Filippo Carlo Wezel

Antecedents and Consequences of Organizational Change: ‘Institutionalizing’ the Behavioral Theory of the Firm

In this paper, we highlight the conditions under which organizations initiate changes in two distinct institutional contexts. While the focus within behavioral research has been on aspiration-driven organizational change, the effect of institutional dynamics on the probability of change has been given limited attention. Pooled cross-sectional data covering the period 1920-2001 in the baseball industry are regressed to examine a set of hypotheses that predict the drivers of organizational change in periods of institutional stability and instability, as well as the impact of these changes on performance. Our findings show that the role of aspiration-driven organizational change diminishes in environments characterized by institutional instability. Rather, mimetic and cognitive pressures pave the ground for responses to institutional dynamics. We also shed light on how the relative stability/instability of the institutional environment heterogeneously influences the implications of behavioral changes for organizational performance.

Location Dependence and Industry Evolution: Founding Rates in the United Kingdom Motorcycle Industry, 1895-1993

This paper examines the founding rates of 648 motorcycle organizations in the United Kingdom between 1895 and 1993. It collates the recent findings on spatial density dependence with those related to the temporal heterogeneity of legitimation and competition. The findings of this study highlight the importance of taking into account the geographical configuration of organizational populations to comprehend their evolution.

Getting There: Exploring the Role of Expectations and Preproduction Delays in Processes of Organizational Founding

Because of preproduction delays, environmental conditions at founding cannot explain organization-building decisions taken earlier. As a consequence, environmental conditions at founding cannot explain organizational founding. Future levels of resource availability may be estimated, but not directly observed by potential entrepreneurs at the time at which they decide to enter preproduction. In this paper, we take these considerations as our starting point to build a dynamic feedback model of organization founding. According to the model, organizational founding is driven by expectations that entrepreneurs form about future levels of resources and, only indirectly, by current levels of population density. We explore the behavior of the model under a variety of experimental conditions. We show that the qualitative behavior of the model is consistent with studies that have linked the duration of preproduction stage with fluctuations in density during population maturity. Our simulation analyses sustains three main conclusions. First, historical trajectories of organizational populations that are consistent with empirical observations may be produced by mechanisms that are not directly dependent on density. Second, alternative hypotheses about how expectations are formed produce qualitatively different historical trajectories of density. Third, fluctuations in numbers of organizations are linked to specific aspects of individual organization-building decisions.

Human capital, inter-firm mobility and organizational evolution

Contents: Preface Part I: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations 1. The Role of Individual Conduct in Macro-organizational Theory 2. Partnership as Major Type of Organization Form Part II: The Intangible Asset of Human Intensive Organizations 3. Social Capital of Organizations: Conceptualization, Level of Analysis and Performance Implications 4. Human, Social Capital and Organizational Dissolution 5. Mimicry and the Market: Adoption of a New Organizational Form 6. Mergers and Acquisitions: Strategic and Organizational Fit Part III: The Role of Individual Mobility for Organizational Behavior and Performance 7. Spatial and Temporal Heterogeneity in Founding Patterns 8. Heterogeneity Shifts Due to Member Mobility: New Insights on Demographic Diversity and Organizational Survival 9. Competitive Consequences of Routine Spillovers Due to Interfirm Mobility 10. In Conclusion: Micro Behaviors as Inducements for Firm and Sector Evolution Index

Scale and Scope Economies in the British Motorcycle Industry, 1899–1993

This paper extends organizational ecology by making an attempt to disentangle the consequences of scale and scope economies for organizational survival under different product market configurations. We test our hypotheses by analyzing the mortality rates of 643 UK motorcycle producers during the 1899–1993 period. The findings obtained offer two specific contributions. First, by separating the performance impact of scale from scope economies we clarify the complex mechanisms behind the survival consequences of different organizational strategies. Second, we show how the intensity of both scale and scope forces is relative to the aggregate market-level product configuration. The implications of these findings for organizational ecology and strategic management, and their cross-fertilization, are further discussed.

