Predicting Organizational Mortality: How Financial Management Matters

Managing financial resources is one of the most important responsibilities of every organization; however, the literature still cannot provide an answer to an important question: how does financial health matter to organizational mortality, especially for nonprofit organizations? To advance our knowledge in this regard, this study empirically examines the effects of solvency, profitability, margin, and liquidity on nonprofit dissolution. Higher solvency, profitability, and margin have significant effects on reducing the likelihood of nonprofit dissolution, but liquidity does not function as a significant predictor.

Patterns in Special District Creation and Dissolution

Special districts are a numerous and unique form of local government in the United States. Unlike cities, counties, and towns, special districts are created and dissolved often. Using tools from the industrial organizations literature, this analysis examines patterns in creation and dissolution of special districts using Census of Governments data from 1972 to 2017. Overall, the rate of entry (creation) has been declining over time while the rate of exit (dissolution) has remained steady. New districts tend to be small relative to existing districts and and exhibit slow growth over time. Lastly, special districts do not appear susceptible to the “liability of newness” or exhibit high levels of infant organizational mortality that is common in the private sector.

Organizational Dissolutions in the Public Sector: An Empirical Analysis of Municipal Utility Water Districts

The proliferation of special-purpose districts and the increasing complexity of local governance systems has been well documented. However, even as new special districts are created, others are being dissolved. This article investigates the extent to which both internal and external factors are at play in municipal utility district dissolutions. Decades of existing empirical studies on private, nonprofit, and interest organizations show that factors internal to organizations, such as institutional structure and resources are significant covariates of organizational mortality. Equally important are external factors, where density dependence and resource partitioning pressures influence organizational survival. Public sector organizations, such as special-purpose water districts, operate in relatively well monitored and statutorily constrained environments, however. Drawing upon the organizational mortality literature, we examine when and why municipal utility water districts that operate in fragmented service delivery systems dissolve. The results show that the relationship between internal and external organizational variables and special-purpose organizational dissolutions is more nuanced than existing research suggests.

Political Party Mortality in Established Party Systems: A Hierarchical Competing Risks Approach

Existing scholarship offers few answers to fundamental questions about the mortality of political parties in established party systems. Linking party research to the organization literature, we conceptualize two types of party death, dissolution and merger, reflecting distinct theoretical rationales. They underpin a new framework on party organizational mortality theorizing three sets of factors: those shaping mortality generally and those shaping dissolution or merger death exclusively. We test this framework on a new data set covering the complete life cycles of 184 parties that entered 21 consolidated party systems over the last five decades, resorting to multilevel competing risks models to estimate the impact of party and country characteristics on the hazards of both types of death. Our findings not only show that dissolution and merger death are driven by distinct factors, but also that they represent separate logics not intrinsically related at either the party or systemic level.

To Be or Not to Be an Ethnic Firm: An Analysis of Identity Strategies in Immigrant-owned Organizations

Immigrant groups often pursue entrepreneurial endeavors in their new home country. Even though both immigrant entrepreneurship and organizational identity have received scholarly attention, there has been little systematic exploration of identity strategies pursued by immigrant-owned organizations. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework that draws on the concepts of liability of foreignness and social identity theory in the context of immigrant entrepreneurship. Our framework explores how immigrant entrepreneurs may negotiate identities for their firms through the development of specific identity strategies that confirm or underplay their national/ethnic identities in order to survive in their immediate environment. We develop a model that shows how these confirmations or underplaying strategies work both for firms that have an individualistic entrepreneurial orientation, as well as those with a collective/associative entrepreneurial orientation. We also suggest two contextual moderators to this relationship: (1) the image of the founder's country of origin, and (2) the presence of immigrant networks in the host country, which may alter the effectiveness of identity strategies in terms of organizational mortality outcomes.

Transitivity, hierarchy and reciprocity of organizational communication network during crisis

Purpose – This paper aims to explore changes in communication networks during organizational crisis. In the literature, various terms such as organizational mortality, organizational death, bankruptcy, decline, retrenchment and failure have been used to characterize different forms and facets of organizational crisis. Communication network studies have typically focussed on nodes (e.g. individuals or organizations), relationships between those nodes and subsequent affects of these relationships upon the network as a whole. Email networks in contemporary organizations are fairly representative of the underlying communication networks. Design/methodology/approach – The changing communication network structure at Enron Corporation during the crisis period (2000-2001) has been analyzed. The goal is to understand how communication patterns and structures are affected by organizational crisis. Drawing on communication network crisis and group behaviour theory, three propositions are tested: communication network becomes increasingly transitive as organizations experience crisis; communication network becomes less hierarchical as organizations are going through crisis; and communication network becomes more reciprocal as organizations are going through crisis. Findings – In this research analysis, the support of these three propositions was noticed. The results of tests and their implications are discussed in this paper. Originality/value – This study builds on an emerging stream of research area that applies social network analysis to organizational interaction data to study various questions related to organizational change and disintegration. These findings could help managers in designing an effective approach to monitor regular functionalities of their organizations.