The Emergence of New Organizational Populations: Media Legitimation Effects in the Broadband Internet Access Industry

Building on the tradition of research in organizational ecology and institutional theory, this article extends our understanding of how legitimacy contributes to the creation of new organizational populations. Ecologists have observed that both legitimacy and competition operate through density-dependent processes to affect patterns of organizational foundings. Drawing on Aldrich and Fiol (1994), we argue that new populations form from the influence of cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy arising around communication and information exchange among industry participants. Using data on the emergent stage of development of the broadband Internet access industry, we develop and test a media coverage model of population entry rates, assessing how the legitimacy effects of various forms of media coverage affect entry rates in the growing population. While the study found significant support for both density-dependent and media-based models of legitimacy effects when treated individually, when taken together density-dependent effects became insignificant, demonstrating the strong influence of the ongoing dialogue occurring among population participants as a factor in population emergence, and strongly suggesting a complex set of interrelationships between different aspects of legitimacy.