Howard Aldrich

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About Howard Aldrich
Howard Aldrich is Kenan Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Business at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, where he has participated in many splendid evenings at High Table. He is the author of 7 books, including one in Japanese & one in Farsi, and over 180 articles. He is a passionate fly fisherman, jazz buff, and theater-goer, traveling the world in search of more opportunities to indulge these interests. More details about his work are available on his personal web page (http://howardaldrich.org).
His son, Daniel P. Aldrich, also has an Amazon author page. Check it out.
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Titles By Howard Aldrich
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When Organizations and Environments was originally issued in 1979, it increased interest in evolutionary explanations of organizational change. Since then, scholars and practitioners have widely cited the book for its innovative answer to this question: Under what conditions do organizations change? Aldrich achieves theoretical integration across 13 chapters by using an evolutionary model that captures the essential features of relations between organizations and their environments. This model explains organizational change by focusing on the processes of variation, selection, retention, and struggle. The “environment,” as conceived by Aldrich, does not refer simply to elements “out there”—beyond a set of focal organizations—but rather to concentrations of resources, power, political domination, and most concretely, other organizations. Scholars using Aldrich’s model have examined the societal context within which founders create organizations and whether those organizations survive or fail, rise to prominence, or sink into obscurity.