Organizational Change in Terms of a Series of Selected Variables

THE study presented in this paper takes its point of departure from the working hypothesis that institutional and cultural can be empirically observed through the growth of a number of selected variables. In his writings F. Stuart Chapin has demonstrated the possibility of studying the successive values of certain strategic institutional variables over a period of time and establishing the law of change by the well-known statistical method of fitting a logistic curve to the time series.' Chapin has linked this time series analysis to one type of broad generalization on the cultural and social in the social group which he calls the cycle of the social process or the societal reaction pattern. An attempt will be made in this paper to summarize some of the findings made in an empirical investigation of a number of quantitative variables related to the organizational growth of ten voluntary associations.2 Theoretical considerations suggest that these variables are important in understanding the processes of organizational