Abstract
Market opportunities constrain the organization of market participants, which in turn constrain dealmaking patterns. Instead of making contexts overly determinative, however, this paper sets out to endogenize contexts. Using player deals among owners in Major League Baseball from 1901 to 1987, the paper traces the mutually reinforcing relations between the opportunity shift from local to national publics, the organizational erosion of large city dominance within leagues and the rise of new patterns of dealmaking among owners. Dealmaking reinforced large city dominance when teams depended on local publics for support and undermined this dominance when national television publics became the main source of opportunity. Yet dealmaking strategies changed well before the new organization and opportunity contexts were in place and played a role in bringing them about. Implications of this finding for understanding institutional change are discussed.
Published Version
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