E Pluribus Unum: Framing, Matching, and Form Emergence in U.S. Television Broadcasting, 1940–1960
研究新组织形式的涌现机制，认为它取决于外部受众对新兴领域的身份框架以及候选组织身份与领域的匹配，利用1940-1960年美国商业电视产业数据，发现公众话语中的聚焦期望和来自广播的电视台数量会提高进入率。
Recent research holds that new organizational forms emerge from the identity of candidate organizations that enter a domain. In this study we argue that emergence of a new form, which is ultimately based on validation by external audiences, depends on two mechanisms: identity framing, i.e., how audiences perceive and frame the identity of an emerging organizational domain, and identity matching, i.e., the match between the identity of the domain and the identity of candidates. Accordingly, form emergence is best characterized as contextual rather than as an inherent attribute of the categories of candidate organizations. Using data on the U.S. commercial television industry from 1940 to 1960, we explore how entry rates of TV stations were affected by audiences' expectations about the identity of the nascent domain and by the densities of organizations with different origins. We find evidence that focused expectations expressed through public discourse about media, and the number of stations coming from radio broadcasting increased entry rates. We reconcile our findings with existing theory on the emergence of organizational forms by pointing to the joint relevance of domain-related and candidate-related identities.