---
title: "Barnett & Hansen's founding 1996 Red Queen organizational paper tested the theory on Illinois commercial banks, not computer manufacturers"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Tier 1 — the authors' own abstract as hosted on their home institution's Stanford GSB faculty publication page, fetched directly. Queen re-fetch not independently repeated this promotion.)"
source_url: "https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/red-queen-organizational-evolution"
source_title: "The Red Queen in Organizational Evolution"
source_author: "William P. Barnett & Morten T. Hansen"
source_date: "1996-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Estimates of organizational failure rates reveal a Red Queen among Illinois banks, and support our predictions."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-does-barnetts-own-data-show-computer-manufacturing-exhibiting.md, 2026-07-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-does-barnetts-own-data-show-computer-manufacturing-exhibiting.md"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
date_created: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["organizational-theory","red-queen","william-barnett","competitive-dynamics","banking"]
---


The paper that introduced William P. Barnett's formal Red Queen model into
organizational theory — William P. Barnett & Morten T. Hansen, "The Red Queen in
Organizational Evolution," *Strategic Management Journal* 17(S1):139–157 (1996)
— was empirically tested on commercial banking, not on computer manufacturing.
The authors' own abstract, hosted on the Stanford GSB faculty publication page,
states: "Estimates of organizational failure rates reveal a Red Queen among
Illinois banks, and support our predictions." The model predicts "maladaptive
consequences when organizations face many, varied cohorts of rivals," estimated
through "ecological models of competition."

This matters for how the vault reads the "two central case industries" framing
in [[claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition]]. Barnett's
empirical demonstration of Red Queen dynamics was built up industry by industry,
paper by paper: the 1996 founding test used Illinois banks, while the
computer-manufacturing evidence comes from later, separately co-authored work
([[claim-barnett-mckendrick-2004-tested-red-queen-on-disk-drive-makers]];
[[claim-barnett-book-text-asserts-disk-drive-industry-drives-up-failure-rates]]).
The book's bundling of computer manufacturing and commercial banking as one pair
of "case industries" therefore synthesizes findings from at least two distinct
empirical projects on two different datasets, not a single study spanning both.

The core mechanism — rivals driving up each other's failure rates as the
signature of Red Queen competition — is the same across both settings and
mirrors the biological original
([[claim-red-queen-hypothesis-names-running-to-stay-in-place]]). What changes is
the industry the hazard model is fit to. See [[entity-william-barnett]].