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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.

While holistic studies devoted to the information behavior of humanist scholars have begun to appear more frequently in the literature, there has been, until quite recently, a persistent tendency to consolidate humanists rather than attend to the variant gestalts, material working conditions, and values that might distinguish one from another. This chapter is a response to recent calls for more finely granulated descriptions of specific humanist disciplinary practices. It offers a close examination of the information behavior of theatre researchers, both academics and practitioners. For reasons that the chapter explores, theatre researchers constitute a user group that has been profoundly neglected. Using both quantitative and qualitative data obtained through a survey of listserv members of the American Society for Theatrical Research and the Theatre Library Association, the chapter examines the impact of theatre culture on theatre research practices. Moreover, inspired by Brenda Dervin's “Sense-Making Methodology,” this chapter offers the embedded perspective of a researcher who is herself a theatre scholar as well as a practicing librarian. The chapter ranges widely, illustrating its findings with, for example, published rehearsal memoirs, statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, white papers produced by the National Endowment of the Arts, performance theory texts. Topics covered include the history of theatre studies as an academic discipline, the multiple job-holding/unemployment culture of practitioners such as actors and directors, the differences in focus and methodology that distinguish practitioners from scholars, the marginalized status of dramatic literature in university English departments. Several themes that emerged through analysis of qualitative data are discussed: the contrast between scholarly rigor and the tendency of the practitioner to “satisfice,” the conflicting claims of text and artifact, the impact of geography and teaching-intensive institutional affiliation on researchers’ access to resources. The author concludes that it is not only inadvisable and inaccurate to generalize behaviors across humanistic disciplines; it is equally inaccurate to assume that all researchers within the same discipline will manifest the same characteristics, or even that the same researcher will apply the same strategies to all projects. The only generalization about the information behavior of the theatre researcher that can be made is that it is highly task and context dependent.