I was surprised to see that this book was rated with two stars. However, I was relieved when I saw that part of the reason was that only a single person actually reviewed the book instead of the result being the average of many reviews. I decided to write a review to "correct" what I believe is an unfair rating.The first thing you need to know before reading this book is that the results presented in this book are part of a long debate that has been going on in Organizational Demography (OD). It is not possible to understand these results without an understanding of the problems and discussions that preceded the book. Apparently the previous reviewer is unaware that the authors of this book had published a book seven years before this in which they argued for the use of classical logic in theorizing about OD, therefore he complains that he doesn't believe that classical logic is of any use in organizational theory. I guess some people have a problem with introducing rigor to the field. To them it is better to keep it a field with no systematic way of thinking and without the use of a pre-defined set of tools that can be used to tackle complex problems. What is interesting is that two of the greatest organizational theorists of the twentieth century, Howard Aldrich and Pfeiffer, have acknowledged the fact that researchers in OD have managed to create a coherent, and more importantly, consistent set of ideas and tools to tackle the problems. Logic is one of those tools, and in my opinion, it is the best of them. The fact that the previous reviewer actually used the term "neo-positivist" to describe the use of non-classical logic in the social sciences shows that he doesn't know the difference between classical and non-classical logic. Perhaps he thinks that non-classical logic, of which fuzzy logic is but a small part, is classical logic with a few additions, or extensions, and this is completely false. I would recommend that he read "An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic" by Priest. This is not the place to discuss the difference but suffice it to say that the difference is as big that between foundationalism as discussed by the Greeks and any modern epistemic school of thought. The greatest advances made in non-classical logic were made in the 1950s and 1960s, way after the "fall" of positivism and of course the discovery of Gödel's theorems. These advances were naturally made to revise what was perceived as the shortcomings of the classical logic. That said, it is extremely dogmatic to refuse the use of such a powerful tool in the social sciences because researchers, according to the previous reviewer, are interested in "material inferences". Every single field in the social sciences has theories that have rules or at least guidelines. What is logic but a better formulation of these rules? Why can't it be used? What is wrong with having more systematic thinking? Or should the social sciences, most notably business and management, rely on fluffy inferences?One of the central problems in OD is to know which organization belongs to a certain population. The decision has huge implications for any research. Over the past twenty years many, including the authors of this book, have tried tackling the problems. Lomi and Larsen (2001) have used local interaction as the criteria, Baum (2002) has argued for a network based approach, and yet some, like Barnett and Amburgy (1990), have considered the size of the organization to be the critical factor. In their previous book the authors introduced a very interesting hierarchy in which each layer is more general than the one below it. The rules for deciding the form of a certain organization were stated in the formal language of classical logic. In this book the authors, bravely, state that their previous formulation was lacking and instead present a far more interesting theory. This theory is based on results obtained by Rosch in a series of influential studies which provided evidence for what is termed the "typicality effects". This led to the prototype model of concepts in which categories are composed of core meaning and surrounded by other similar members. This theory has stood very well against competitive theories such Miller and Johnson-Laird's identification procedure and the probabilistic model of Smith, Shoben, and Rips. Rosch's theory lends itself well to fuzzy set theory. Of course, the notion of fuzzy sets is not new in the social sciences. A good first book is "Fuzzy-Set Social Science" by Ragin, and a more comprehensive one is "Fuzzy Set Analysis for Behavioural and Social Sciences" by Smithson. Hannan, Polos and Carroll masterfully bring all these ideas together and use them to develop a wide theory that, hopefully, will help tackle the problem of which organizations to include in certain populations. Of course, this is but one of the problems which the book discusses, but to me it is the most important. The book is not easy, but this is because it tackles serious problems that have been heavily debated for a long time. A significant part of the book uses logic. However it is enough if the reader knows how to read the language of logic. You don't need to know how to individually prove or derive logical results. There is a very helpful appendix at the end of the book which should be enough. Overall, this is a well needed addition to the current literature and one that will surely result in many empirical research papers.