Embracing Market Liberalism? Community Structure, Embeddedness, and Mutual Savings and Loan Conversions to Stock Corporations
研究了美国储蓄贷款协会在1970-80年代放松管制期间，其社区嵌入性和社区社会结构如何影响从互助制向股份制转型的决策，揭示了社区解体、精英脱离和阶级分化等社区层面的动力如何推动金融化。
Integrating research on communities with economic and organizational sociology, we analyze how organizations’ responses to marketization are shaped by their embeddedness in communities and the socio-associational structure of those communities. We address these relations via event-history analyses of mutual conversions to stock corporations among savings and loan associations (SLAs) in the United States, a population of depositor-owned and traditionally community-based banks that demutualized amid deregulation during the 1970s and 1980s. Consistent with accounts of social disorganization and declining social capital, SLA managers abandoned mutual for corporate enterprise as SLAs became less locally embedded, and where communities experienced disorganization and declining working- or cross-class associationalism. Yet conversions also depended on elite detachment, civic reorganization, bifurcation within communities, and “upwardly oriented” associations that helped SLA managers reorient SLAs from Main Street to Wall Street. Through this study, we look beyond networks, institutions, and categories to add communities and local associations to economic sociology’s toolkit for understanding the social foundations of firms and markets. We show how financialization coupled macro-level political-institutional dynamics of marketization with community-level dynamics of elite disconnection, class and ethno-racial fracture, and civic reorganization, while also shedding light on the contemporary fates of mutual and cooperative forms.