COMMUNITY CONTEXT AND FOUNDING PROCESSES OF BANKING ORGANIZATIONS

We distinguish between two forms of local banks that build and maintain legitimacy in different ways: branches and unit banks. Branches gain legitimacy through the parent organization. Unit banks gain legitimacy through the personal reputation and social connections of the founders. Given the different ways in which legitimacy is built by these organizational forms, we think that the rural or urban nature of the community is likely to affect the founding rates of these two forms differently. Rural communities, in which personal and family relationships play an important role in both social and economic life, provide advantages to well-connected founders of unit banks. In these communities social networks serve as a demand buffer for unit banks, making the founding rate of this organizational form less sensitive to fluctuations in the demand for banking services in rural versus urban communities. In contrast, the founding rate of branches may not be greatly affected by the community context because branches gain legitimacy through a sponsoring organization whose legitimating characteristics are not local. Empirical analyses of foundings of local banks between 1976 and 1988 support these predictions. Supplemental empirical analyses also show no evidence of such buffering effect for unit retail establishments, which are expected to be less central in the social networks of rural communities than unit banks. Our results suggest that community organization channels resources to some kinds of organizations at the expense of others and that organizational research in general and organizational ecology in particular will benefit by paying more attention to community context.