Following the Old Road: Organizational Imprinting and the Regional Development of Russia

ABSTRACT In this article, I draw from organizational imprinting theory to illuminate the impact of the Soviet legacy on contemporary Russian economic geography and regional policy. I argue that central coordination in the creation and regulation of Russian urban agglomerations is connected to a socialist imprinted paradigm associated with the Soviet economic regionalization model and territorial-production complexes (TPCs). I conduct a qualitative historical study to analyze the role of the foundational environment and the dynamics in the development of this imprint. I propose that this imprint effect is prone to reproduction in contemporary regional development strategies and community-based paradigms due to exaptation and cultural-cognitive persistence. The article extends the literature of socialist imprinting by demonstrating how imprints may emerge, transform, and affect localized organizational communities in transition economies and highlights the role of imprinted paradigms in policymaking and regional development.

Organizational Imprinting and Response to Institutional Complexity: Evidence from Publicly-Traded Chinese State-Owned Firms in Hong Kong

ABSTRACTThis study seeks to answer the following question: What are the organizational attributes that influence organizational responses to institutional complexity? Building on core ideas of organizational imprinting, I argue that organizational response is influenced by the imprint from the dominant logic of organizing during the founding period and from the institutional position an organization possessed at founding. Empirically, I examine the variation in board composition of Chinese state-owned firms listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange market. It is found that state-owned firms founded in the market logic dominant period tend to have more non-state directors on the board in that they were organized around the prescription of the market logic and more responsive to shareholders’ demands for legitimacy reasons. Besides, state-owned firms founded by central government agencies tend to have fewer non-state directors because they were born at the center of the socialist system to accomplish strategic goals of the central government and non-state directors may challenge the vested interests. This study contributes to the organizational imprinting and institutional literature and resonates with the contemporary call for a more systematic examination of organizational attributes that influence organizational responses to institutional complexity.

Biological Children Versus Stepchildren: Interorganizational Learning Processes of Spinoff and Nonspinoff Suppliers

Interorganizational scholars have long thought about how firms learn through buyer relationships. However, it is not clear whether dyadic learning gains are susceptible to imitation or are only inherited and whether these gains decay over time or are of an enduring nature. In this paper, I import ideas from the organizational imprinting literature into the interorganizational literature and apply the knowledge-based and learning views of the firm to examine how suppliers with differing initial endowments learn to work together with a buyer. The findings from an inductive multiple case study of spinoff and nonspinoff suppliers of an automotive manufacturer parent in Turkey reveal the following three learning mechanisms: informal relationships and social capital, transfer of routines, and shared identity. Although nonspinoff suppliers also exhibit evidence of several learning processes to a certain extent, spinoff suppliers’ deeper relationship, in particular their shared identity, with their parent based on their direct parental heritage tends to be more difficult for them to copy. No matter how hard nonspinoff suppliers try, they have “one hand tied behind their back,” they remain stepchildren, and they never truly become a biological child. By providing a novel setting and a rich set of qualitative data on the learning behaviors of these two types of suppliers, this study teases apart the knowledge and resources that can be “learned from external sources” versus those that can “only be inherited.”

Why Firms Perform Differently in Corporate Social Responsibility? Firm Ownership and the Persistence of Organizational Imprints

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the effects of firms’ founding ownership in shaping their corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in China. Drawing on a nationwide survey of 1,037 representative manufacturing firms in 12 cities, we specify the imprinting effects of firms’ founding ownership on labor and environmental protections, two important CSR practices. Our results show that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) founded during the state socialist period, regardless of their restructuring experience in the market reform era, continued to implement pro-labor practices. Moreover, even the SOEs founded in the market reform era provided better labor protection than non-SOEs founded during the same time. In contrast, the founding imprints of environmentalism in the reform era for non-SOEs, especially thede novoprivate firms, explain why they spent more than SOEs in environmental protection. We extend the organizational imprinting theory by highlighting the importance of firms’ founding ownership imprints and in shaping their current CSR performance.

The Effects of Business Failure Experience on Successive Entrepreneurial Engagements: An Evolutionary Phase Model

This study draws insights from the literatures on entrepreneurial learning from failure and organizational imprinting to develop an evolutionary phase model to explain how prior business failure experience influences successive newly started businesses. Using multiple case studies of entrepreneurs located in an institutionally developing society in Sub-Sahara Africa, we uncover four distinctive phases of postentrepreneurial business failure: grief and despair, transition, formation, and legacy phases. We find that while the grieving and transition phases entailed processes of reflecting and learning lessons from the business failure experiences, the formation and legacy phases involve processes of imprinting entrepreneurs’ experiential knowledge on their successive new start-up firms. We conclude by outlining a number of fruitful avenues for future research.