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This paper examines foundings of human services organizations after natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, and tsunamis and explains why only some communities bounce back by founding appropriate collective-goods organizations. Using natural disasters in California counties from 1990 to 2010 as shocks that exogenously impose a need for collective goods over and above the level endogenous to the community, this paper shows that a geographic community's local organizing capacity rests on the richness of its repertoire of voluntary organizing models as reflected in the diversity of its voluntary associations. Such diversity is even more critical when the type of natural disaster is more unexpected or complex (e.g., both a wildfire and an earthquake) in an area, and the organizational challenges posed are thus more novel for the community. Associational diversity has positive effects on both the numbers and aggregate size of foundings of local (non-branch, secular) human services organizations, and the effects are generalizable to other endogenous demand conditions such as poverty. Results also show how different kinds of variety can have opposing effects on organizing capacity after a disaster, with associational diversity having a positive effect, political diversity having a negative effect, and racial diversity having no significant effect, net of other factors. The paper concludes with a call for treating community resilience as a matter of enhancing local organizing capacity over centralized planning efforts when the environment is rapidly changing.

Free spaces are arenas insulated from the control of elites in organizations and societies. A basic question is whether they incubate challenges to authority. We suggest that free spaces foster collective empowerment when they assemble large numbers of people, arouse intense emotion, trigger collective identities, and enable individuals to engage in costly collective action. We analyze challenges to authority that invite repression: mutinies of regiments in the East India Company's Bengal Native Army in India in 1857. We take advantage of an exogenous source of variation in the availability of free spaces—religious festivals. We predict that mutinies are most likely to occur at or right after a religious festival and find that the hazard of mutiny declines with time since a festival. We expect community ties to offer alternate avenues of mobilization, such as when regiments were stationed close to the towns and villages from which they were recruited. Moreover, festivals are likely to be more potent instantiations of free spaces when regiments were exposed to an oppositional identity, such as a Christian mission. Yet even free spaces have a limited ability to trigger collective action, such as when the political opportunity structure is adverse and prospective participants are deterred by greater chances of failure. These predictions are supported by analyses of daily event-history data of mutinies in 1857, suggesting that free spaces are an organizational weapon of the weak and not a substitute for dissent.

Various strands of work have explored how spatial proximity helps (metaphorically) bridge barriers to resource mobilization and foster knowledge transfer. However, much of that work takes spatial connectedness as a given. We argue that spatial connectedness is a distinct construct that affects the extent to which spaces are not just proximate but are actually able to link people, ideas, resources, and knowledge together. We explore one such source of connectedness—physical (not metaphorical) bridges. We find that the opening of newly built bridges enhances startup founding in the local geographic community. Beyond their impact on startup founding, newly built bridges also influence the organizing process for such ventures. This includes a positive impact on the entry of prospective founders into entrepreneurship and an increase in the number of early-stage investors. The subsequently founded ventures are also more likely to engage in recombination and to cross industry boundaries. We explore scope conditions around industry and connective heterogeneity. We also test for robustness to various modeling approaches. The discussion highlights contributions of these findings to the study of entrepreneurship, as well as of organizations and the institutional fields in which they operate.