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Lewis, Cordero & Xiong (2020 Forthcoming)
Abstract
Institutional change is typically studied at the organizational field level; we leverage political culture to examine how the context in which these fields are embedded influence processes of institutional change within such fields. Specifically, we look at the effect of conservative political culture on legitimation and adoption of crowdfunding in the United States. We find that crowdfunding is less popular and more slowly legitimated in conservative regions. However, we also find that crowdfunding’s legitimacy is more important in these regions and that once a legitimacy threshold is reached, the adoption of crowdfunding in conservative regions surpasses that in liberal regions.
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As improving the construct validity of measures has been a fundamental concern in management research, we commend Bitektine and colleagues for their efforts to develop and validate individual-level measures for organizational legitimacy, reputation, and status. However, we have some concerns with regard to their measurement approach. Specifically, although Bitektine and colleagues stress the multi-level nature of social evaluations, they do not translate this insight into a measurement instrument that acknowledges that individual evaluators hold both private judgments (“first-order judgments”) and judgments about the collective-level judgment (i.e., judgments of the judgments of other evaluators in a specific reference group, or “second-order judgments”). These two types of individual judgments reflect different facets of social evaluations and have different effects on individual behavior, and thus researchers need to avoid conflating them within a measurement instrument. Our commentary seeks to complement the approach of Bitektine and colleagues by sensitizing readers to the distinction between first-order and second-order judgments and by developing recommendations for future scale development efforts. These recommendations are given in a spirit of collegiality and with an understanding that progress in social evaluation research requires the concerted effort of many researchers over many years.
How does the legitimacy conferred on entrepreneurial endeavors affect the legitimacy of subsequent ones? We extend the notion of a “legitimacy threshold” to develop and test a recursive model of legitimacy. Whereas extant research has focused on whether entrepreneurial endeavors garner sufficient support from key audiences to cross this threshold, we argue that the order of magnitude by which they succeed or fail is consequential for later entrants, too. Distinguishing “blockbuster” from “unsung” successes, and “path breaking” from “broken path” failures, we contend that recent successes and failures affect related subsequent endeavors in predictable, though sometimes counterintuitive ways. We test our hypotheses by examining 182,358 entrepreneurial endeavors pitched within 165 categories over a six-year period on Kickstarter, one of the most important crowdfunding platforms. We show that individual outcomes, taken collectively, generate legitimacy spillovers, either by encouraging audiences to repeatedly support other related endeavors or by discouraging them from doing so. Our research contributes to understanding the recursive nature of legitimacy, the competitive dynamics of entrepreneurial efforts, and crowdfunding platforms.
The purpose of this editorial is to discuss methodological advancements to enhance quantitative theory-testing entrepreneurship research. As the impact of entrepreneurship scholarship accelerates and deepens, our methods must keep pace to continue shaping theory, policy, and practice. Like our sister fields in business, entrepreneurship is coming to terms with the replication and credibility crisis in the social sciences, forcing the field to revisit commonly-held assumptions that limit the promise and prospect of our scholarship. Thus, we provide suggestions for reviewers and editors to identify concerns in empirical work, and to guide authors in improving their analyses and research designs. We hope that our editorial provides useful and actionable guidance for entrepreneurship researchers submitting theory-testing papers to Journal of Business Venturing.
Research Summary
With the recent growth of the sharing economy, regulators must frequently strike the right balance between private and public interests to maximize value creation. In this paper, we argue that political competition is a critical ingredient that explains whether cities accommodate or ban ridesharing platforms and that this relationship is moderated in more populous cities and in cities with higher unemployment rates. We test our arguments using archival data covering ridesharing bans in various U.S. cities during the 2011‐2015 period. We supplement these data with semi‐structured interviews. We find broad support for our arguments while mitigating potential endogeneity concerns. Our study has important implications for nonmarket strategy, entrepreneurship and innovation, and public‐private partnership literatures. In addition, our findings inform policy debates on the sharing economy.
Managerial summary
Entrepreneurs and businesses oftentimes face severe regulatory barriers when commercializing innovative products and services even if the innovations are generally beneficial for consumers and the broader society. This research focuses on the political determinants of regulation to provide a better understanding of why some markets are more receptive to innovative products while other markets are more hostile to them. Using the banning of ridesharing companies (e.g., Uber and Lyft) in various U.S. cities during the 2011‐2015 period, we find that elected politicians facing less political competition (i.e., not easily replaceable, serves multiple terms, longer tenure in office) were more likely to ban ridesharing companies and favor, potentially displaceable, local taxicab companies. Our research has implications for navigating the political barriers to entry.
