Organizational Obsolescence, Drifting Tastes, and Age Dependence in Organizational Life Chances

Gaël Le Mens (), Michael T. Hannan () and László Pólos ()
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Gaël Le Mens: Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona School of Management, 08005 Barcelona, Spain
Michael T. Hannan: Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
László Pólos: Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom

Organization Science, 2015, vol. 26, issue 2, 550-570

Abstract: Various patterns of age dependence in hazards of organizational failure have been documented: liabilities of newness, adolescence, and obsolescence. Prior efforts at providing a unified theory that can accommodate these patterns as special cases have not dealt properly with obsolescence. We tackle this problem by proposing a new model that builds on the most recent unification attempt while integrating the core intuition behind obsolescence: organizations have trouble adapting to drifting environments, which leads to declining performance and, in turn, to decreasing viability. In doing so, we develop a comprehensive representational framework to precisely characterize obsolescence. Our perspective builds on recent theory and research that treats categories as constructions by audiences. We characterize environmental drift as changing audience tastes in a multidimensional feature space and organizational inertia as a decreasing ability for producers to move quickly in that space. This combination creates obsolescence with aging. We then integrate this perspective with prior theory to make novel predictions regarding the age dependence in life chances over the life courses of organizations. We also show how the predictions of our theory can be tested empirically by adapting Levinthal’s random walk model [Levinthal DA (1991) Random walks and organizational mortality. Admin. Sci. Quart. 36(3):397–420] to incorporate the possibility of organizational obsolescence.

Keywords: organizational failure; age dependence; organizational adaptation; drifting tastes; random walk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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