Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow — The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence: Institutions and Organizations

121 published claims from this book.

• A bank-forced corporate split created the pull-order structure that matched just-in-time.
• A definition’s usefulness depends on the discipline’s assumptions about learning
• A firm’s founding architecture both enables scale and forecloses whole markets.
• A geopolitical accident blocked Toyota’s foreign partnership, locking it into self-reliance.
• A policy’s founding idea becomes a cognitive barrier to its own revision.
• A region’s earlier success can become the cause of its own decline
• A single testing failure taught Sakichi to develop innovations in his own mill.
• A technology that makes a firm’s identity obsolete forces a crisis of strategy.
• Acute external crisis can convert regionally bound institutions into globally oriented ones
• Adopted mental models make organizations blind to new problems.
• Agglomeration economies convert initially random location choices into locked-in paths
• An intellectual atmosphere can vanish entirely within months of a political takeover
• An organization can destroy its own legitimacy by trying to maintain it.
• An organization’s legitimating principle can blind it to shifting political demands.
• An organization’s own justifying standard becomes the gauge it is later punished on.
• Arbitrary early choices can rigidify into standards that defeat better alternatives
• Blaiming lock-in on historical accident erases entrepreneurs’ active role in shaping paths
• Category boundaries are definitional, so relabeling lets firms shift strategy without abandoning it
• Concepts broadened to embrace everything lose all causal meaning
• Continuity is a kind of change, not a synonym for staying the same.
• Corporate lobbying staff nearly doubled across Europe in under a decade
• Corporate political activity budgets grew sharply and keep expanding.
• Corporate political activity has never been properly operationalized as a measurable construct
• Corporate political activity is invisible in official registries
• Credentialing rules built to ensure competence now function as trade barriers.
• Critical events mark the shift from decision to self-reinforcing lock-in.
• Decades of patenting produced no new specializations, only deepening
• Demonstrating lock-in requires identifying self-reinforcing mechanisms, not correlation.
• Dense cooperative networks breed three distinct kinds of regional lock-in
• Deregulation pressures firms to abandon political strategies for market ones
• Descending oral auctions require years of learning to master.
• Discourse creates the switching costs that lock institutions into old policies.
• Discourse locks in partly by shrinking what can be acceptably said.
• Discourses exercise constitutive power that constrains political decisions and shapes policy paths.
• Early crises may immunize institutions against later rigidity and arrogance.
• Early entertainment venues become the seedbed of later media clusters
• Economic rents cannot explain all path-dependent political decisions.
• Efficiency-driven supply expansion can ultimately destroy the demand it depends on.
• Entrepreneurial luck is not exogenous because skills create the opportunities that look accidental
• Environmentalists fought gas drilling but left its enabling policy untouched.
• Equating path dependence with mere past-dependence explains nothing about lock-in.
• Exogenous political shifts, not internal lock-in, can dissolve institutional legitimacy.
• Firm-specific routines, not external conditions, determine which path an organization locks into.
• Firms absorb deep change only when it does not threaten their institutional character.
• Firms give away valuable technology when owning it would dilute core focus.
• Firms that deepen political-activity focus sacrifice customer satisfaction.
• Framing change as continuous lets organizations adopt new technology without rupturing identity
• General theory can blind researchers to novel phenomena that grounded fieldwork reveals
• Germany and Austria still restrict new-EU-member farm workers, de facto breaching the common market.
• Heavy political-activity focus erodes firms’ customer focus and competitiveness.
• Hooves that evolved for wear now break down from underuse.
• Horses shifted from work to recreation while their shoes stayed unchanged.
• Increasing returns make the status quo preferable to uncertain alternatives.
• Industrial districts prosper through tacit local atmosphere that cannot be replicated remotely
• Institutional lock-in is a matter of degree, not absolute determinism.
• Institutionalization deliberately suppresses alternative thinking to drive organizational success.
• Institutionalized practices become valued as ends in themselves, not just for results
• Institutions change through endogenous processes, exogenous shocks, or both together
• Institutions outlive the problems that originally justified them.
• Landowners gain little from labor-intensive crop rules, so they lobby elsewhere.
• Lock-in did not follow a single design diffusing and hardening.
