Forms survive via environmental selection; inertia is high.
Hannan and Freeman's 1977 argument that organisations change mainly by being replaced. Inertia is not a defect but a byproduct of the reliability that let them survive in the first place.
In practice
- A newspaper that dominated print does not become a digital newspaper; a different organisation does, and the first one closes.
- A high street chain restructures four times and is replaced by an entrant that never had the estate to restructure.