How do corporations and other organizations maintain and transmit their
cultures over time? Culture and Demography in Organizations offers the
most reliable and comprehensive answer to this complex question to date.
The first book on the subject to ground its analysis in mathematical
tools and computer simulation, it goes beyond standard approaches, which
focus on socialization within organizations, by explicitly considering
the effects of demographic processes of entry, exit, and organizational
growth.
J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll base their analysis on a formal
model with three components: hiring, socialization, and employee
turnover. In exploring the model's implications through computer
simulation methods, the authors cover topics such as organizational
growth and decline, top management teams, organizational influence
networks, terrorist organizations, cultural integration following
mergers, and organizational failure. For each topic, they identify the
conditions influencing cultural transmission. In general, they find that
demographic processes play a central role in influencing organizational
culture and that studying these processes leads to some surprising
insights unavailable when considering socialization alone. This book,
which also serves as an ideal introduction to the increasingly popular
use of computer simulation, will be an indispensable resource for
scholars and students of organization theory and behavior, cultural
studies, strategic management, sociology, economics, and social
simulation.
