Traditionally, studies looking into the firm from the outside have focused on the issues of adaptation and coevolution from a vista of competing firms in an industry-specific environment or congregations of firms in connected industries (Aldrich and Ruef 2006; Sørenson 2004).
This approach is aimed at categorizing populations that are homogenous inside while equally heterogeneous across a universe of firms.
A priori partitioning of firms has been quite useful for arriving at generalizations, but it has culminated in smoothing out the idiosyncratic aspects of interaction each firm had with its unique broader periphery.