Freeman’s early research focused on organizational politics and the variations among organizations in the ratios of managers and supervisors to the rest of the work force. Freeman’s empirical studies revealed that organizations in decline have higher “administrative intensity” than similar-sized growing organizations because staffing decisions are made by managers, who might be expected to favor their close associates. The pattern came to be known as the “Freeman effect” and became a staple of macro-organization theory. Perhaps Freeman’s greatest contribution to the study of organizational theory was an area he helped create with colleague and friend Michael Hannan, professor of management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of sociology at Stanford University. The two sociologists pioneered “organizational ecology.” Together they sought to answer the question, “Why are there so many kinds of organizations?” Their work included rebuilding the foundations of macro-organization theory by emphasizing change by selection rather than adaptation, shifting the level of analysis to the level of the population of organizations, and introducing a focus on dynamics. Freeman was involved in building many now-standard themes including age dependence in organizational mortality, r and K selection, niche width, organizational forms, and density-dependent legitimation and competition. In 1992, the American Sociological Association awarded Freeman and Hannan the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship for their book Organizational Ecology, published in 1989.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Freeman’s early research focused on organizational politics and the variations among organizations in the ratios of managers and supervisors to the rest of the work force. Freeman’s empirical studies revealed that organizations in decline have higher “administrative intensity” than similar-sized growing organizations because staffing decisions are made by managers, who might be expected to favor their close associates. The pattern came to be known as the “Freeman effect” and became a staple of macro-organization theory. Perhaps Freeman’s greatest contribution to the study of organizational theory was an area he helped create with colleague and friend Michael Hannan, professor of management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of sociology at Stanford University. The two sociologists pioneered “organizational ecology.” Together they sought to answer the question, “Why are there so many kinds of organizations?” Their work included rebuilding the foundations of macro-organization theory by emphasizing change by selection rather than adaptation, shifting the level of analysis to the level of the population of organizations, and introducing a focus on dynamics. Freeman was involved in building many now-standard themes including age dependence in organizational mortality, r and K selection, niche width, organizational forms, and density-dependent legitimation and competition. In 1992, the American Sociological Association awarded Freeman and Hannan the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship for their book Organizational Ecology, published in 1989." in the context of "Jerome Engel and Michael Hannan. "IN MEMORIAM : John H. Freeman" at senate.universityofcalifornia.edu, 2008." to mean that wisdom is timeless.