt to find newly founded firms in Durham County and the Research
Triangle area.
When I realized that I was actually studying "entrepreneurship" rather than "small
businesses," I reframed my research questions and began teaching seminars on the topic. I
became associated in people's minds with entrepreneurship and received many invitations to
teach courses and seminars internationally. Bocconi University in Milan hosted me for several
month-long courses, and I visited the University of Economics in Vienna every spring for seven
years in the 1990s to offer a course on entrepreneurship in their Institute for Small and Medium-
Size Businesses. Spurred in part by my youngest son's interest in Japanese studies, I taught
two short entrepreneurship courses at Keio University in Japan.
In the mid-1990s, Paul Reynolds began soliciting my participation in perhaps the most
important US research project carried of the decade: the Entrepreneurship Research
Consortium (ERC) project, which eventually became the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial
Dynamics (PSED I). However, he had to drag me into it: I was reluctant to get involved, knowing
how difficult it is to manage such diverse, multi-member, collective action projects. To his credit,
Paul never gave up, and I saw that he had really big plans; ultimately, the chance to do another
four-wave panel study was just too good to pass up. And of course it wasn’t coincidental that the
earlier research projects that I had favored were four-wave panel studies. Although I did not join
the executive committee of the first PSED, Paul always referred to me as his "over-enthusiastic
volunteer." That experience taught me that it was better to be on the inside of such projects,
rather than criticizing from the outside, and so when he proposed PSED II, I signed up for the
executive committee.
Organizations Evolving
The impact of my shift from purely organization studies to entrepreneurship and
organization studies is also evident in the first edition of Organizations Evolving (Aldrich, 1999).
Even though it’s sold as a trade book that’s about organization theory, it’s really about
entrepreneurship. It starts with the creation of organizations and their internal dynamics, and
moves through the building of organizational boundaries to the level of change at the
organization and population levels, and ends at the community level. Many of the key ideas in
the book date back to a paper I wrote in the early 1980s together with Bill McKelvey (McKelvey
& Aldrich, 1983). In the article “Populations, Natural Selection and Applied Organizational
Science,” we argued that scholars could use the variation-selection-retention scheme to create
a comprehensive understanding of organizational change: In populations of organizations in
which there is great heterogeneity, no organization will represent the central tendency in the
population – the organizations will differ from each other and this variation paves the way for
evolution due to selective elimination. The organizations that survive will be copied, thus
diffusing a new form throughout the population. It was a breakthrough idea at the time, and I
quarried that paper substantially for the 1999 book, and then again with Martin Ruef for the
2006 edition (Aldrich & Ruef, 2006b), where we brought that argument up to date.
Graduate Students’ contributions
About half what I publish is empirical and half is conceptual, and more than half of my
work is co-authored. Over the years, I’ve been able to find people to work with who’ve
substantially enriched my understanding. Graduate students and people at other universities
have been very important to my work. For example, Jennifer Cliff Jennings and I became
acquainted when I was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia working with
Nancy Langton (Aldrich, Renzulli, & Langton, 1998), and Jennifer and I subsequently wrote
papers together on gender, family, and entrepreneurship (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003; Cliff, Langton, &
Aldrich, 2005). My work relies heavily on teamwork with people whose skills are complementary
to mine.
While I was at Cornell, I worked with a number of students on various aspects of
organizational formation and change. David Whetten, my first doctoral student, is extremely
interested in comparative approaches to organizational research. In 1973, Dave and I began a
large study of interorganizational relationships in the manpower training program and published
several papers using a resource dependence perspective (Aldrich & Whetten, 1981). Udo
Staber did field research on trade associations and we subsequently published a number of
studies looking at the evolution of that industry over more than a century (Aldrich & Staber,
1988). Lance Kurke became interested in Henry Mintzberg’s field study of managerial work and
we published one of the few empirical replications of that study (Kurke & Aldrich, 1983). Finally,
Ellen Auster and I wrote several papers on ethnic businesses, but our best-known work was
purely conceptual, with the title based on one of my favorite Werner Herzog movies, “Even
Dwarfs Started Small” (Aldrich & Auster, 1986). It was one of the first papers to explicitly
address the question of the complementarities between the liabilities facing small and new
organizations and the liabilities facing old and well-established organizations. We argued that
new small and nimble organizations often pioneered innovations but then were snapped up by
larger established organizations, rather than continuing to grow organically. Steve Bradley
(2011) recruited me to join with him, Dean Shepherd, and Johan Wiklund, in co-authoring a
paper that tested the central proposition of Aldrich and Auster (Aldrich & Auster, 1986).
