Limits to Bureaucratic Growth: The Density Dependence of Organizational Rule Births
采用种群生态学方法，利用美国一所大型研究型大学的规则生产时间序列数据，检验官僚规则是否催生更多规则，发现规则诞生率随规则数量增加而下降，支持组织学习理论。
I thank the following people for help, suggestions, and encouragement: James G. March, Richard B. Peterson, Xueguang Zhou (for providing the time series of academic rule births and some of the covariates), Alfred Kieser, Paul D. Collins, Heather Haveman, Lloyd A. Jobe, and three anonymous ASQ reviewers. The study reported here uses a population ecology approach to examine whether bureaucratic rules breed more rules. Hypotheses about the birth rate of bureaucratic rules are derived and tested with time series data on rule production in a large U.S. research university. Results show that the rate of rule production declines with the number of rules in a rule population over time. The results support organizational learning theories: by expanding the number of rules, organizations increasingly respond to environmental challenges in a programmed way, reducing organizational experiences with new situations, inhibiting organizational learning, and thereby eliminating a main impetus for making more rules. Radical bureaucratization theories, however, are not supported.'