The author explores the relevance of “place” in institutional field dynamics by examining how actors working in the Israeli high-tech industry construct the meaning and implications of its location. She finds that place is a rich construct that goes far beyond geography and includes culture, character, and values. The discourse of space is plurivocal, offering multiple, sometimes contradictory or ambivalent depictions of the meaning and consequences of location and of the local and global more generally. Place is therefore not given. It is used by institutional actors in different, sometimes contradictory ways, in their abiding efforts to define their identity as part of institutional work.
Prior research has focused on the factors that affect funding success on equity crowdfunding platforms, but a detailed understanding of the factors that drive firms to search for equity crowdfunding in the first place is lacking. Drawing on the pecking order theory, we argue that firms list on equity crowdfunding platforms as a “last resort”—that is, when they lack internal funds and additional debt capacity. In line with the pecking order theory, the empirical evidence shows that firms listed on equity crowdfunding platforms are less profitable, more often have excessive debt levels, and have more intangible assets than matched firms not listed on these platforms. We discuss the implications for theory and practice.
This paper presents a first-ever empirical examination of the effectiveness of signals that entrepreneurs use to induce (small) investors to commit financial resources in an equity crowdfunding context. We examine the impact of venture quality (human capital, social (alliance) capital, and intellectual capital) and uncertainty on fundraising success. Our data highlight that retaining equity and providing more detailed information about risks can be interpreted as effective signals and can therefore strongly impact the probability of funding success. Social capital and intellectual capital, by contrast, have little or no impact on funding success. We discuss the implications of our results for theory, future research and practice.
To explain the legitimation of inequality among the members of a social system, we blend system justification theory and the theory of social judgment. We identify adaptation and replacement as two major mechanisms of inequality legitimation and examine their influence in the unique setting of a natural experiment, the reunification of socialist East Germany and capitalist West Germany. We show that the new members of a society in which inequality is broadly endorsed and perceived as enduring will adapt to this perception and come to view inequality as acceptable. This process of adaptation reflects the subtle but powerful influence of collective legitimacy on an individual’s tacit approval of inequality. Inequality also becomes legitimate as older cohorts are replaced by younger cohorts; however, this effect is weaker than the effect of adaptation. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating that developing and testing a theory of how inequality becomes legitimized can provide new insights into the ideational antecedents of inequality.
The study of institutional change is a core research area in organization theory and is of increasing relevance for scholarship in other disciplines. In this article, we review the substantial number of studies that have examined the ways by which institutions are created, modified, or transformed, highlighting the lack of integration of prior works that emphasize exogenous shocks, institutional entrepreneurship, and practice-based change. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective, we then develop a novel typology of pathways of change that more comprehensively brings together this diverse literature, accounts for the richness and heterogeneity of institutional change processes unveiled by studies to date, and provides a more synthetic framework to guide future research. Based on our analysis and theorizing, we discuss important new scholarly directions that will enhance our understanding of different kinds of institutional change processes and outcomes, as well as contribute to further development of the institutional logics perspective.
Despite increased interest in examining the factors that influence crowdfunding success, the effects of community context have been relatively unexamined. We address this void by examining the role of cultural context in crowdfunding success. Our unique data set of crowdfunding projects to “save the local theater” are homogenous in their goal, allowing us to test whether crowdfunding campaigns in certain communities lead to better funding outcomes than others. Theoretically, our results suggest the need for further integration of community and cultural constructs into models of venture funding, as such variables may have more relevance than previously believed.
Political ideology represents an imperfect yet important indicator of a host of personality traits and cognitive preferences. These preferences, in turn, seemingly propel liberals and conservatives towards divergent life-course experiences. Criminal behavior represents one particular domain of conduct where differences rooted in political ideology may exist. Using a national dataset, we test whether and to what extent political ideology is predictive of self-reported criminal behavior. Our results show that self-identified political ideology is mono-tonically related to criminal conduct cross-sectionally and prospectively and that liberals self-report more criminal conduct than do conservatives. We discuss potential causal mechanisms relating political ideology to individual conduct.