Over my years at UNC-Chapel Hill, I have been fortunate to find students interested in
doing entrepreneurship research, sometimes in addition to another project for their
dissertations. While preparing her dissertation on charter schools, Linda Renzulli also worked
with Jim Moody and me on a study of social networks and entrepreneurship in the Research
Triangle Area of North Carolina. Using panel data that Pat Reese had collected with me, we
found that an over-abundance of family ties in someone’s personal network inhibited their acting
on entrepreneurial intentions (Renzulli, Aldrich, & Moody, 2000). Ted Baker came to graduate
school after being involved in several entrepreneurial ventures of his own and worked on
several projects with me, in addition to a dissertation on the consequences of entrepreneurs
being beholden to “critical employees” (Aldrich & Baker, 1997; Aldrich & Baker, 2001; Baker,
Aldrich, & Liou, 1997). Amy Kenworthy shared my fascination with the work of Donald Campbell
and together we wrote a paper applying his ideas to entrepreneurship (Aldrich & Kenworthy,
1999).
Amanda Elam was one of several students who earned a PhD in sociology but then
eventually started her own company. She worked on several entrepreneurship projects with me
at Carolina, including one on social networks with another student who became an
entrepreneur, Pat Reese (Aldrich, Elam, & Reese, 1996). Courtney Hunt earned her PhD in the
business school and while taking my organization theory seminar, saw the potential for the
commercialization of the World Wide Web. In 1996, at the dawning of the dot com era, our
collaboration resulted in the first paper ever presented on that topic at the annual meeting of the
Academy of Management and then a subsequent paper two years later (Hunt & Aldrich, 1998).
She also formed her own consulting firm.
With an undergraduate degree in management and then some business experience, Phil
Kim turned his attention to entrepreneurship as a PhD student. Phil made good use of the
PSED I for some research papers as well as his dissertation, focusing particularly on social
networks (Kim & Aldrich, 2005; Kim, Aldrich, & Keister, 2006; Kim, Longest, & Aldrich, 2013).
Amy Davis also joined with me in exploring the potential of the PSED data set, writing several
papers on entrepreneurship and social networks (Davis, Renzulli, & Aldrich, 2006). Tiantian
Yang worked with me on several projects using the PSED II data set (Aldrich & Yang, 2013;
Yang & Aldrich, 2012; Yang & Aldrich, 2014), and then saw an opportunity to work with “big
data,” using the Swedish registry data called LISA. Her Masters’ level training in statistics came
in handy in building state-of-the-art level models of entrepreneurial spawning, a skill I admired
but did not possess.
Steve Lippmann and Martha Martinez are two former students who have continued to
work with me on projects many years after they left graduate school. Steve’s interest in
historical analysis has led to a series of empirical and theoretical papers, exploring the
intersection of historiography and organization theory (Lippmann, 2005, 2007; Lippmann &
Aldrich, 2014). Martha’s eclectic interests have allowed us to contribute not only to the
entrepreneurship literature (Aldrich & Martinez, 2001; Martinez, Yang, & Aldrich, 2011) but also
to the family business (Martinez & Aldrich, 2014) and strategy and innovation (Aldrich &
Martinez, 2015) literatures.
The importance of teamwork is particularly apparent in the development of PSED II
project. After leading the PSED I, Paul Reynolds raised money for a follow-on project with more
cases and more waves of data collection, enriching the design and fixing some of the omissions
in the earlier project. One paper, in particular, demonstrates the evolution of my thinking on a
sociological approach to entrepreneurship: a project with Martin Ruef and Nancy Carter (Ruef,
Aldrich, & Carter, 2003), showing that entrepreneurial teams are put together in a very
homophilous way. Our results indicated that entrepreneurs’ actions contradicted the old
prescriptive argument that entrepreneurs should put together a team of people with diverse
backgrounds. What we were able to show with this wonderful dataset - a sample of people
trying to start businesses - is that in fact, the businesses that emerge from this process are very
homophilous by age, sex, occupation, and race.
