---
id: "20260728-0213-what-are-the-specific"
title: "What are the specific statistical estimates behind Barnett & McKendrick (2004)'s hard-disk-drive Red Queen finding?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
promoted_to: []
not_promoted: ["Claim: 'the full text was not reached this session' — a first-hand access-attempt record (5 routes, all 403/401), not a domain claim about the world. Worth preserving so future sessions don't repeat the same dead ends, but not an atomic vault-worthy claim-note; folded as a progress log into question-verify-barnett-mckendrick-2004-disk-drive-hazard-estimates.md instead, which stays status: open.","Claim: 'Semantic Scholar lists the paper as CC-BY open access via Durham Research Online despite the repo 403ing this session' — administrative/access metadata, not a substantive finding about Barnett & McKendrick's Red Queen result. Recorded as a next-attempt lead inside the same question's progress log rather than a standalone claim-note.","Entity: Glenn R. Carroll, J. Richard Harrison, Albert C. Y. Teo — declined for hub pages. Real, named co-authors on a related 1965-1998 hard-disk-drive-population working paper, but the paper itself was only located via WebSearch aggregation this session, never fetched — thin, unread, single-mention co-author threads. Bias against the flood; left as plain mentions.","Entity: David G. McKendrick — promoted to a hub (40-entities/entity-david-mckendrick.md), not left as a mention: he is the recurring co-author of the vault's central disk-drive Red Queen study and independent author of two other unread studies of the same industry.","Entity note: Leigh Van Valen already has a page (entity-leigh-van-valen); no action needed, the capture flagged it only to confirm it wasn't missed."]
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "Batch research run, 2026-07-28, answering [[question-verify-barnett-mckendrick-2004-disk-drive-hazard-estimates]]"
derived_from: []
tags: ["organizational-theory","red-queen","william-barnett","hard-disk-drive-industry","verification","quant","access-barrier"]
source_url: "https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1631176/2516.pdf"
source_author: "William P. Barnett & David G. McKendrick"
source_date: "2004-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_tier: "see per-claim tiers below — full primary text was not reached this session"
---


This capture is a direct follow-up to the vault's routed question
[[question-verify-barnett-mckendrick-2004-disk-drive-hazard-estimates]], which
asks for the coefficients, hazard ratios, sample size, and years-of-data behind
the finding already captured at the directional level in
[[claim-barnett-mckendrick-2004-tested-red-queen-on-disk-drive-makers]] (large
firms led the technology race but failed to become stronger competitors than
small rivals, per Barnett & McKendrick's own abstract, Tier 1). That existing
note is not duplicated here — see it directly.

## Claim: The full text of Barnett & McKendrick (2004) was not reached this session; the specific statistical estimates remain unconfirmed

Every located route to William P. Barnett & David G. McKendrick, "Why Are Some
Organizations More Competitive than Others? Evidence from a Changing Global
Market," *Administrative Science Quarterly* 49(4):535–571 (2004), returned a
paywall or an access error during direct, first-hand fetch attempts on
2026-07-28:

- SAGE Publishing (publisher of record), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/4131490 — HTTP 403.
- JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4131490 — HTTP 403.
- ResearchGate paper page, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30051410_Why_are_some_organizations_more_competitive_than_others_Evidence_from_a_changing_global_market — HTTP 403.
- Durham Research Online / Durham University's institutional repository (Worktribe platform) — both the abstract page (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1631157/) and the direct PDF (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1631176/2516.pdf) returned HTTP 403 to both `extract_pdf` and direct fetch, despite this being the repository Semantic Scholar's metadata records as the paper's open-access, CC-BY-licensed copy.
- core.ac.uk search — HTTP 403.
- An `r.jina.ai` reader-proxy retry on the Durham PDF returned HTTP 401.

This is a first-hand, direct-observation record of access attempts (this
researcher's own fetch results), so it clears its own floor as an
uncontested, present-tense fact about *access*, not about the paper's
content. It does **not** stand in for the paper: no coefficients, hazard
ratios, model specification, sample size, or years-of-data were recovered.
The routed question stays open and unresolved
`[unverified — could not confirm or deny after search]` for its quantitative
core. The directional finding (large firms lead technologically but do not
gain relative competitive strength) remains the only part of this paper's
content confirmed at Tier 1, and that was already established in
[[claim-barnett-mckendrick-2004-tested-red-queen-on-disk-drive-makers]] from
the authors' own abstract on the Stanford GSB faculty page.

## Claim: Semantic Scholar's bibliographic record lists the paper as openly available via Durham Research Online under a CC-BY license, though the repository itself refused direct access this session

Querying the Semantic Scholar Graph API by DOI
(https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/DOI:10.2307/4131490 — this
exact query URL returned live JSON content, confirmed resolving) returned
title, year, and author metadata matching the known citation, plus an
`openAccessPdf` field pointing to `https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1631157`
with license "CC BY." This is a definitional/administrative claim about
where the paper is catalogued as hosted, not a claim about the paper's
statistical content, so it clears the floor at Tier 3–4 (aggregator
metadata) for that limited purpose. It does not override the fact that the
repository itself returned 403 to every fetch attempt this session — the
CC-BY licensing claim and actual public reachability are two different
things, and only the latter was tested directly.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The metadata says this paper is open access; the server disagreed three
> different ways (HTML page, direct PDF, proxy). Worth a retry in a future
> session — possibly the repository was rate-limiting or blocking this
> session's request pattern rather than gating the content itself — before
> concluding the CC-BY claim is simply wrong. Flagging the discrepancy rather
> than resolving it either way.
> — Seek

## Further leads

- Carroll, Glenn R., David McKendrick, J. Richard Harrison, Albert C. Y. Teo & William P. Barnett, "Differentiation, Variation and Selection: Evolutionary Implications of Technical Change among the Worldwide Population of Hard Disk Drive Makers, 1965–1998," Stanford GSB Research Paper 1915 (2004) — a related Barnett-coauthored hard-disk-drive population study spanning 1965–1998; not accessed this session, but a candidate for the same or an overlapping dataset. [pointer only — via WebSearch aggregation, not directly fetched]
- David G. McKendrick, "Global strategy and population-level learning: the case of hard disk drives," *Strategic Management Journal* 22(4):307–334 (2001) — Wiley-paywalled (https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smj.161), not accessed.
- David G. McKendrick, *From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry* (Stanford University Press) — previously flagged in the routed question as a candidate richer primary; still unopened.
- The Durham repository's direct PDF URL (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1631176/2516.pdf) is recorded here for a future retry attempt, given the CC-BY metadata discrepancy noted above.

## Entity candidates

- David G. McKendrick — person — co-author of the 2004 ASQ paper and sole/lead author of at least two other hard-disk-drive-industry studies (2001 SMJ paper; *From Silicon Valley to Singapore*); no entity note currently exists for him despite his recurring role alongside [[entity-william-barnett]].
- Glenn R. Carroll — person — co-author (with Barnett and McKendrick) on the related 1965–1998 hard-disk-drive-population working paper; organizational-ecology scholar, not yet in the vault.
- J. Richard Harrison — person — co-author on the same related working paper; not yet in the vault.
- Albert C. Y. Teo — person — co-author on the same related working paper; not yet in the vault.
- Note on the "foundational figure" blind spot: the figure this whole Red Queen line of work measures itself against is [[entity-leigh-van-valen|Leigh Van Valen]], already present in the vault as an entity — flagged here explicitly so it isn't missed, though no new page action is needed since it already exists.