Small is beautiful? Organizational identity and growth rates in a partitioned market.
Summary (4 min read)
Introduction
- The study of the evolution of organizational diversity is central to a broad range of research streams such as industrial organization (Tirole, 1988), strategic management (Porter, 1980), institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) and organizational ecology (Hannan and Freeman, 1977).
- The authors aim at contributing to this stream of research by discussing the forces that may challenge or, conversely, prolong the durability of resource partitioning within a market.
- As identities of peripheral producers are often rooted into size differences compared to market leaders, the authors will focus on firm growth rates.
- Because a mixed method -- i.e., qualitative and quantitative - - is employed to explore their research questions, the next section is meant to introduce the reader to the empirical context under investigation.
The Empirical Setting
- The German electricity retail market after deregulation offers an excellent context to study the effects of competitive release and organizational identities on market partitioning.
- By providing these services, local authorities acted in the interests of "the common good of the local community" (Wollmann, 2002).
- Before the deregulation, around 900 electricity suppliers served German end customers including industrial, commercial and household customers in their respective monopoly regions (Die Welt, 1998).
- In 1997, eight utilities (the “Big Eight”) operated at the supra-regional level and around 80 companies operated at the regional level.
- The renaissance of the MUs is also discussed in the mass media (e.g. Financial Times Deutschland, 2008; Frankfurter Rundschau, 2009; Die Tageszeitung, 2010).
Theory and Hypotheses
- In developing their hypotheses, along with the theoretical arguments the authors will make use of the qualitative data obtained from four main sources.
- (iii) Reports based on BDEW customer surveys (BDEW household customer survey, 1999-2009; BDEW commercial customer survey 2000-2009): funded by BDEW and conducted by PROMIT Institut fuer Prognose, Marktforschung & Informationstechniken with a sample size of 1200 household customers and 1040 commercial customers from 13 business areas.
- (iv) 11 semi-structured in-depth interviews the authors have conducted between 2008 and 2010, each lasting 1 to 2 hours.
Competitive Release
- Recent theoretical developments (Hannan et al., 2007; Polos et al., 2010) emphasize competitive release as the key trigger of resource partitioning.
- According to ifm study (ifm 2006), customers perceive the identities of the NWUs and their “own municipal utilities” as distinct and oppositional.
- The MU Wedel matched its image with one of its newly gained customersFC St. Pauli, a local soccer club – i.e., “Just like the authors as a small local company, the club also has to fight with passion and creativity against the big players with a lot money… a Davidagainst-Goliath-situation”, as the CEO put it.
- Building on the arguments and evidence presented, the authors propose an hypothesis which juxtaposes the growth rates of peripheral and center organizations triggered under competitive release.
Beyond Homogeneous Peripheries: Variations of Intrinsic Appeal and Engagement
- In the former section, the authors followed the spirit of traditional resource partitioning studies, which mostly concentrate on prototypical – i.e., average -- peripheral firms.
- The primary focus of resource partitioning.the authors.
- More specifically, the authors challenge the average effect of resource partitioning along two dimensions: identity matching remains contingent on the fitness (i.e., intrinsic appeal) to audience preferences; and the intensity of the engagement with the claimed identity varies across firms as well.
- The authors challenge this assumption pointing to the differences in the intrinsic appeal of MUs across geographical communities (H2).
- Moreover, by taking a closer look on firm level actions (i.e., engagement), the authors will reflect upon the effects of engagement on organizational viability (H3).
Variations in Identity Matching: Intrinsic Appeal
- The matching to audience tastes or characteristics may be defined in terms of intrinsic appeal (as inferred from an audience member’s social position, see McPherson 1983).
- Audience preferences can be segmented along multiple dimensions.
- According to qualitative evidence and to a recent survey (TNS Emnid, 2009), localness and environmental friendliness became the two defining features of the MU identity.
- The factual high percentage of electricity generated by their coal plants and especially nuclear power plants have made their claims anything but authentic and the NWUs are duly called “nuclear utilities” (e.g. Der Spiegel, 2002; Financial Times Deutschland, 2010).
Variations in Identity Claims: Engagement
- Peripheral organizations vary also along the intensity of the identity claims made (see Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000).
- Engagement activities aimed at developing and displaying credible signals of authenticity and commitments towards the claimed identities are especially rewarded (see Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000; Baron, 2004; Hsu and Hannan, 2005; Hannan et al., 2007).
