Variations and the evolution of organizational forms: Mergers and acquisitions as form-changing strategies in the financial service industry, 1981--2000.

摘要

The first objective of this dissertation is to organize theoretical perspectives from different fields; these perspectives address how variations in organizational forms are generated in an organizational community. I propose an integrated framework to organize literature along three lines: one is “the philosophy of system equilibrium”, another is “sources of variation” and the other is “the mechanism of adaptation vs. selection.” To empirically test how variation in organizational forms evolves, I choose the financial service industry, which has undergone dramatic changes in the regulatory environment and technology since the 1980s. I define new organizational forms as the recombination of any two different financial markets. Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are therefore considered as form-changing strategies across different financial markets. I propose four empirical questions: (1) What is the pattern of variation in M&As? Is there an increasing or a decreasing degree of variation in M&As? (2) Are patterns of variation across different financial service markets similar? (3) What factors will influence the pattern of variation shown in each market? and (4) What will influence a firm's choice of a cross-boundary M&A?; Empirical results show that a convergent pattern of variation in M&As is generally supported over time. In addition, the investment market displays a higher degree of variation in M&As than the commercial bank market. The degree of variation at the market level is significantly associated with interorganizational imitation. In the analysis of firms' choices of cross-boundary M&As, I found the significant influences of the degree of variation at the market level and firms' past experience in M&As.; This dissertation contributes to the evolutionary literature by filling in the discussion of variation. I address not only sources of variation but also patterns of variation evolution. Moreover, this dissertation contributes to the organizational learning literature by identifying three sources of learning in the process of variation evolution: firms will learn from their own experience, they will learn from other firms either in the same or different markets, or they will learn from the industry.