Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode

Political Pluralism, Public Policies, and Organizational Choices: Banking Branch Expansion in India, 1948–2003

Data on the expansion of 94 commercial banks in India from 1948 to 2003 were analyzed to test the proposition that political pluralism-wherein competing parties control the state and national governments of a nation-can promote business expansion. The results confirm that such political pluralism reduces the power of either government to constrain business decision making but that pluralism might at times lead to unhealthy competition between parties, harming local expansion opportunities. The data show that, in India, banks selectively exploit political pluralism to guide their expansion decisions.

Contested institutional prescriptions and organizational identity in a pluralist country

Organizational imprinting hypothesis suggests that institutional environment at founding shapes organizational identities. But it remains ambiguous as to how organizational identities are shaped under institutional pluralism, where multiple institutional constituents co-exist and compete for the attention of the entrepreneurs. In this paper, we theorize how organizational identities are shaped by the interactions between different institutional constituents. An investigation of the linguistic identity choices of newspapers founded in India between 1948 and 2008 lend support to our thesis that the ability of dominant institutional constituents to shape organizational identities at founding is contingent on the strengths of their challengers and allies.