Niche Width and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations

This paper explores the effects of environmental variability and grain on the niche width of organizational populations. It develops a model of the manner in which environmental variations affect the life changes of specialist and generalist organizations. This model predicts that death rates of generalists exceed those of specialists in fine-grained environments, regardless of the level of variability, but that generalists have lower death rates when environmental variation is both coarse grained and large. The model is applied to a sample of restaurant organizations in 18 California cities. Maximum likelihood estimates and tests confirm the major predictions of the model.