Imprints of a World to Come: Nonconformity in Chicago Architecture Firms, 1928-2000

Abstract

Entrepreneurs often face pressure to conform with the dominant institutional logic or logics in their fields and to adopt organizational traits and strategies that follow from these logics. This pressure may be especially acute in professionalized fields, where the collective norms of what is seen to be important, right, and good are constructed and enforced by the professions themselves. But when the economic and social environment is in turmoil, do these conformity pressures remain relevant for new firms? Or, instead, when the institutional and economic context is in flux, are new firms adopting non- conformist organizational forms and strategies more likely to survive than those that follow convention? Through a longitudinal study of 3,882 Chicago- area architecture firms from 1928 to 2000, this study contributes to our understanding of organizations by proposing and testing a two- stage theoretical model of institutional slack and anticipatory fit, in which conformity pressures are relaxed as crisis c...