Current Research on the Maker Movement
My good friend Jerry Davis, with his enthusiasm and optimism, drew me into studying
the maker movement (Davis, 2013). He arranged a meeting for me with a near-neighbor of
mine, Ted Hall, the founder of ShopBot and a leading voice in the maker movement. Jerry said
to me, “There’s this guy over in Durham who’s doing some really interesting stuff, you ought to
meet him.” Jerry and I had talked a little bit about my interest in technology and technological
revolution. My oldest son, Steven, is a serial entrepreneur whose work has been in high tech
and knowledge intensive industries, and I’ve always been interested in high-tech. I looked up
what Ted Hall was doing and it turned out to be the portal into an amazing new movement.
People mostly associate the term “hacker” with computer software but it actually turns out to be
very powerful movement in open-source hardware as well.
What I discovered was that technological changes, such as 3D printing, numerically
controlled machinery downsized to desktop size, and laser cutters were changing the way that
people developed and experimented with prototypes. Traditional craft-based technologies were
also involved: sewing, weaving, and other tools of the creative classes. I learned about a
movement of people who say that the way that things are made and distributed in modern
societies doesn’t tap into the inherent creativity of humans, and that creativity could be
unleashed if people were just given the tools to use that potential. Humans in the 21st century
are accustomed to having goods just delivered to their door. They’re told that this is just the way
things are: “Don’t open that computer, phone, or home appliance - you’ll break it.” In the maker
movement, people reject that claim. They argue that humans can take something off the shelf
made by manufacturers, open it up, look at its innards, figure out how it actually works, make it
better through hacking it by adding something to it or redesigning it. They can even put another
program into its controller.
Starting in 2012, I began doing serious reading on the maker movement. I’ve now been
to many of these spaces and have been able to give some presentations on the movement. I
spent several days learning how to use a CNC machine. (I must admit that when my wife
examined what I produced, she said to me something like, “Oh that’s a lot better than I thought it
would be.”) What I’ve discovered is that the potential for new industrial revolution seems to be
emerging. This is what Jerry and I have been talking about, which is that the new technologies
combined with this maker movement - which is a very powerful global movement to give people,
in a sense, control over their own destiny - will make available the tools people can use to make
things for themselves. These can be as simple as things that you play with, or things that are
functionally useful in the kitchen, the car, and the garage. It’s an amazingly adaptable set of
technologies.
What’s important about the way this is developing is that makerspaces are being put
together through contributed resources, like Kickstarter campaigns (Mollick, 2014). Over a
thousand of these makerspaces exist throughout the world, and they’re spreading.
Makerspaces make available on an inclusive basis very flexible machines and often some kind
of consulting help to inexperienced makers. Users sometimes pay nothing to use the
equipment, or pay only for the materials, and get a chance to design things that will enrich their
lives. What’s interesting to me from an entrepreneurial point of view is that some of these
projects do have commercial potential. There are two examples everyone knows about: one of
them is the Pebble Watch which was started with a Kickstarter campaign (a hacking of physical
entities: the bracelet, with the microcontroller insider, and the sensors). It was put together by
somebody who didn’t go to a venture capitalist or an angel investor. Instead, he went to
Kickstarter, a crowdfunding source, and raised the money. Square is another new venture that
was put together from one of these campaigns.
The potential now exists for thousands of people working in makerspaces to engage in
what Sonali Shah, Mary Tripsas, and Eric von Hippel have called user-driven innovation: they
noted that people often discover innovations when they’re working with an off-the-shelf design
and spot ways to improve it (Shah & Tripsas, 2007; Von Hippel, 2005). In makerspaces, you’re
not just stuck with a hammer and a screwdriver, you’ve got a CNC machine, a 3D printer,
computer software design programs that let you do craft work that was unthinkable fifteen or
twenty years ago. Possibly the next revolution will emerge from these aggregated individual and
collective efforts.
Another way to think about this is through a sort of anti-Schumpeter distorted lens: if the
R&D labs of big firms were the only force in invention and innovation, we would be stuck with
what the imaginations of those people can generate. In the hierarchies of big firms, people are
assigned to work on projects, with varying degrees of autonomy in how they accomplish their
goals. What if we take those same resources, downsize them, and make them available to
people working in makerspaces? Instead of having corporate agendas driving the innovation,
we would have users driving the innovation, based on recognizing local needs. Ithaca, New
York may have people who need goods and services that people in Binghamton or Elmira don’t
need. Alternatively, people in Binghamton or Elmira may collectively have needs that we
wouldn’t have in the Research Triangle Park. Who knows? The maker movement and the
possibility that these people will come together and help one another means that the
innovations and their variations can be generated might well succeed in changing the world for
those people locally. That’s an unprecedented opening to the future.