• Locking a policy debate matters more than the policy’s measured effects.
• Manipulating the political environment invites the backlash that erodes an agency’s legitimacy.
• Mastery of political influence can coexist with market failure and customer defection
• Minority intermediaries built early cinema because they bridged import-dependent foreign trade networks
• Multinational firms can substitute for the local networks that cluster theory treats as essential.
• New media spread fastest by being folded into existing local practices
• Observable quasi-parameters let decision makers convert institutional drift into deliberate change
• Offshoring is sometimes about time zones and perceived comfort, not wage savings.
• Once a cluster forms it pulls in newcomers who started elsewhere
• Organizational structures built for simple technologies become dangerous for complex ones
• Organizations construct justifications for expansions they already have reason to want
• Past success makes leaders escalate commitment into ventures they should abandon.
• Path dependence describes how strategic options narrow into eventual lock-in.
• People seeking independence absorb the identities of those they depend on.
• Political activity’s strategic importance, not its degree, drives path dependence.
• Political relationships and reputation are sunk assets that lock firms into lobbying.
• Political resources are too specific to be redeployed into market strategy
• Political science identifies path dependence but cannot explain why inefficient policies begin.
• Political ties to a ruling regime can flip from asset to liability overnight
• Prior institutional thickness stabilizes old industries and blocks new regional identities
• Prioritizing efficiency metrics over public support erodes an institution’s democratic legitimacy.
• Professional licensing rules divert foreign workers into support roles rather than full practice.
• Professional trust in known colleagues resists cheaper substitutes more than cost logic predicts.
• Protective farm labor quotas persist without any group collecting the rents.
• Public discourse, not rent-seeking, drives persistent labor-market regulation.
• Publicly committing to a political strategy permanently narrows a firm’s freedom to change course.
• Reimbursement rules, not cost or technology, often decide whether offshoring happens.
• Relocating a national capital triggers a wave of corporate lobbying offices
• Rent creation generates self-reinforcing lock-in because beneficiaries never surrender privileges.
• Reordering the same events can produce entirely different outcomes
• Repression can convert a political rival’s exclusion into a durable power network
• Researchers retain theoretically justified variables even when statistically insignificant.
• Self-reinforcement drivers were catalogued in six technology-economics types.
• Self-reinforcing processes progressively narrow choice until no alternative remains.
• Shared beliefs among entrepreneurs cause collective misreading of competitive threats
• Shared mental models lock in policy because interpretations are costly to unlearn.
• Short-term profit maximization locks a booming industry into a self-reinforcing downward path
• Six distinct self-reinforcing mechanisms drive path-dependent lock-in.
• Social science conflates two distinct theories under the single label path dependence
• Strategic lock-in on government orientation makes shifting to market orientation nearly impossible
• Strong institutional identity makes deviation from cherished practices nearly impossible.
• Structural change requires a controversy being triggered and settled.
• Structuring an organization around a proven core technology creates a competency trap.
• Stuttgart’s auto-sector concentration rose from below 30 to nearly 50 percent
• Successful organizations internalize their criteria until they cannot read market change.
• Sufficiency locks in an outcome; necessity only enables the next step.
• Sunk costs and commitments to workers make reversing a bad program politically impossible.
• Sunk costs and identity-locked legitimacy drive organizations deeper into failing strategies.
• Superior early horse-shoe designs spread but were adapted, not adopted.
• Sustained exploitation eventually starves the exploratory process needed for renewal.
• The absence of controversy is itself self-reinforcing.
• The auction system consolidated loggers’ central intermediary role between forests and mills.
• The mechanisms that institutionalize an organization also cause its eventual decline.
• Toyota’s lean-production waste reduction targeted scarce labor and union power, not material scarcity.
• Vaguely defined organizational missions let political actors impose any task on an agency.
• Violating a settled welfare paradigm imposes punishing electoral costs on reformers.
• Wartime misery paradoxically strengthened Hollywood by increasing demand for fantasy escape.
• When an agency’s mission narrows, oversight can lapse without being reassigned
• Whether strategic change happened is an interpretive judgment, not a measurable fact.
• Which district hosts a cluster is a contingent outcome, not geographic destiny