Research generally suggests that, relative to commercial entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs stand at a disadvantage at acquiring resources through traditional financial institutions. Yet interest in social entrepreneurship appears to be at an all-time high. The current paper advances the argument that an innovative institutional form - crowdfunding - has emerged to address the needs of social entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs with limited access to traditional sources of capital. To examine this, we study whether and how a sustainability orientation affects entrepreneurs' ability to acquire financial resources through crowdfunding and hypothesize that a venture's sustainability orientation will enhance its fundraising capability. We also suggest that project legitimacy and creativity mediate the relationship between a sustainability orientation and funding success. Our analysis produces two key findings: 1) a sustainability orientation positively affects funding success of crowdfunding projects, and 2) this relationship is partially mediated by project creativity and third party endorsements. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.
We propose that political differences in social policy support may be partly driven by the tendency for conservatives to show greater sensitivity to deviance than liberals, even among targets lacking social or functional relevance. In 4 studies, participants were shown geometric figures and were asked to identify the extent to which they were "triangles" (or circles, squares, etc.). More conservative participants reported greater differentiation between perfect and imperfect shapes than more liberal participants, indicating greater sensitivity to deviance. Moreover, shape differentiation partly accounted for the relationship between political ideology and social policy, partially mediating the link between conservatism and harsher punishment of wrongdoers (Studies 1 and 4), less support for public aid for disadvantaged groups (Study 2), and less financial backing for policies that benefit marginalized groups in society (Study 3). This effect was specific to policies that targeted deviant groups (Study 3) and who were not too highly deviant (Study 4). Results suggest that, in addition to commonly cited affective and motivational reactions to deviant actors, political differences in social policy may also be driven by conservatives' greater cognitive propensity to distinguish deviance. (PsycINFO Database Record
The distinction of macro- and microfoundations of institutions implies a multilevel conceptualization of institutional processes. We adopt the evaluators' perspective on legitimacy to develop a multilevel theory of the legitimacy process under ideal-type conditions of institutional stability and institutional change, and we explore the dynamics of institutional change - from destabilization of the institutional order to return to stability in legitimacy judgments expressed by evaluators. We argue that through the process of institutionalization, legitimacy judgments of evaluators are subjected to social control and describe an institutional stability loop - a cross-level positive-feedback process that ensures persistence of legitimacy judgments and stability of the institutional order. Viewing institutional stability as a state of suppressed microlevel diversity, we draw researchers' attention to "silenced" legitimacy judgments and to judgment suppressor factors that induce evaluators to abstain from making their deviant judgments public. The removal of such factors leads to the (re)emergence of competing judgments in public communications and creates an opportunity for institutional change. We explore competitive strategies that address propriety or validity components of legitimacy and describe the process through which organizational fields return to a state of institutional stability.
We use meta-analytical techniques to address three central debates in institutional theory: Is organizational behavior the product of social structure or organizational agency? Does conformity to institutional norms enhance or diminish organizational performance? Can organizational field-level factors explain differences in the pull of isomorphic forces across organizational fields? We find that the influence of social structure is weak. Also, the adoption of isomorphic templates improves both symbolic and substantive performance. Finally, we identify several field-level factors that moderate isomorphic processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for institutional theory research.
Using institutional theory as a conceptual framework, the present paper construes crowdfunding as a form of institutional entrepreneurship and its three components, the entrepreneurs, the crowd, and the crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) as institutional entrepreneurs. The paper also argues that crowdfunding has gained some form of legitimacy through media coverage and the passage of the JOBS Act. The paper’s implications for research in institutional entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, and entrepreneurship education are discussed.
We distill existing literature on theoretical contribution into two dimensions, originality (incremental or revelatory) and utility (scientific or practical). We argue for a revision in the way scholars approach the utility dimension by calling for a view of theorizing that would enable theories with more "scope" (both scientific and practical utility). We also argue for an orientation toward "prescience" as a way of achieving scope and fulfilling our scholarly role of facilitating organizational and societal adaptiveness.
An organization's identity, symbolized by its corporate name, is rooted in institutional fields. We advance the construct of symbolic isomorphism, or the resemblance of an organization's symbolic attributes to those of others within its institutional field, and examine its effects on the homogenization of names and legitimacy. We review historical naming patterns and present two studies that examine the antecedents and outcomes of name conformity: The first analyzes 1,600 name changes to demonstrate how institutional conformity shapes organizational identities, and the second surveys public audiences and delineates how symbolic isomorphism serves as a touchstone for legitimacy.
