This paper asks how we can predict entrepreneurship, an individual's participation in the founding of a new organization. We advance a model that combines aspects of two distinct perspectives on entrepreneurship: the social structural view that sees context as the driving force in new venture formation, and the perspective that each founding is an idiosyncratic event attributable to the charisma of the entrepreneur. We propose that the organizational context of an individual either accelerates or retards the likelihood of entrepreneurship-depending on the individual's role in the organization. The effects of role hinge, we argue, on the founder's charismatic identity, and the decoupling of this identity from the organization as it ages and grows. We test our model on a dataset created from responses to a career history survey administered to all alumni of a major U.S. business school. Our findings support the proposition that organizational properties that affect the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur do so in opposite ways for organizational members and founders. Members of organizations become increasingly unlikely to engage in entrepreneurship as their organization ages and grows. By contrast, as an organization develops, its founder is increasingly likely to leave and start a new venture. We discuss how our theory and results demonstrate the value of a sociological perspective on entrepreneurship.

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

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We know that organizations of different but related kinds greatly influence each other’s evolution. Although empirical findings abound, the theories behind them are still being developed. We advance a model of ecological interdependence between emergent and established populations. Our model is based on three main ideas. First, we consider related populations to be those that overlap in identity and resource space and that simultaneously exhibit competitive and mutualistic relationships, the latter leading to legitimacy transfer. Second, we build on the idea that legitimated forms codify prescriptive sanctions for deviations from identity blueprints, and predict that when an emergent population overlaps with an established one in identity space, its early proliferation will manifest violations of established social identities and will trigger prescriptive sanctions. Third, we rely on the notion of a focused identity to argue that organization-level changes affect external perceptions of the population’s collective identity, and hamper legitimacy. Analysis of the survival rates of financial cooperatives in Singapore—a population overlapping the identity and resources of commercial banks—confirms our predictions.

Based on previous empirical research, size is perhaps the most powerful explanatory organizational covariate in strategic analysis. We suggest that theoretical arguments about size be examined carefully to specify models with explicit comparison sets and with mechanisms linking size and underlying processes to outcomes. We illustrate the approach here by advancing arguments about scale competition within an organizational population. In this effort, we feature a theoretical model of scale-based selection, which posits that a firm's chances of survival decrease with its aggregate distance from larger competitors on a transformed size gradient. The model assumes that the appropriate comparison set consists of all contemporaneous similar organizations competing on the basis of scale and operating in a localized geographic setting. We argue that aggregate distance of a focal firm from larger other firms (a specific form of relative position in the size distribution) reflects the extent to which it can capitalize on potential competitive advantages of scale emanating from economic, political, and social processes. Analyzing the mortality rates of large organizations across the entire histories of automobile industries in four major countries provides support for the theory. We discuss the general implications of our findings for strategic and organizational analysis.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Although the niche figures prominently in contemporary theories of organization, analysts often fail to tie micro processes within the niche to long-term changes in the broader environment. In this paper, we advance arguments about the relationship between an organization's niche and evolution in the structure of its organizational population over time. We focus on the technological niche and processes of positioning and crowding among firms in the niche space, relating them to the level of concentration among all firms in the market. Building on previous empirical studies in organizational ecology, we study the evolution of concentration in the American automobile industry from 1885 to 1981 and estimate models of the hazard of exit of individual producers from the market. The findings show that niche and concentration interact in complex ways, yielding a more unified depiction of organizational evolution than typically described or reported.*Many analysts' accounts of the U,S-automobile industry's development, including conjectured reasons for particular firms succeeding and failing, can be readily interpreted from the perspective of the organizational niche. For instance, General Motors' historical success against Ford is hailed by many as the consequence of its early wide-ranging muitiproduct market position-a broad niche, in ecological terms. In more recent years, the Japanese manufacturers showed that they could build a sizeable presence after entering the market with small low-cost cars, a part of the market in which major American producers were not very competitive. According to a niche interpretation, one would say that the Japanese firms benefited from initial niche positions with little overlap from existing firms, allowing them to gain strength before attempting more direct competition.In the background of such niche-based processes, the competitive dynamics of the automobile industry have been driven by both cost and innovation, each of which is tied to scale. The scale of automobile production has increased steadily over the last century, and the race to remain competitively large often constitutes a main reason why automobile firms behave as they do. For instance, insider accounts of the recent round of mergers among large automakers, such as Chrysler and Daimler, point to the increasing scale of the global industry as the critical motivation (Vlasic and Stertz, 2000), As a result of this scale orientation, the automobile industry is characterized generally by a long-term...

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractWe examine how experiential learning affects organizational change and its consequences on firm mortality. We develop hypotheses about the interactions of experiences with a specific type of organizational change on the one hand, and environmental stability, organizational size, and organizational niche width on the other hand. Our findings draw from analysis of the U.S. automobile industry between 1885 and 1981 and support the general prediction that "process" effects of change in the organizational core elevate the hazard of failure. We also find that a dynamic interpretation of organizational environments as comprised of other organizations helps to explicate the interplay between organization and environmental forces that shape the occurrence and outcome of transformation.