Ambition Is Nothing Without Focus: Compensating for Negative Transfer of Experience in R&D

Organizations create high-impact inventions when they combine disparate strands of technology in their corporate research and development. We theorize that when undertaking complex inventive search characterized by high breadth, i.e., drawing on multiple diverse technology components, an organizations propensity toward high-impact inventions depends on its stock of experience with recombining such components and on the focus of its inventive search. Building on learning transfer theory, we argue that the complexity and causal ambiguity of higher-breadth projects is such that experience with similar inventive search will be a poorer guide, comparatively reducing their inventive impact; however, this negative effect can be attenuated by the degree of focus of an organizations contemporaneous inventive search. Using a longitudinal data set of patents from the photographic imaging industry, we find support for our predictions.

The organizational advantage of nations: An ecological perspective on the evolution of the motorcycle industry in Belgium, Italy and Japan, 1898-1993

Why do nations succeed in particular industries? Why do certain industries prosper in one country, but languish in others? Several recent attempts to address these core questions in the study of geography and strategy are based on the notion of domestic rivalry as the essence of the persistence of competitive advantage of nations. Starting from the claim that rivalry between countries typically implies competition among organizational populations across national boundaries, in this paper we make a first attempt to develop empirical connections between a central problem in international business and the conceptual and analytical categories of corporate demography. Relying on information on the founding of 719 independent motorcycle producers operating in Belgium, Italy and Japan during the period 1898–1993, we build on recent results in organizational ecology to link a selected number of essential but underspecified aspects in current theories of international business to observable patterns of competition within and among organizational populations. The results of the analysis invite a new interpretation of the evolutionary forces that shape the competitive advantage of nations.

Davids Against Goliath? Collective Identities and the Market Success of Peripheral Organizations During Resource Partitioning

This paper contributes to the sociology of markets literature by arguing that collective identities sustain the market success of peripheral producers during the process of resource partitioning. Two conditions underlie the positive returns obtained by peripheral producers from their identity claims. First, the demise of near-center producers crystallizes the difference among classes of organizations which benefits the market success of peripheral producers. Second, individual peripheral producers (i) facing an audience that values their identity claims and (ii) exhibiting credible engagement with their claimed identity encounter greater market success. Our contributions to the literature are discussed.

Faraway, Yet So Close: Organizations in Demographic Flux

Change in firm governance is often associated with inbound and outbound movements of key decision makers. This research extends that observation by treating mobility as a trigger of demographic change in management teams that, in turn, influences organizational survival. Mobility occasions transformations in demographic profiles both within a firm and among firms sharing a competitive arena. In the former case, shifts in diversity may alter the quasi-resolution of conflict achieved by the firms upper echelons, or, conversely, serve to inject novel views and ideas. In the latter case, migration may modify the demographic overlap among firms and thus rearrange their competitive positioning. We present here an empirical test of this two-pronged manifestation of demographic change and stress the moderating roles of team age and competitive intensity.

Identity repositioning: The case of Liberal Democrats and audience attention in British politics, 1950–2005

Empirical research demonstrates that category specialism is aligned with competitive success and that social actors indulging in perceptual violations of social codes are subjected to devaluations. Through category generalism, however, social actors may obtain access to diverse set of audience segments. This chapter investigates such a trade-off in the context of political ideologies – conceived here as composed of social codes and exposed to a discipline similar to that of market categories. A successful instance of repositioned identity is introduced and discussed: the case of the British Liberal Democrats Party during the post-WWII period. Particular attention is dedicated to the process of recombination of own and oppositional social codes. This strategy contributed to increase the audience attention received on each of the issues traditionally “owned” by the Liberal Democrats Party. Party level analyses suggest that the borrowed issues improved audience attention when they contributed to extend and clarify the ideological roots of the Liberal Party. The implications of this case study for current research on market categories are further discussed.