Looking Forward: Advice to Young Scholars
I’m an evolutionary theorist, which means it’s a violation of my credo if I claim
clairvoyance and assert an ability to peer into the future. By definition, tomorrow is different than
today, and we don’t know what it will give us. I will only speculate about how to interpret the
recent past and the immediate future.
“Entrepreneurship” used to be an area that people avoided because it wasn’t sexy
enough; it wasn’t like studying big firms and their M&As and IPOs. But entrepreneurship actually
is an amazingly attractive and interesting field. When you’re studying big firms, such as the
publicly held firms formerly favored by many entrepreneurship scholars, you will discover that
there are perhaps 5000 publicly traded firms left in the United States. There are more than 5000
organizational scientists, right? We could, technically speaking, assign each one of the 5000 to
one organization and have them all meet once a year to talk about their organizations and then
go out for drinks afterward.
That’s not true with entrepreneurship: there are millions of trials every year. There’s lots
of variation to study. Moreover, if you’re trying to do a study of organizational change in big
firms, you have to wait forever for interesting things to happen. Getting access to this means
begging lots of people for permission and then having a lot of people to follow around. By
contrast, consider startups: you have 2 or 3 people to follow. If something interesting is going to
happen, it’s going to happen right there in front of you. Immediately, people understand what’s
going on because the totality of what’s happening is within your purview. New and small
organizations thus constitute a great laboratory in which to study social processes such as
social networks, power and resource dependence, and gender dynamics. All these things are
visible in the micro laboratory of startups.
I see several methodological challenges involving “big data” and
“fieldwork/ethnography.” Big data has given us the ability to discover patterns we were
previously simply unable to recognize. The danger for a social scientist in using big data or
archival data (for example, using patent data, data that comes from the census bureau, or using
data from government registry-based projects, such as LISA in Sweden or IDEA in Denmark) is
that you are an arms’ length from the actual phenomenon. One of my arguments - going back to
the first papers I wrote in the mid-1980s about entrepreneurship research methods - is that we
don’t have enough people doing the real field work: the ethnographic and observational field
work (Aldrich, 2000). I would like to see more researchers venturing into entrepreneurial
startups and new ventures - or into incubators and accelerators - and actually hanging out,
spending days observing, taking notes, recording, doing mini-experiments if you’re permitted to
do so, collecting data in innovative ways: We don’t have many people doing that.
I would like to see entrepreneurship researchers doing ethnographies that document, in
a typical day, week, or month, what entrepreneurs actually do. How do they spend their time?
How much time are they spending in meetings? Are these people like Mintzberg’s (1973)
managers in The Nature of Managerial Work whose days are consumed with meetings, and
who spend very little time thinking about strategy? The managers in Mintzberg’s study were
mostly stuck answering memos or the phone and giving people orders. We have great articles
in magazines like Wired and Fast Company that describe a very different world than the world
described in cases on big companies. Some scholars are probably naturally gifted
ethnographers who are good at watching people do things and interpreting what they see, and
then communicating to others the theoretical significance of what they observed. I’m hopeful
that young scholars who are interested in entrepreneurship or organizations will think twice
before beginning to use an archival dataset - a dataset handed to them by somebody,
downloaded from the web, from the ICPSR. I suggest that instead, they go out and spend a little
time with the phenomenon.
I’m constantly amazed when I go to professional meetings and find how little people
actually know about what they are studying. I meet with people in doctoral consortiums, talk with
them about their proposals, and I’ll ask them questions about their phenomenon. Something
like, “You’re studying people making gaming software. What’s it like to be in one of their shops?”
and they say, “I don’t know, I’ve never actually watched them do this.” Or I say, “What’s it like to
be in a biotech firm? What’s it like in the lab? What’s the interaction like between the scientist
and the entrepreneurs?” “I don’t know, I’ve never seen it.” I’m astonished by investigators’
inabilities to questions about basic descriptive characteristics of the phenomenon. They tell me
what they’ve read in books or how the variables are described in a code book. But that’s not
enough. If you’re going to convince me that you understand the phenomenon, I want a report
from the field. So I’m encouraging graduate student researchers who have the resources to
maybe stay in grad school an extra year, or find a mentor who is really interested in helping
them. Let’s get some reports from the field and perhaps transform our understanding of the
entrepreneurial startup process.
