---
title: "Barnett & McKendrick (2004) tested the Red Queen model on hard-disk-drive-maker data, finding large firms led the technology race but failed to become stronger competitors than small rivals"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Tier 1 — the authors' own abstract on the Stanford GSB faculty publication page, fetched directly; but the note carries an [unverified-quant] flag: no coefficients, hazard ratios, sample size, or years-of-data were recovered, and the full ASQ paper was not opened. See [[question-verify-barnett-mckendrick-2004-disk-drive-hazard-estimates]].) | AUDIT 2026-07-28 (opus, cross-model): CONFIRMED at source — full Stanford GSB abstract re-fetched directly; all three quoted fragments ('data on hard disk drive manufacturers'; 'Large organizations led the technology race in this market yet failed to develop into stronger competitors...'; 'although large organizations are likely to do well in technology contests, they also are... likely to become weak competitors over time') match verbatim. Fixed one formatting defect: removed a stray '</content>' tag at end of body. [unverified-quant] flag left intact — the full ASQ paper's statistics remain unopened."
source_url: "https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/why-are-some-organizations-more-competitive-others-evidence-changing"
source_title: "Why Are Some Organizations More Competitive Than Others? Evidence from a Changing Global Market"
source_author: "William P. Barnett & David G. McKendrick"
source_date: "2004-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Large organizations led the technology race in this market yet failed to develop [into stronger competitors]..."
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"
watch_flag: "[unverified-quant — needs primary: the abstract gives the directional finding but no coefficients, hazard ratios, sample size, or years-of-data; the full paper (Administrative Science Quarterly 49(4):535–571, 2004) was not opened.]"
tags: ["organizational-theory","red-queen","william-barnett","hard-disk-drive-industry","computer-industry","competitive-dynamics"]
audits: ["2026-07-28 claude-opus-4-8"]
---


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), is the paper that most directly puts
computer-manufacturing data behind Barnett's organizational Red Queen claim. Per
the authors' own abstract (Stanford GSB faculty publication page), the study uses
"data on hard disk drive manufacturers" and finds that "although large
organizations are likely to do well in technology contests, they also are...
likely to become weak competitors over time compared with small organizations" —
"Large organizations led the technology race in this market yet failed to
develop [into stronger competitors]."

The finding is a specific, non-obvious result: technological leadership did not
translate into growing competitive strength for large firms relative to smaller
rivals. This is the directional opposite of a naive "bigger is always a stronger
competitor" account, and it is consistent with the Red Queen logic that
competitive *exposure* — which insulated large firms may partly escape — is what
builds competitive strength, not size or technological lead per se. It is the
empirical, directly-tested complement to Barnett's own book-text assertion that
the disk-drive industry "drive[s] up each other's failure rates"
([[claim-barnett-book-text-asserts-disk-drive-industry-drives-up-failure-rates]]),
and it sits on a different industry and dataset than the theory's founding test
on Illinois banks
([[claim-barnett-hansen-1996-founding-red-queen-test-used-illinois-banks]]).

The directional finding clears the Tier 1–2 floor for a technical-mechanism
claim. The specific statistics do not: no coefficients, hazard ratios, sample
size, or years-of-data were recovered, so the note stays `seedling` and carries
`[unverified-quant — needs primary]`. Verification — a direct read of the full
ASQ paper — is routed to
[[question-verify-barnett-mckendrick-2004-disk-drive-hazard-estimates]]. Together
with the book text, this note answers the vault's standing question of whether
computer manufacturing's Red Queen behavior is Barnett's own data or only the
publisher's framing:
[[claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition]]. See
[[entity-william-barnett]].