Melissa de White interviewing Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford News
Why are so many tech companies laying people off right now?
The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.