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Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an understanding of how social ties and resource dependencies among firms affect market structure and the resulting behavior of firms within it. Evidence is furnished that supports the assumptions of the perspective and provides a basis for specifying propositions about the effect of network structure on organizational survival. I conclude by discussing the perspective’s implications for organizational theory and economic sociology.

Empirical studies show substantial variation across immigrants in the rate and direction of assimilation along various dimensions (e.g., cross-ethnic contact, language, identity). To explain this variation, past research has focused on identifying exogenous factors, such as discrimination, human capital, and settlement intention. In this chapter we argue that variation in immigrant outcomes emerges endogenously through positive interaction effects between dimensions of assimilation. We propose a new assimilation model in which processes of social influence and selection into congruent social environments give rise to multiple long-term equilibria. In this model, migrants who are already assimilated along many dimensions tend to also adapt along other dimensions, while less assimilated migrants become more strongly embedded in their ethnic group.

To test the assimilation model, we derive a number of hypotheses, which we evaluate using trend analysis and dynamic panel regression on data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada.

The data mostly confirm the hypotheses, providing overall support for the assimilation model.

Our theory and findings suggest that immigrants would follow divergent assimilation trajectories even in the absence of a priori population heterogeneity in external factors.

The positive interaction effects between cultural and structural dimensions of assimilation suggest that mixed policies that promote integration while seeking to prevent loss of identity go against the natural tendency for cultural and structural assimilation to go hand in hand.

The present chapter proposes a novel model of immigrant assimilation and an empirical test.

A widespread consensus in strategy literature argues that firms acquire positions of advantage and competitive capability by assembling or “organizing” sets of uniquely complementary resources, activities, or assets. In this regard, value is created not only in identifying unique and valuable combinations of existing resources, but also in seeing unique and valuable ways to modify or cospecialize these assets. With the envisioned strategic bundle defined, the manager must then determine how to form, organize, and create this bundle. In particular, the manager must decide which assets, activities, and resources must be “owned” and which can be accessed contractually. We argue that although integration does have certain advantages over market transactions, it does not necessarily lead to the expansion of the scale and scope of the firm, because firms would also fail, particularly as they become larger in size. While established theories articulate this organizational failure puzzle in terms of incentive explanations and measurement difficulties, recent advancement in organizational economics and business strategy sees this as a result of influence activities, and social comparison and social attachment processes. These elements can serve as new building blocks for a more comprehensive theory of the nature and the boundary of the firm. Three future research trajectories – both theoretical and empirical in this realm – are suggested.

The study of the family firm has gained increased attention in recent years, judging by the number of articles and books published lately as well as the fact that a number of universities in the United States and elsewhere now emphasize a focused study of family business in higher education (Fletcher, 2002; Hoy & Verser, 1994; Litz, 1997). At the same time, the field of entrepreneurship has been enriched by perspectives from sociology and anthropology and has welcomed the study of ethnic business groups, especially in terms of their unique entrepreneurial tendencies as well as their organization and operations within a social order in which they remain a distinct minority (Aldrich & Waldinger, 1990; Light & Gold, 2000).

The basis of ethnic groups' economic status remains among the enduring controversies in both popular and social scientific discussions of inequality. While this debate commonly opposes cultural attributes to structures of opportunity and disadvantage, we point out that various policies—including banking, public employment, business development programs, and refugee resettlement—have also had important impacts on ethnic economies. Because our definition of the ethnic economy includes both the ethnic-owned economy of the self-employed as well as the ethnic-controlled economy, wherein ethnic networks help locate jobs in non-co-ethnic firms or the public sector, we are able to incorporate a wide range of groups and contexts in our analysis. Our results suggest that the economic status of certain ethnic groups in American society reflects the outcome of specific policies that helped or hindered the growth of their ethnic economies. We conclude that policies, such as public employment, which incorporate various ethnic groups, are a more viable means of nurturing ethnic economic growth than selective programs that benefit some groups while excluding others.

The aim of this study is to assess the significance of social capital in a public organization according to two theoretical frameworks. Following the structural hole theory (Burt, 1992), a sparse social network enables employees to gain control and information benefits. According to the social capital theory (Coleman, 1988), a cohesive social network creates trust and an obligation to cooperate. The theories describe favorable outcomes of the opposite poles of social structure, but the discussion shows that the social capital might not be realized because of unfavorable contextual factors. Empirical findings indicate that a sparse ego network increases an employee's indirect control and that a dense work unit network increases trust in the democracy of decision making. The discussion suggests that a sparse social network might be most beneficial to a bureaucratic organization and that cohesiveness does not automatically induce commitment if it is not supported by favorable social norms. Unless prerequisites of social interaction are well secured, the organization faces the risk of having inadequate levels of social cohesion, which might impede the creation of social capital. In conclusion, the management is faced with the challenge of social liabilities arising from both social cohesion and the lack of it.

In this study we used community health survey data to test an adapted version of Lin's (2001a, b) theoretical model for explaining health differences in terms of the differential generation of social capital. There was considerable support for the model's explanatory components with regard to differences in physical health. Variation in physical health was related to resources generated by education and avoidance of cost barriers in paying for care, embeddedness in the form of household composition, and accessibility of interpersonal health resources. However, life satisfaction differences were more related to employment experience and to being female than to health resources generation or utilization. Cost barriers had a considerable positive effect upon stress levels, as did being female. Overall, findings show that life orientations were largely independent of health-related resources, and that differences in stress reflected problems in paying for health care and gender-related experiences. The importance of gender in our results suggested the need for considering gender-specific models of the generation of health resources. The reciprocal relationship found between households' mobilization of provider services and their involvement in community health activities suggested the collateral generation of resources at the individual and community levels stressed by network theorists such as Burt (1992), Granovetter (1985), and Wellman (1983). Implications of our results for policy issues regarding inequalities in health and for the future study of health-related social capital are discussed.