ABSTRACT
This approach to innovation supplements more common approaches to the problem. such as those that see organizational size as the main factor promoting the addition of new structures to organizations (e.g., Blau, 1970; Moch and Morse, 1972). Although numerous empirical analyses have demonstrated the relationship between organizational size and the addit1on of new structural un1ts. such research has generally suffered from two shcrtcomings. First, cross-sectional research designs have led to a focus on the problem of structural expanision (in innovation research adoption, in structural research differentiation) without a similar emphasis on whether or not newly added structures are retained. That is, most researchers of organizational structure have treated the issue of expansion as problematic without also seeing that the retention of structures is also problematic (an exception is Freeman and Hannan, 1975).