- As market concentration increased, the Big Four emerges as the prominent enemies and substantial threat to the MUs.
- Due to their prominent position in the retail market, NWUs have attempted to lure the MUs to “cooperate” with them.
Interaction between Intrinsic Appeal and Engagement
- While the credibility of an MU identity claim and its matching to local preferences may act independently in increasing the growth rates of MUs (see H2 and H3), it seems intuitive to think that the co-existence of these two conditions further amplifies the benefits gathered by MUs.
- In a similar vein, intrinsic appeal should amplify the effect of engagement on fitness.
- Better fit with local tastes will obviously make a credible identity claim appear more authentic and more convincing.
- Nonetheless, the lack of intrinsic appeal of their identity in the eyes of local audience members reduces significantly the returns from fitness.
- Therefore, the authors propose the following hypothesis:.
Data Source
- To test their hypotheses, the authors have collected various datasets.
- The authors chose to focus on the household customer segment because they expect the hypothesized effects to be stronger among household customers rather than, e.g., large industrial firms.
- The data were primarily obtained from the BDEW annual data publication (BDEW Jahresdaten der Stromversorger 2001-2008).
- As the umbrella trade association for the German electricity and 3 Covering the industry from 1998 – i.e., the year in which the deregulation started -- is not possible for two reasons: first, there existed no data for 1999 and 2000; second, although the authors have sales data for 1998, the categorization of end customers was different.
- The information gathered from the home pages of MUs and from various cooperation groups, as well as from German national and local newspaper articles using LexisNexis, served to double-checked and complement the data collected.
Variables
- The authors dependent variable is organizational growth.
- To proxy Localness, the authors employed the voter turnout in county elections (for a discussion see the validity issues section).
- Cooperation activities of collective purchasing and trading were thus labelled Economic Engagement.
- The nationwide firms with large-scale power plants generated electricity and sold it to the regional utilities; regional utilities then distributed it to municipal utilities which then sell to end customers (FES 1991, Brandt 2006, Krisp 2007).
- The authors log-transformed the control variables except the two density ones to reduce the skewness of their distributions.
Model Specification
- One of the most commonly used growth models is the one proposed by Gibrat, which assumes size-independent growth (but see Barnett and Carroll, 1987; Barron, West & Hannan, 1995).
- By transforming the equation into its natural logarithm, the authors obtain the following log- linear model which can be estimated using linear regression: ( ) ( ).
- The authors use least square dummy variable regression models which include a dummy variable for each firm to isolate unobserved differences across firms (see also Sorensen, 1999; Greve, 2008).
- Similarly, the authors also added dummy variables at the county level to control the unobserved heterogeneity across communities.
- Since the test of the first hypothesis employs a time-constant covariate (i.e., the MU dummy), random effects estimates are reported.
Results
- Table 3 provides the results obtained when testing Hypothesis 1.
- Model 2 tests Hypothesis 2 concerning the impact of intrinsic appeal (i.e., matching) on the growth rates of MUs.
- It has been argued that firm growth rates decrease with age (Harrison, 2004).
Discussion and Conclusions
- Drawing inspiration from the limitations of existing research on resource partitioning (Carroll, 1985; Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000) and by relying on recent developments in organization ecology (Hannan et al., 2007), the authors aimed at improving their understanding of the processes of identity-based partitioning by focusing on organizational growth rates.
- The beneficial effect of competitive release is not uniform across peripheral organizations due to their heterogeneity in terms of identity claims and of matching to local preferences: peripheral producers that enjoyed a greater match between their identity and local preferences grew faster.
- As a consequence of the emergence of separate and oppositional identities, meaningful boundaries between center and peripheral forms get established.
- The theoretical model of Polos and colleagues focuses mainly on the audience side effect of competitive release, namely the matching part of their model.
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Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "Small is beautiful? organizational identity and growth rates in a partitioned market" ?
In case of two oppositional schemas, high grade of membership in one category precludes the possibility that the engagement in the oppositional category will generate actual appeal. Future research should investigate the tension between size and growth rates during partitioning processes and the effects of increased fragmentation of market peripheries. Last, the present paper contributes to research on organizational diversity driven by form identity as follows. For instance, the results reported in Table 5 suggest that, in their context, the market periphery is becoming increasingly fragmented.