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A study of 230 private colleges over 16 turbulent years supports two arguments: (1) Strong ties to other organizations mitigate uncertainty and promote adaptation by increasing communication and information sharing. (2) Networks can promote social learning of adaptive responses, rather than other, less productive, forms of interorganizational imitation. Colleges that were members of smaller, older, and more homogeneous intercollegiate consortia were more likely to undertake fundamental curriculum changes. Colleges tended to imitate similar consortium partners that were performing well rather than larger and more prestigious partners. Implications for organizational adaptation and the growing network perspective within organization theory are considered.
As industries and other organizational populations develop over time, they are periodically confronted by fundamental changes in their environments. During these periods, changing consumer preferences, eroding industry boundaries, changing social values and demographics, new government regulations, new technologies, and other exogenous developments create substantial uncertainty, often requiring organizations to make major changes in their core practices or else risk decline and failure (Hannan & Freeman, 1984; Levinthal, 1994; Schumpeter, 1942; Tushman & Anderson, 1986).
The questions of how, if, and when organizations respond to these types of exogenous challenges are, quite plainly, fundamental ones for organizational research. Thus, it should not be surprising that the study of organizational adaptation, which can be defined as "change in a significant organizational attribute, such as basic business strategy or organizational structure [undertaken] in response to environmental change" (Levinthal, 1994: 171), has long occupied a prominent place in various important research traditions within organizational studies. The contingency and resource dependence literatures (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Thompson, 1967), the strategic change literature (Ginsberg, 1988; Rajagopalan & Spreitzer, 1997), and the literatures on organizational learning and evolution (Levinthal & March, 1993; Nelson & Winter, 1982; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985) all share a common concern with adaptation. More recently, many ecologists have taken a renewed interest in processes of adaptation as well (Haveman, 1992; Usher & Evans, 1996). Evidence of the field's continuing concern with adaptation can be found in a number of relatively recent studies that have examined organizations' strategic and structural responses to industry-wide threats in a variety of contexts (Boeker & Goodstein, 1991; Haveman, 1992; Kelly & Amburgey, 1991; Kraatz & Zajac, 1996; Meyer, Brooks, & Goes, 1990;...