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Using a case study of a new biotechnology firm, we examine the formation of a new organizational form as a hybrid emerging from two `parent' organizational forms. We focus on key internal labor processes that are selected from existing organizations and replicated in the hybrid form and argue that this inheritance process strengthens the likelihood of survival of the new form. We propose that analyzing the micro-level processes of inheritance contributes to the understanding of macro-level phenomena of organizational births and deaths, examined by population ecologists.

Rather quietly over the last decade, a large body of literature has emerged to consider how new forms of organization arise and become established in the organizational community. The literature represents a very wide array of theoretical perspectives, and no emerging consensus or dominant theme can plausibly be identified. No long stream of research has been produced to validate the arguments of any perspective. What we find instead is a disparate group of mostly nascent theories from organizational ecology, economics, institutional sociology, strategic management, and others, all seeking to explicate the nature of contexts and processes that may generate new organizational forms. This review organizes this literature according to assumptions about how variations are generated in the organizational community. Three perspectives appear to capture most of the arguments: an organizational genetics view, which emphasizes random variation; an environmental conditioning view, which considers variation to be contextually constrained; and an emergent social systems view, which considers variations in organizational forms to be the products of embedded social-organizational interactions. Theories associated with each of the perspectives are explicated, and their practical implications for future research are examined. The review concludes with a brief consideration of the theory of the evolution of new organizational forms as itself an evolution of a new and important field of study.

The evolution of new organizational forms has attracted growing theoretical and empirical attention, but little research has considered the microsocial processes that promote the emergence of groups of quasi-similar organizations that sometimes evolve into new organizational forms. Drawing from social psychological and sociological theories of identity formation, we explain processes of individual identification and collective identity development that precede and promote the formation of similar clusters, which audiences can then recognize and distinguish from established organizational populations and other emerging similarity clusters.

Conceptual schemes of the organizational ecology are applied to reveal major trends in the evolution of trading formats in Russian retailing at present. They include the increasing share of modern stores, downstream waves of exploring the market niches from premium to economic market segments, and the spread of the multiformat strategy. The role of new trading formats in Russia is compared with that in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Scenarios of future development in the retailing sector are presented.

This paper studies the association between regulation and the organizational form of new life insurers between 1900 and 1949. The mutual form was popular in states with low initial capital requirements for mutual companies and differentially higher requirements for stock companies, but was rarely used elsewhere. This suggests that entrepreneurs took a "path of least resistance" when choosing organizational form and that the mutual's disadvantage in raising capital contributed to its decline–a decline that accelerated as states raised requirements and eliminated the aforementioned differentials. Contrary to previous analysis, the paper finds little evidence connecting other regulations to mutual decline. (JEL G21, L51, N21, N22)

After the 1960s, women, Blacks, and other ethnic groups mapped political objectives onto a more traditional form of voluntary association, along with investing in direct political protest and advocacy for civil and social rights. One result was the development of a hybrid organizational form that combines advocacy and service provision as its core identity and thus faces distinctive environmental uncertainties and boundary conditions. This article provides a community ecology framework for analyzing the development of the service/advocacy organizational form. The author argues that hybrid forms of organization, by expanding the resource infrastructure and legitimacy available to identity-based organizations, play a critical role in anchoring the continued viability of identity-based service organizations under newly politicized conditions. Data are drawn from a study of national women's and racial and ethnic minority organizations since 1955.