This article models the implications of innovations being nested within categories. In effect, social actors assess the legitimacy of innovations vis-à-vis conformity to categories such that a sufficiently legitimate innovation may be adopted without direct reference to the behavior of peers. However, when innovations lack categorical legitimacy, actors default to proximately peer-oriented heuristics such as information cascades. Eventually, if enough similarly novel innovations achieve widespread popularity, their conventions will become accepted as a legitimate category. Thus density creates legitimacy, but this density can be at the level of the particular innovation or of the category within which it is embedded.
Research Summary
This article invites scholars to reconsider how the evolution of entrepreneurial phenomena affects the underlying theories employed in our field. We highlight three themes affected by changes to the entrepreneurial journey nowadays in a way that can challenge some foundational research in each area. To that end, we engage in a dual conversation; explicitly revisiting extant theories, as well as deliberately seeking out practice insights on how behaviors and actions are changing. This approach provides fertile ground for future work to re‐examine the theoretical assumptions we often take for granted. Such investigation can either provide fresh evidence of the robustness of extant theory, or create new pathways of inquiry. For entrepreneurship scholars who are dedicated to researching innovation and progress in firms and individuals, this is an exciting time to create innovation and progress in our field.
Managerial Summary
Has the entrepreneurial journey remained unchanged over the past decades? And if there have been substantive changes, what are they? And what are their implications? These are critical questions that talk to entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners alike. The purpose of this article is to encourage a dialogue among and across the two groups. We present dual theory‐practitioner conversations around three points of dialogue; the origin of entrepreneurial opportunity, organizing and scaling, and resource acquisition. In each case, we show that drawing on both the practice and academic community is important in identifying the value of extant theories and frameworks and where there are important opportunities for new frameworks and predictions. We believe that this kind of theory‐practitioner dialogue offers invaluable guidance to further advance our field.
A video abstract is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7o9Yy-Vtzs.
Access to finance is arguably one of the most critical challenges in starting a new business. In this study, we examine how the difficulty of obtaining bank loans based on housing collateral, which is a form of traditional finance, relates to crowdfunding use by entrepreneurs. We obtained data on housing prices related closely to the cost of accessing such bank loans and matched these data to a 2009-2013 novel data set from a leading crowdfunding market. We adopted the first-difference estimator to address unobserved area-specific effects and used housing supply elasticity as an instrument for housing price changes. We found an increased decline in housing prices leads to a significant increase in the creation of crowdfunding projects. However, we did not find significant differential effects in housing price changes between successful and unsuccessful projects. Finally, the effect of housing prices on crowdfunding projects was more significant for areas with low socioeconomic status. Interestingly, the increase in crowdfunding projects in these lowstatus areas was driven wholly by a significant increase in unsuccessful projects, whereas the effect of housing prices on successful projects was significant only in areas of high socioeconomic status. Numerous additional tests support the robustness of our main findings. Overall, our study suggests that crowdfunding can supplement traditional sources of funding although socioeconomic status may still prevent disadvantaged people from receiving its full benefits.
Entrepreneurship contributes importantly to the economy. However, differences in the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship vary significantly across developing and developed countries. We use a sample of 70 countries over the period of 2005–2015 to examine how formal and informal institutional dimensions (availability of debt and venture capital, regulatory business environment, entrepreneurial cognition and human capital, corruption, government size, government support) affect the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship between developed and developing countries. Our results demonstrate that institutions are important for both the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship. However, not all institutions play a similar role; rather, there is a dynamic relationship between institutions and economic development.
