Industry value systems drive organizational inertia more than individual firms do

Evidence

The well-known study of the Scottish knitwear industry (Porac, Thomas, Wilson, Paton, & Kaufer, 1995), for example, convincingly demonstrates that it was primarily the value system of the industry and not the individual organization that brought about inertia. Another example is Hollingsworth’s (2006) study of leading research organizations that were involved in major scientific discoveries. This study not only points to the path-dependent development of the organizations (and even of single laboratories) investigated but also to that of the institutional fields in which they were embedded. — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to A Midwife’s Tale-style microhistory and to institutional-economics accounts of collective cognition; also to field-level explanations in organizational ecology.
• SEED: An essay on how industries, not companies, calcify — using knitwear towns, Detroit, and Silicon Valley as cases of collective inertia rather than firm-level failure.