Many of my projects have been planned and executed over many years. My study of
small businesses in three American cities was designed in 1965, with data collection from 1966
until 1972. Coding and analyzing the data took more than a year and thus the first papers were
not submitted until 1974. I continued publishing from that data set throughout the 1970s.
Similarly, my study in England was conceptualized in 1975, designed in 1976, and data
collection carried out from 1978 until 1984. In a third example, my project on trade associations
was designed and funded in the early 1980s, with publications appearing until the early 1990s.
Many of my other projects were similarly measured in years, not months. My recommendation
to young scholars is to realize that if you undertake large-scale long-term projects, you better
have more than one project underway and the other projects should have different beginning
and ending times. Long-term planning for a portfolio of several projects needs to begin the
moment your PhD advisor signs off on your thesis.
Closing Thoughts
Over the past five decades, the world has changed and with it, our understanding of
organizations and how they operate has grown tremendously. I have been incredibly fortunate
to have witnessed new perspectives taking shape and honored to have contributed to our
understanding in some ways. By learning from excellent guides and mentors and their world
class research and theory-building strategies, the groundwork was laid for me to contribute to
the growing realm of entrepreneurship research. I believe the current environment is ripe with
opportunities for future scholars to build on these insights to study entrepreneurial efforts and
outcomes and to take stock of the many new ways creators have to bring their ideas to life in
the world.
References
Aldrich, H. 1971. Organizational Boundaries and Inter-organizational Conflict. Human
Relations, 24(4): 279-293.
Aldrich, H. 1975. Ecological Succession in Racially Changing Neighborhoods. Urban Affairs
Review, 10(3): 327-348.
Aldrich, H. 1999. Organizations Evolving. London: Sage.
Aldrich, H., & Auster, E. R. 1986. Even Dwarfs Started Small: Liabilities of Age and Size and
Their Strategic Implications. In B. M. Staw, & L. L. Cummings (Eds.), Research in
Organizational Behavior, Vol. 8: 165-198. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Aldrich, H., & Reiss, A. J., Jr. 1976. Continuities in the Study of Ecological Succession:
Changes in the Race Composition of Neighborhoods and Their Businesses. American
Journal of Sociology, 81(4): 846-866.
Aldrich, H., Renzulli, L. A., & Langton, N. 1998. Passing on Privilege: Resources Provided by
Self-Employed Parents to Their Self-Employed Children. In K. Leicht (Ed.), Research in
Stratification and Mobility, Vol. 16: 291-317. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Aldrich, H. E. 1992. Methods in Our Madness? Trends in Entrepreneurship Research. In D. L.
Sexton, & J. D. Kasarda (Eds.), The State of the Art of Entrepreneurship: 191-213.
Boston: PWS-Kent Publishing Company.
Aldrich, H. E. 2000. Learning Together: National Differences in Entrepreneurship Research. In
D. L. Sexton, & H. Landström (Eds.), The Blackwell Handbook of Entrepreneurship:
5-25. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Aldrich, H. E. 2001. Who Wants to Be an Evolutionary Theorist? Remarks on the Occasion of
the Year 2000 OMT Distinguished Scholarly Career Award Presentation. Journal of
Management Inquiry, 10(2): 115-128.
Aldrich, H. E., & Baker, T. 1997. Blinded by The Cites? Has There been Progress in
Entrepreneurship Research? In D. L. Sexton, & R. W. Smilor (Eds.), Entrepreneurship
2000: 377-400. Chicago: Upstart Publishing Company.
Aldrich, H. E., & Baker, T. 2001. Learning and Legitimacy: Entrepreneurial Responses to
Constraints on the Emergence of New Populations. In C. B. Schoonhoven, & E.
Romanelli (Eds.), The Entrepreneurship Dynamic: Origins of Entrepreneurship and
the Evolution of Industries: 207 – 235. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Aldrich, H. E., Cater, J., Jones, T., & McEvoy, D. 1983. From Periphery to Peripheral: The South
Asian Petite Bourgeoisie in England. In I. H. Simpson, & R. Simpson (Eds.), Research
in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 2: 1-32. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Aldrich, H. E., Cater, J., Jones, T., McEvoy, D., & Velleman, P. 1985. Ethnic Residential
Concentration and the Protected Market Hypothesis. Social Forces, 63(4): 996-1009.