How can new ventures successfully distinguish themselves from competitors and incumbents while also ensuring that the new venture is seen as legitimate and appropriate? This tension is challenging. If a new venture is not seen as legitimate, usually by conforming to typical models of firms in its category, it will struggle to access resources, attract customers, satisfy regulators and curry favor from other stakeholders. This makes commercialization challenging. At the same time, entrepreneurs must convince customers, investors, and suppliers that their nascent firm is offering something new and valuable. This is the challenge of optimal distinctiveness: how different can and should firms be? Prior research addressing the challenge of optimal distinctiveness has suggested that firms strike a strategic balance between conformity for legitimation and competitive differentiation, and also that firms should be as different as legitimately possible. While similar, there is ambiguity in these prescriptions. Should firms perfectly balance legitimacy and differentiation, or aggressively differentiate themselves beyond a base level of legitimacy? How to achieve optimal distinctiveness remains unclear. Clouding matters further, how a firm seeks legitimation and pursues differentiation is contextual depending on industry, technology stage, constituents and other factors. This means that the path to optimal distinctiveness likely demonstrates equifinality. We adopt a configurational approach, exploring optimal distinctiveness in the context of newly commercializing Canadian clean technology firms. We consider how firms use differentiating framing and collaboration strategies in the context of radical technology, incumbent dependency, relevant entrepreneurial experience, and presence in international markets. Rather than assuming a singular point of optimal distinctiveness, we explore how different combinations of strategies and conditions can lead to successful commercialization. Methodologically, we adopt an exploratory qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) approach. Our study elaborates theory on optimal distinctiveness by developing the notion of a legitimacy threshold. We argue that successfully commercializing firms are those that seek levels of differentiation that go beyond merely striking a strategic balance. In the process we identify combinations of strategies and contextual conditions associated with successful commercialization as well as non-commercialization.
Positive and negative views of family firms and their performance abound. Although there have been explanations for this divergence based on conditions of governance and context, the institutional environment has been less thoroughly explored as a source of these differences. We argue that the blend of family and market institutional logics in the regional communities where firms operate can have an important impact on the governance arrangements and financial performance of family firms. Specifically, we find that family-intensive governance is more common where family logic predominates in a region, and does best when this logic remains at modest levels or is countered by market logic. We test and support these notions in a comprehensive sample of private family firms in Italy, an ideal context in which distinct historically-determined logics exists among its 20 regions.
Psychological scientists draw inferences about populations based on samples—of people, situations, and stimuli—from those populations. Yet, few papers identify their target populations, and even fewer justify how or why the tested samples are representative of broader populations. A cumulative science depends on accurately characterizing the generality of findings, but current publishing standards do not require authors to constrain their inferences, leaving readers to assume the broadest possible generalizations. We propose that the discussion section of all primary research articles specify Constraints on Generality (i.e., a “COG” statement) that identify and justify target populations for the reported findings. Explicitly defining the target populations will help other researchers to sample from the same populations when conducting a direct replication, and it could encourage follow-up studies that test the boundary conditions of the original finding. Universal adoption of COG statements would change publishing incentives to favor a more cumulative science.
Research summary
This article provides a review of the entrepreneurial finance literature in the surprisingly not very well integrated entrepreneurship and finance journals. Entrepreneurial finance encompasses venture capital, private equity, private debt, trade credit, IPOs, angel finance, and crowdfunding, among other forms of finance. We analyze trends in citation activity to these topic areas across 16 journals that publish at least somewhat regularly on these topics, and we show there has been a rise in citations on venture capital, private equity, and IPOs post‐2006. We highlight an unfortunate degree of segmentation in the literature, as well as topics that have been the subject of scholarly focus, and identify promising topics for future research.
Managerial summary
Who does research in entrepreneurial finance—entrepreneurship or finance scholars? And which types of journals are more likely to publish research in entrepreneurial finance? In this article, we provide an overview of the literature on topics that include venture capital, private equity, private debt, trade credit, IPOs, angel finance, and crowdfunding. Our review of the literature shows some elements of segmentation by the specific topic, which we explain is partly due to the fact that datasets on entrepreneurial finance themselves are often segmented and do not include information on more than one form of entrepreneurial finance at a time. Further, we show citation patterns are segmented by the type of journal, with finance journals being much less likely to refer to entrepreneurship journals. Copyright © 2017 Strategic Management Society
This paper analyzes the substantially growing markets for crowdfunding, in which retail investors lend to borrowers without financial intermediaries. Critics suggest that these markets allow sophisticated investors to take advantage of unsophisticated investors. The growth and viability of these markets critically depend on the underlying incentives. We provide evidence of perverse incentives in crowdfunding that are not fully recognized by the market. In particular, we look at group leader bids in the presence of origination fees and find that these bids are (wrongly) perceived as a signal of good loan quality, resulting in lower interest rates. Yet these loans actually have higher default rates. These adverse incentives are overcome only with sufficient skin in the game and when there are no origination fees. The results from the analysis in this paper provide more general implications for crowdfunding, its structure, and its regulation.
