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Case studies of four important automobile firms are used to understand how the performance of both diversifying and new entrants into the automobile industry was conditioned by their pre-entry experience. Various conjectures based on the four firms are then tested using a unique data source on the pre-entry backgrounds of all entrants into the automobile industry from the commercial inception of the industry in 1895 through 1966. In addition to analyzing the types of pre-entry experiences that affected the longevity of entrants, the analysis also focuses on the conduits by which pre-entry experience influenced the performance of entrants and the extent to which pre-entry experience had enduring effects.

Purpose – This chapter is intended to encourage comparative-historical research in strategy by articulating a framework for the study of industry and firm evolution.

Design/methodology/approach – Strategy research at its core tries to explain sustained performance differences among firms. This chapter argues that one, out of the many ways to create a productive marriage between strategy research and historical scholarship, is to carry out historically informed comparative studies of how firms and industries gain and lose their competitive position. While much of current strategy research adopts a large N hypothesis testing mode with the implicit assumption that one discovers generalization just like a Newtonian law such as F=m×a that applies across all space and time, an historically grounded methodology starts from the opposite direction. It assumes that a process or event may be idiosyncratic and therefore seeks to establish with detailed evidence that a 2nd (and later 3rd, 4th, … nth) process or event is indeed similar before generalizing across observations.

Findings/originality/value – The chapter argues that the field of strategy would benefit from allocating more effort on building causal generalizations inductively from well-researched case studies, seeking to establish the boundary conditions of emerging generalizations. It articulates a comparative research program that outlines such an approach for the arena of industry and firm evolution studies.

Research on employee mobility has proliferated in the past four decades across four research traditions: Economics, sociology, management, and organizational behavior/human resource management. Despite significant overlap in interest and focus, these four streams of research have evolved independent from each other, resulting in a structural divide. We provide a detailed account of the research on employee mobility and the structural divide across disciplines. We document that the payoff from this profusion of research and increasing interest has been disappointing, as reflected in the limited number of cross-disciplinary citations, even among common topics of interest. However, our analysis also provides some encouraging signs in the form of specific journals and individuals who provide a bridge for cross-disciplinary fertilization.

A recent stream of research in strategy has demonstrated the effect of boundary of the firm decisions on firm performance by integrating concepts and methods from organizational ecology with predictions from transaction cost economics (e.g. Silverman et al., 1997; Bigelow, 1999; Nickerson & Silverman, 2003; Argyres & Bigelow, 2005). This work has confirmed that managing organizational boundary choices (or governance structures) efficiently has ramifications for firms’ survival chances. But further questions delineating the conditions under which governance structure alignment has a greater or lesser effect on firm survival remain. In this paper, we consider how selection pressures may differ according to a firm's adoption of either a mature or an evolving technology. Using ecological insights regarding competitive intensity and sub-population density, we test for the evidence of the role of sub-population organizational (governance) structure within a technology class. We present preliminary results using an 18-year panel of the population of U.S. automobile manufacturers from 1916 to 1934.

The primary preliminary findings: Within a population, individual misalignment diminishes survival. However, the aggregate governance structure of firms within a technology sub-population has a greater effect on the survival of a focal firm than the governance choice of the individual firm. These findings suggest that governance choices in aggregate within technologically localized sub-populations may influence firm survival. Further, this paper adds to a body of work that utilizes ecological concepts to extend organizational theory.

Social scientists have recently turned their attention to the important consequences of industrial districts or so-called agglomeration economies on economic growth and firm performance. This paper explores an important but unanswered question involving agglomeration economies: does geographic location within an agglomeration affect firm performance? I assess this question by examining the effects of different geographic office locations (by zip code) on the failure rates of all corporate law firms located in Silicon Valley from 1969 to 1998. Empirical estimates reveal that Silicon Valley corporate law firms benefit from the increased volume of client referrals that comes from being near mutualistic firms that offer a different range of legal services, the lower labor costs and more specialized division of labor that come from being near a large joint supply of lawyers, and the increased business that comes from being near important clients (i.e. venture capital firms).

In addition, corporate law firms that locate in certain municipalities of Silicon Valley, including Palo Alto, San Jose, and Santa Clara, have significantly increased failure rates, even controlling for many firm-specific differences. Younger corporate law firms (under the age of 11 years) are helped disproportionately by being near important environmental resources and harmed disproportionately by being in certain perilous areas of Silicon Valley. All told, a law firm’s office location within Silicon Valley has significant consequences for its survival.

Purpose – This study is intended to extend scholarship on the management of organizations by examining the long-term performance of orphaned products.

Design/methodology/approach – This study uses the historical context of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression to examine the long-run appeal (performance) of orphaned products – products from start-ups that fail soon after production. I use this setting to determine how factors within the purview of management, as well as the role of changing tastes, affect the appeal of music from short-lived start-ups founded in 1929 and 1933.

Findings/originality/value – I find that while the evolution of tastes has a substantial effect beyond the control of a firm's managers, a start-up's decision-makers were able to positively influence the long-run appeal of music when they (a) recorded tunes with new artists and (b) were able to create an early big hit with the tune. These results demonstrate how and why, even with cultural producers in one of the greatest economic disasters in U.S. history, managerial decisions were meaningful for product performance. Finally, I show that the effect of being a start-up on the long-run appeal of a tune is time-varying such that being a start-up in 1929 or 1933 does not harm a tune's appeal until after World War II. These final analyses point to further ways in which strategy, history, and sociology might combine to further scholarship on the management of organizations.