Aldrich, H. E., & Cliff, J. E. 2003. The Pervasive Effects of Family on Entrepreneurship: Toward
a Family Embeddedness Perspective. Journal of Business Venturing, 18(5): 573-596.
Aldrich, H. E., Elam, A., & Reese, P. R. 1996. Strong Ties, Weak Ties, and Strangers: Do
Women Business Owners Differ from Men in Their Use of Networking to Obtain
Assistance? In S. Birley, & I. C. MacMillan (Eds.), Entrepreneurship in a Global
Context: 1-25. London: Routledge.
Aldrich, H. E., & Fiol, C. M. 1994. Fools Rush In? The Institutional Context of Industry Creation.
Academy of Management Review, 19(4): 645-670.
Aldrich, H. E., & Kenworthy, A. 1999. The Accidental Entrepreneur: Campbellian Antinomies
and Organizational Foundings. In J. A. C. Baum, & B. McKelvey (Eds.), Variations in
Organization Science: In Honor of Donald T. Campbell. Newbury Park, CA.: Sage.
Aldrich, H. E., & Martinez, M. A. 2001. Many are Called, but Few are Chosen: An Evolutionary
Perspective for the Study of Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice,
25(4): 41.
Aldrich, H. E., & Martinez, M. A. 2015. Why Aren’t Entrepreneurs More Creative? Conditions
Affecting Creativity and Innovation in Entrepreneurial Activity. In C. E. Shalley, M. A. Hitt,
& J. Zhou (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and
Entrepreneurship: Multilevel Linkages: 445-456 Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aldrich, H. E., & Pfeffer, J. 1976. Environments and Organizations. Annual Review of
Sociology, 2: 79-105.
Aldrich, H. E., & Ruef, M. 2006a. Organizations evolving (2nd ed.). London: Sage
Publications.
Aldrich, H. E., & Ruef, M. 2006b. Organizations Evolving (2nd ed.). London: Sage
Publications.
Aldrich, H. E., & Staber, U. H. 1988. Organizing Business Interests: Patterns of Trade
Association Foundings, Transformations, and Deaths. In G. R. Carroll (Ed.), Ecological
Models of Organizations: 111-126. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Aldrich, H. E., & Whetten, D. A. 1981. Organization Sets, Action Sets, and Networks: Making
the Most of Simplicity. In P. Nystrom, & W. H. Starbuck (Eds.), Handbook of
Organizational Design: 385-408. New York: Oxford University Press.
Aldrich, H. E., & Yang, T. 2013. How Do Entrepreneurs Know What to Do? Learning and
Organizing in New Ventures. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 24(1): 59-82.
Aldrich, H. E., & Zimmer, C. 1986. Entrepreneurship through Social Networks. In D. Sexton, &
R. Smilor (Eds.), The Art and Science of Entrepreneurship: 3-23. New York: Ballinger.
Baker, T., Aldrich, H. E., & Liou, N. 1997. Invisible Entrepreneurs: The Neglect of Women
Business Owners by Mass Media and Scholarly Journals in the United States.
Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 9(3): 221-238.
Baum, J. A. C., & Amburgey, T. L. 2002. Organizational Ecology. In J. A. C. Baum (Ed.),
Companion to Organizations: 305-326. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
Bradley, S. W., Aldrich, H., Shepherd, D. A., & Wiklund, J. 2011. Resources, Environmental
Change, and Survival: Asymmetric Paths of Young Independent and Subsidiary
Organizations. Strategic Management Journal, 32(5): 486-509.
Campbell, D. T. 1969. Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution. General
Systems, 14: 69-85.
Cliff, J. E., Langton, N., & Aldrich, H. E. 2005. Walking the Talk? Gendered Rhetoric vs. Action
in Small Firms. Organization Studies, 26(1): 63-91.
Converse, P. E. 1976. The Dynamics of Party Support: Cohort Analyzing Party
Identification. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Davis, A. E., Renzulli, L. A., & Aldrich, H. E. 2006. Mixing or matching?: the influence of
voluntary associations on the occupational diversity and density of small business
owners' networks. Work and Occupations, 33(1): 42-72.