In a study of artists who launched independent record labels in the music industry from 1990 to 2013, we focus on explaining the paradox generated when prospective entrepreneurs accumulate broad functional experience, which signals to resource providers mastery of different skills and access to various information and resources but may also undermine the legitimacy of their entrepreneurial claims because they are not seen as specialists. To resolve this paradox, we theorize that the potential legitimacy discount of categorical membership can be avoided when individuals are classified according to multiple categories simultaneously. We find that the transition to entrepreneurship is most likely to occur when an artist’s functional experience is broad but market experience is narrow: he or she has mastered a variety of skills but solicited few audiences. We also find that the paradox of breadth is attenuated—the potential penalty of functional breadth and the corresponding need to develop narrow market experience are reduced—when the entrepreneur has alternate methods of signaling legitimacy, including high status and more-typical prior work experience. Moreover, some audiences are more disposed than others to allow an entrepreneur to pursue greater novelty. Our findings suggest that mastering a variety of skills is not universally beneficial for aspiring entrepreneurs. In some circumstances, such mastery is best coupled with a narrow market focus.
Crowdfunding is a rapidly growing phenomenon wherein entrepreneurs seek funding for their entrepreneurial activities from a potentially large audience of interested individuals. Crowdfunding has exploded in popularity over the last decade and now accounts for tens of billions of dollars annually. But despite the importance and growth of crowdfunding, little scholarly knowledge exists about the topic. To address this gap, this special issue includes five articles that each advance knowledge about crowdfunding in important ways. We briefly review past work on crowdfunding in leading entrepreneurship and management journals. We then highlight the diverse contributions offered in the special issue articles.
The explosion of crowdfunding within entrepreneurial circles is attracting increased academic interest in the nature of crowdfunding, its antecedents, and its consequences. In an effort to help researchers concentrate their inquiry on the most promising questions and theories involving crowdfunding, we surveyed key thought leaders within the entrepreneurship field—the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice editorial review board—regarding what inquiry they believe is needed. Their responses offer implications for crowdfunding research. For example, cross-disciplinary work is one approach that board members believe holds high potential. In response, we outline a cross-disciplinary research agenda that can inform scholarly efforts.
This study draws upon affective events theory, research regarding funders' perceptions, and research regarding expectation alignment between products and their presenters to develop and test an indirect effects model of crowdfunding resource allocation decisions. To test our hypothesized relationships, we drew upon a sample of 102 participants who each assessed ten different product pitches made by ten different entrepreneurs. Results from the study indicate that perceived product creativity is positively related to crowdfunding performance, both directly and indirectly, via positive affective reactions of prospective funders. Moreover, we find the indirect effect of product creativity is contingent upon the extent to which funders perceive an entrepreneur to be passionate, such that perceived entrepreneurial passion increases the positive nature of the indirect effect. Implications for future theory development, empirical research and implications for practitioners are discussed as well.
The article focuses on the development of a theory. A discussion is presented about steps involved in developing a theory, such as seeing which factors logically should be considered as part of the explanation of the social or individual phenomena of interest. The authors assert that authors developing theories are considering these factors, they should err in favor of including too many factors, recognizing that over time their ideas will be refined. The article presents information about the importance of sensitivity to the competing virtues of parsimony and comprehensiveness.
The concept of an institutional field is one of the cornerstones of institutional theory, and yet the concept has been stretched both theoretically and empirically, making consolidation of findings across multiple studies more difficult. In this article, we review the literature and analyze empirical studies of institutional fields to build scaffolding for the cumulation of research on institutional fields. Our review revealed two types of fields: exchange and issue fields, with three subtypes of each. We describe their characteristics. Subsequently, we review field conditions in the extant literature and develop a typology based on two dimensions: the extent of elaboration of institutional infrastructure and the extent to which there is an agreed upon prioritization of logics. We discuss the implications of field types and conditions for isomorphism, agency, and field change, based on a review of the literature that revealed six pathways of field change and the factors affecting them. We outline a research agenda based on our review highlighting the need for consolidation of field studies and identify several outstanding issues that are in need of further research.
This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.
The proposed theory extends research on cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy, reputation, and status by advancing an evaluator's perspective on these concepts as forms of social judgment, each addressing a different evaluator's question about the organization. I describe how evaluators make their social judgments under conditions of bounded rationality and how cognitive and social factors influence this process. The proposed process model of social judgment formation highlights the complex and nondeterministic nature of this process.
