【公开学术报告】Where Do New Organizational Forms Come From?

How Experimental Spaces Shape Organizational Form Emergence Through “Proto-Forms”

Guest Speaker:     Dr. Ying Li (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Date & Time:        9:30-11:00, Wed. 22^nd, Sept. 2021

Zoom Meeting:    892 621 82546（Password: 622298）

Click Link:            https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89262182546  

ABSTRACT

While significant knowledge has accumulated about the diffusion and legitimation of new organizational forms, it is not well understood where entrepreneurial ideas for new forms come from and why geographic communities may develop different organizational forms to exploit the same innovation. In this paper, by focusing on the often-neglected earliest stage of organizational form emergence, we uncover the role of experimental spaces in facilitating entrepreneurial recognition of provisional templates for organizing, which we call “proto-forms.” We theorize that proto-forms provide potential entrepreneurs with ideas about how to start ventures of a new type and, if different proto-forms prevail across geographic communities, organizational form emergence exhibits community-specific patterns. Using archival data on historical movie theaters in Chicago communities, 1896-1927, we find empirical support that community variance in the density and types of experimental spaces for early movie projectors (e.g., opera houses, vaudeville theaters, and dime museums) led to community-level differences in the emergence of movie theaters with different forms: nickelodeons, movie houses, and movie palaces. This study advances scholarship on form emergence by revealing the role of experimental spaces in shaping localized opportunity structures for entrepreneurial actions.

Guest Bio

Ying Li is a doctoral candidate that studies organization theory at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the dynamics of market emergence and disruption as well as the related topics including technological innovation, market entry, and organizational adaptation. In her dissertation, she investigates how organizations, entrepreneurs, and related stakeholders developed shared understandings about the application and implications of technology at the local community level as the American movie theater industry emerged from 1896, when the movie projection technology was commercialized, and evolved until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic thrust the industry into an existential crisis. Her dissertation is recognized with the Robert Ferber Dissertation Award by UIUC. One of her dissertation chapters won the Best Student Paper Award from the Organization and Management Theory (OMT) division of the Academy of Management.