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Title: Embracing Market Liberalism? Community Embeddedness, Associationalism and Mutual Savings and Loan Conversions to Stock Company Form

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2010

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Abstract: To what extent do various organizational forms depend on the characteristics of the local communities in which organizations are embedded? Are changes in form rooted in local communities and their constituent networks and associational systems? We address these questions and integrate organizational theory with research on community, social capital and collective efficacy through an event history analysis of mutual conversions to corporations in the American savings and loan industry. This was a traditionally community-based banking subsector that was increasingly subject to the resurgence of the market during the 1970s and 1980s. We find substantial effects of community structure on change in organizational form. As mutuals become less embedded in their local communities, and as those communities become disorganized and less rich in certain kinds of associations, their members become more receptive to the markets call, and are more inclined to abandon mutual enterprise for for-profit corporate forms. Yet our results also caution us against overly simplified social disorganization or declining social capital arguments. Some forms of associationalism promoted conversions and served as social infrastructure for marketization. Such findings suggest that community takes qualitatively different forms and that revisions of claims about community disorganization or declining social capital in the latter 20th century are warranted.

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Authors: Goldstein, Adam; Schneiberg, Marc; Kraatz, Matt

Publisher: University of IllinoisUrbana Champaign

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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