Scholarship commonly implies that the major political parties in the United States are configured as mirror images to each other, but the two sides actually exhibit important and underappreciated differences. The Republican Party is primarily the agent of an ideological movement whose supporters prize doctrinal purity, while the Democratic Party is better understood as a coalition of social groups seeking concrete government action. This asymmetry is reinforced by American public opinion, which favors left-of-center positions on most specific policy issues yet simultaneously shares the general conservative preference for smaller and less active government. Each party therefore faces a distinctive governing challenge in balancing the unique demands of its base with the need to maintain broad popular support. This foundational difference between the parties also explains why the rise of the Tea Party movement among Republicans in recent years has not been accompanied by an equivalent ideological insurgency among Democrats.
We examine a crowdfunding platform that connects artists with funders. Although the Internet reduces many distance-related frictions, local and distant funders exhibit different funding patterns. Local funders appear less responsive to information about the cumulative funds raised by an artist. However, this distance effect appears to proxy for a social effect: it is largely explained by funders who likely have an offline social relationship with the artist (“friends and family”). Yet, this social effect does not persist past the first investment, suggesting that it may be driven by an activity like search but not monitoring. Thus, although the platform seems to diminish many distance-sensitive costs, it does not eliminate all of them. These findings provide a deeper understanding of the abilities and limitations of online markets to facilitate transactions and convey information between buyers and sellers with varying degrees of social connectedness.
In this paper we explore the constitutive effects of a legitimate order on the mobilization of collective action. We distinguish
between validity (the collective orientation to a binding rule) and propriety (an individual's approval of the rule). Legitimacy
theory suggests that validity has direct effects on attempts to mobilize which are independent of propriety, power, and social
control. A laboratory study is used to isolate these direct effects: when change in a communication network would damage collective
purpose, fewer attempts at change are made. Further results reveal that validity also affects nonmobilizing alternatives.
Moreover, validity indirectly influences propriety: individuals act out commitment to the constitutive rules and then bring
propriety into line with that action. We conclude by noting implications of the structural effects of legitimacy on collective
action.
This research demonstrates wide variation in tightness-looseness (the strength of punishment and degree of latitude/permissiveness) at the state level in the United States, as well as its association with a variety of ecological and historical factors, psychological characteristics, and state-level outcomes. Consistent with theory and past research, ecological andman-made threats-such as a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater disease prevalence, fewer natural resources, and greater degree of external threat-predicted increased tightness at the state level. Tightness is also associated with higher trait conscientiousness and lower trait openness, as well as a wide array of outcomes at the state level. Compared with loose states, tight states have higher levels of social stability, including lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization. However, tight states also have higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness relative to loose states. In all, tightness-looseness provides a parsimonious explanation of the wide variation we see across the 50 states of the United States of America.
Do the states of the United States matter (or are they of no political consequence)? Using a data set with over 50 thousand respondents, we demonstrate the influence of state political culture on partisanship and ideology. For individuals, we find that the state of residence is an important predictor of partisan and ideological identification, independent of their demographic characteristics. At the aggregate level, state culture dominates state demography as a source of state-to-state differences in opinion. In general, geographic location may be a more important source of opinion than previously thought. One indication of the importance of state culture is that state effects on partisanship and ideology account for about half of the variance in state voting in recent presidential elections.
Why does the number of organizations of any given kind vary over time? Utilizing a diverse group of organizations including national labor unions, newspapers and newspaper publishers, brewing firms, life insurance companies, and banks, this book seeks to deepen and broaden the understanding of change in organizational populations by examining the dynamics of numbers of organizations in populations. Such an approach involves explaining the sources of growth and decline in the sum of organizations (what the authors call "density") over the histories of populations of organizations. The authors conclude their study by formulating a theory of density-dependent legitimation and competition.
This research replicates and extends Thomas, Walker, and Zelditch's (1986) work on legitimacy and collective action. We find,
as they did, that validity significantly reduces attempts to change an inequitable structure. But contrary to their speculation,
our data suggest that validity has two direct effects on propriety: (1) It increases an actor's sense that a structure possesses
propriety, and (2) it acts to prevent erosion of propriety when substantial inequity is introduced into the structure.