Michael T. Hannan

Michael T. Hannan is a professor emeritus of management and sociology at Stanford University whose research examines how organizations emerge, change and disappear. With John Freeman, he helped develop organizational ecology, an approach that studies organizations in the context of populations and the pressures those populations face.

For the article on strategic entropy, Hannan’s most direct contribution is Cascading Organizational Change, coauthored with László Pólos and Glenn R. Carroll. The paper develops a formal theory in which an initial change to organizational architecture prompts further changes. It connects the initiating unit’s centrality and the intricacy of the design to reorganization time and opportunity costs. This offers a mechanism for thinking about dependencies during change; it does not measure a general rate at which initiatives or rules accumulate.