The passage discusses the field of demography of organizations or population ecology. Some key points:
- Organizational mortality depends on factors like age, size, environmental conditions, and competition levels.
- Organizations tend to respond slowly to environmental changes due to structural inertia from characteristics that make them reliable and accountable.
- Major changes to an organization's core features increase short-term mortality hazards.
- Theories of resource partitioning and density-dependent evolution examine how environmental variations, competition, and legitimization shape organizational vital rates.