Concentration and Specialization: Dynamics of Niche Width in Populations of Organizations

This paper departs from the common practice of focusing on large, generalist organizations and shows that new organizational insights are obtined by adopting a broader, ecological perspective. The newspaper publishing industry is examined as an illustration. The ecological focus shows that many small, specialized organizations operate successfully in this industry, despite apparently high levels of local concentration. A resource-partitioning model is advanced to explain the interorganizational relationships between generalist and specialist organizations. Statistical tests of the model using historical data on 2,808 American local newspaper organizations show the merit of using the ecological perspective for analyzing industries.