The central argument is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision‐makers. What decision‐makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on. What issues and answers they focus on depends on the specific situation and on how the firm’s rules, resources, and relationships distribute various issues, answers, and decision‐makers into specific communications and procedures. The paper develops these theoretical principles into a model of firm behavior and presents its implications for explaining firm behavior and adaptation. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. This article examines the historical contingency of executive power and succession in the higher education publishing industry. We combine interview data with historical analysis to identify how institutional logics changed from an editorial to a market focus. Event history models are used to test for differences in the effects of these two institutional logics on the positional, relational, and economic determinants of executive succession. The quantitative findings indicate that a shift in logics led to different determinants of executive succession. Under an editorial logic, executive attention is directed to author-editor relationships and internal growth, and executive succession is determined by organization size and structure. Under a market logic, executive attention is directed to issues of resource competition and acquisition growth, and executive succession is determined by the product market and the market for corporate control.Classic and contemporary theory and research in sociology have emphasized the importance of leadership succession in demarcating changes in 1 We acknowledge the helpful comments on previous drafts of this article from Nicole Biggart,

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