Book Review

American Journal of Sociology, the field of organizational ecology has in its thirty years of existence generated a wealth of knowledge about change in the world of organizations through extensive analyses of the founding, growth, and demise of organizations. In Logics of Organization Theory, Michael Hannan teams up with László Pólos and Glenn Carroll to reflect on organizational ecol-ogy as a research discipline and to point the way forward. They note that, over the years, theories in organizational ecology have become fragmented, and some of the fragments are even at odds with each other regarding the defini-tion of key concepts (e.g. the definition of an organizational ‘niche’) and their predictions (about, for example, the age dependence of organizational mortal-ity). The authors take the position that the simultaneous development of vari-ous theory fragments may not be problematic as such, but that there is a danger that inconsistencies among them may impede further advances and applica-tions. They therefore explore formal logic as a means to resolve ambiguities, and they invoke insights from fuzzy set theory to stimulate the development o