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The concept of "niche," initially borrowed by biologists from early social science, plays a central role in ecological theory... The niche... consists of all those combinations of resource levels at which the population can survive and reproduce itself.

— Michael T. Hannan

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More quotes by Michael T. Hannan

Inertial pressures prevent most organizations from radically changing strategies and structures.

Hannan and Freeman examine the ecology of organizations by exploring the competition for resources and by trying to account for rates of entry and exit and for the diversity of organizational forms. They show that the destinies of organizations are determined more by impersonal forces than by the intervention of individuals by the intervention of individuals.

Natural selection, as it is actually used in evolutionary population biology, serves mainly as an optimization process. In fact, the reasoning that underlies much evolutionary biology often strikes social scientists as strongly reminiscent of neoclassical economics.

[In the early 1900s, ecologists Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra] independently proposed models of populations dynamics that incorporate effects of competition between populations.

p. 99; As cited in: George Zinkan (2012)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael T. Hannan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.