The Population and Community Ecology of Organizational Founding: Italian Co-operative Banks, 1936–1989

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Ecological models of organizational founding are proposed in order to investigate the effect of competitive and institutional processes on the founding rates in two populations of co-operative banks in Italy for the period 1936–1989. A number of stochastic specifications of organizational founding rates are estimated to test the effects of density dependence, resource partitioning and community interdependence on the vital dynamics of the organizational populations under study. Processes of density dependence and resource partitioning are shown to have a different impact on the founding rate of generalist and specialist organizations. The empirical analysis reveals the existence of community-level patterns of asymmetric mutualism between the two populations of banking organizations. While the proliferation of Rural Cooperative banks accelerated the founding rate of Popular Co-operative banks, the founding rate of Rural Co-operative banks was unaffected by the number of Popular Co-operative banks in existence. The results generally support the view that institutional constraints encoded in organizational forms shape the vital dynamics of organizational populations over long time periods.