Davis, G. F. 2013. How Affordable CNC Can Remake Industry: Thoughts on Technology and
Business Structure. In T. Hall (Ed.), 100KGarages.com, Vol. 2015. Durham, NC: Ted
Hall.
DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. 1983. The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and
Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2):
147-160.
Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. H. 1989. Organizational Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Hunt, C. S., & Aldrich, H. E. 1998. The Second Ecology: The Creation and Evolution of
Organizational Communities as Exemplified by the Commercialization of the World Wide
Web. In B. Staw, & L. L. Cummings (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol.
20: 267-302. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Katona, G. 1964. The Mass Consumption Society. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kim, P. H., & Aldrich, H. E. 2005. Social Capital and Entrepreneurship. Foundations and
Trends in Entrepreneurship, 1(2): 1-52.
Kim, P. H., Aldrich, H. E., & Keister, L. A. 2006. Access (Not) Denied: The Impact of Financial,
Human , and Cultural Capital on Entrepreneurial Entry in the United States. Small
Business Economics: Forthcoming.
Kim, P. H., Longest, K. C., & Aldrich, H. E. 2013. Can You Lend Me a Hand? Task-Role
Alignment of Social Support for Aspiring Business Owners. Work and Occupations,
40(3): 211-247.
Kurke, L., & Aldrich, H. E. 1983. Mintzberg Was Right! A Replication and Extension of the
Nature of Managerial Work. Management Science, 29(8): 975 – 984.
Lippmann, S. 2005. Public Airwaves, Private Interests: Competing Visions and
Ideological Capture in the Regulation of U.S. Broadcasting, 1920-1934. In H. Prechel (Ed.),
Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 14: 111-150. Bingley UK: Emerald.
Lippmann, S. 2007. The institutional context of industry consolidation: Radio broadcasting in the
United States, 1920-1934. Social Forces, 86(2): 467-495.
Lippmann, S., & Aldrich, H. E. 2014. History and Evolutionary Theory. In M. Bucheli, & R. D.
Wadhwani (Eds.), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods: Forthcoming.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Martinez, M. A., & Aldrich, H. E. 2014. Sociological Theories Applied to Family Businesses. In L.
Melin, M. Nordqvist, & P. Sharma (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Family Business:
83 – 99. London: Sage Publications
Martinez, M. A., Yang, T., & Aldrich, H. 2011. Entrepreneurship as an Evolutionary Process:
Research Progress and Challenges. Entrepreneurship Research Journal, 1(1).
McKelvey, B., & Aldrich, H. E. 1983. Populations, Natural Selection, and Applied Organizational
Science. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28(1): 101-128.
Mintzberg, H. 1973. The Nature of Managerial Work. New York: Harper & Row.
Mollick, E. 2014. The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study. Journal of Business
Venturing, 29: 1-16.
Pfeffer, J., & Salancik, G. R. 1978. The External Control of Organizations: A Resource
Dependence Perspective. New York: Harper & Row.
Renzulli, L. A., Aldrich, H., & Moody, J. 2000. Family Matters: Gender, Networks, and
Entrepreneurial Outcomes. Social Forces, 79(2): 523-546.
Ruef, M., Aldrich, H. E., & Carter, N. M. 2003. The Structure of Founding Teams: Homophily,
Strong Ties, and Isolation among U.S. Entrepreneurs. American Sociological Review,
68(2): 195-222.
Shah, S. K., & Tripsas, M. 2007. The Accidental Entrepreneur: the Emergence and Collective
Process of User Entrepreneurship. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 1: 123-140.
Von Hippel, E. 2005. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Waldinger, R., Aldrich, H. E., & Ward, R. 1990. Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant
Businesses in Industrial Societies. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Wallerstein, I. M. 2004. World Systems Analysis: an Introduction. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Wry, T., Cobb, J. A., & Aldrich, H. E. 2013. More than a Metaphor: Assessing the Historical
Legacy of Resource Dependence and its Contemporary Promise as a Theory of
Environmental Complexity. The Academy of Management Annals, 7(1): 441-488.
Yang, T., & Aldrich, H. E. 2012. Out Of Sight but Not Out Of Mind: Why Failure to Account for
Left Truncation Biases Research on Failure Rates. Journal of Business Venturing,
27(4): 477-492.
Yang, T., & Aldrich, H. E. 2014. Who's the Boss? Explaining Gender Inequality in
Entrepreneurial Teams. American Sociological Review, 79(2): 303-327.