Although the concept of niche has been extremely useful in sociological theory and research, some aspects of the concept have not been clearly developed. This article advances a theoretical reconstruction of the concept of niche, with special application to organizations. The proposed formal model unifies several active lines of sociological theory. It also extends the notion of the niche from the realm of behaviors to apply to the rules coding social identities and organizational forms. The reconstruction gives deeper insight into the niche of an organizational population as well as individual organizations. Finally, the model analyzes the (thus far) tacit assumption that niches are convex, examines the implications of convexity for commonly used measures of niche width, and provides a general sociological argument for the predominance of convex niches.

尽管利基的概念在社会学理论和研究中非常有用，但是该概念的某些方面还没有得到明确的发展。本文提出了利基概念的理论重构，并将其特殊地应用于组织。拟议的形式模型统一了社会学理论的一些活跃路线。它还从行为领域扩展了利基的概念，以适用于编码社会身份和组织形式的规则。重建工作可以更深入地了解组织人口以及单个组织的利基市场。最后，该模型分析了（迄今）壁convex是凸的默认假设，检验了凸度对于小生境宽度的常用度量的含义，