Our purpose in this note is to make explicit how two lines of work in sociology — the population ecology of organizations and the structural hole theory behind network studies of markets — are based on the same unit of analysis. The unit is a set of structurally equivalent producers; termed a niche in population ecology and a market in structural hole theory. Making the market niche analogy explicit puts a bridge in place for what we believe and begin to explain here, should be productive exchange between the two lines of work.
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Burt et al. (1993) studied this question.
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