Main description: There's a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen, having just led a chase with Alice in which neither seems to have moved from the spot where they began, explains to the perplexed girl: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same...

Many organizational populations display increasing variation over time in characteristics thought to be central to survival, as we show here for hard disk drive producers. We develop a simple model that might account for this pattern. In it, technological advance follows a trajectory consistent...

While radical technological change is often characterized as hazardous, particularly to incumbents, incremental technological change has appeared to be immune from such risks. Little attention has been given to the possibility that under some circumstances incremental technological change can be...

What are the forces that are driving firms and industries to globalize their operations? This volume explores how specific industries have organized their global operations through case studies of seven manufacturing industries: garments and textiles, automobiles and auto parts, televisions,...

Momentous developments in the global economy over the last two decades have dramatically increased the availability of industrial investment sites and lowered the cost of relocating core activities to new countries. But how should these developments be exploited for competitive advantage? Firms...

We study how tape drive producers respond to the almost continuous emergence of new drive formats across the technology's history. The analysis characterizes the technological formats of tape drives according to their degree of contrast (distinctiveness and visibility) from other formats. We...

Why do successful organizations often move in new directions and then fail? We propose that this pattern is especially likely among organizations that have survived a history of competition. Such experience adapts organizations to their environment, through so-called "Red Queen" evolution, but...

Considerable attention goes to whether there is a "first-mover advantage" among organizations. Technical mechanisms have been considered for this advantage, such as learning and occupancy of preferred market segments. We argue that first movers may also benefit from a social identity advantage...

Research across disciplines presumes that markets will have strong boundaries. Markets without well-defined boundaries typically are not useful and do not become institutionalized, so are expected to fade away. In contrast, we suggest that in many contexts lenient markets or market labels with...