Environmental Effects on Railway Foundings, Failures, and Firm Structure

本研究的主要目标是了解制度、生态和监管因素如何结合起来影响组织和组织人口的特征。本研究将考察相互竞争的环境方法来理解组织。人口生态学理论、制度理论和关于监管变化对企业直接影响的假设将使用1825年至1925年数百家马萨诸塞州铁路公司的纵向数据进行检验。英联邦从所有特许铁路收集了大量的年度数据，这些数据将有助于比较关于组织成立和失败的竞争性假设，以及关于一系列公司内部特征（如行政比率和特定职能部门的存在）的假设。

The principal goal of this research is to understand how institutional, ecological, and regulatory factors combine to influence characteristics of organizations and of populations of organizations. This study will examine competing environmental approaches to understanding organizations. Population ecology theory, institutional theory, and hypotheses about the direct effects of regulatory changes on firms will be examined using longitudinal data from 1825 through 1925 on several hundred Massachusetts railway firms. The Commonwealth collected extensive annual data from all chartered railways that will facilitate the comparison of competing hypotheses about organizational foundings and failures, and about an array of internal firm characteristics such as administrative ratios and the presence of particular functional divisions.