No abstract

Studies of career dynamics implicitly claim that government employees are not entrepreneurial. Utilizing longitudinal data from the U.S. Panel Study for Income Dynamics, we investigate the reasons for the low rate of entrepreneurship from the public sector. We conjecture that it is due to labor market matching processes and the bureaucratic nature of public organizations and bureaucratization of individuals. Our life-course analysis identifies labor market matching as a major determinant: nonentrepreneurial types choose public sector employment. We also uncover tenure and context effects, which decrease and increase the hazard rate of entrepreneurial exit, respectively. Whereas the former effect points toward adaptation and internal labor market sorting, the latter draws attention to exits due to frustration.entrepreneurship, public sector, bureaucracy, endogeneity, tenure, sorting

Organizations that compete in institutional environments in which oppositional logics compete for dominance face a risk-return trade-off between maintaining ideological purity versus pragmatism by borrowing template elements from the rival ideology. Deviating from ideological purity might improve a firm's competitive strength, however, at the same time, it might also undermine its very identity and legitimacy. Although such decisions are of strategic importance, research about why, how, and where these trade-offs are made is still limited.We develop the argument that organizations will be more likely to deviate from ideological purity when the potential return of borrowing from the oppositional template exceeds the perceived risk of doing so. The more organizations aspire to be ideologically pure, the more they are constrained by the moral codes that define the category, and, therefore, the higher the risk associated with deviating from purity. However, given the potential benefits of pragmatism, pure organizations will be particularly sensitive to contextual cues that reduce the perceived risk of borrowing, tilting their tradeoff balance toward pragmatism. Specifically, we expect that pure (compared to less pure) organizations will be particularly tempted to seize the opportunities offered by pragmatism when (1) they perform below aspiration, (2) the relevant market attaches less importance to ideological purity, and (3) pragmatism is becoming taken-for-granted.We test our hypotheses on detailed data of the hiring process of branch managers of Turkish Islamic banks analyzing when and in which communities Islamic banks hire managers from conventional banking in order to implement their geographical expansion strategy in the period 2003-2016.

Past research has shown that founders bring important capabilities and resources from their prior employment into their new firms and that these intergenerational transfers influence the performance of these ventures. However, we know little about whether organizational practices also transfer from parents to spawns, and if so, what types of practices are transferred? Using a combination of survey and registrar data and through a detailed identification strategy, we examine these two previously unaddressed questions. Our results provide strong evidence for organizational heritage in practices. About 70% of the comparisons of start-ups and other established organizations are less similar than the average similarity between a parent organization and its spawn and that the overlap in organizational practices is almost 10% greater between a spawn and its parents than between the spawn and other established firms. Our further investigation shows that not all practices seem to find their way into the new entrepreneurial firms. In particular, practices that are valuable for and fit with the requirements of a start-up organization, and at the same time are more clearly defined and casually less ambiguous, are more likely to be transferred by the founders from their previous employers. These results contribute to our understanding of how entrepreneurs assemble their organizations and practice innovation as well as the diffusion of practices and the origins of firm heterogeneity.

Four distinct theoretical programs have examined market entry decisions of multiunit firms, advancing different explanations for the relationship between a firm's likelihood of entry into a geographical market and the number of rivals that are already present in the target market. Within the strategy literature, theory of strategic interactions explains that firms will want to establish a foothold in markets where their multimarket competitors are scarce, but avoid markets where there are many multimarket competitors. Within economic geography, positive externalities such as increase in demand explain firms' desire to locate close to their rivals whereas negative externalities such as competition explain their desire to avoid them. Within the ecological tradition, density dependence theory explains this relationship in terms of legitimation of an organizational form in a particular market and subsequently increased competition for resources there. Within new institutional theory, the presence of rivals is seen as a signal that a particular market is suitable for entry. Although generally quoted and mentioned in the literature, these four explanations have not been sufficiently separated to indicate whether these four mechanisms all operate simultaneously or whether one of them might account for the often found inverse-U-shaped relationship. Distinguishing firms with different strategies and using various moderators, we test the four explanations jointly and demonstrate their scope of operation. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1723 . This paper was accepted by Jesper Sørensen, organizations.