Abstract

Although several attempts were made in the 1950s and 1960s to develop a demography of organizations, none were successful. While recent work shows more promise, it is still the case that organizational demography does not really exist, either as an academic field or as an institutionalized component of policy making. Unsurprisingly, detailed knowledge about the demography of the corporation in the modern world has been slow to develop; corporations and other kinds of organizations remain poorly understood. The lack of corporate demography represents a missed opportunity, one filled with many possibilities for looking at corporations and industries in a new way. The applications of a corporate-demographic approach described in this article demonstrate the potential value of corporate demography for understanding the changing roles of corporations and populations and communities of corporations.