Different Paths of Industry Evolution: Timing of Entry, Legitimation, and Competition Spillovers Across Countries

Abstract

This chapter has two main goals: (a) to model some of the variety of evolutionary paths of organizational populations empirically observed and (b) elaborate on a model refinement that captures the existence of legitimation and competition spillovers across national populations. In doing so, it contributes to an emerging branch of organizational ecology concerned with evolutionary processes taking place at the international level. A model is proposed that points to cross-country differences in timing of entry and development as key drivers of the country-specific processes of legitimation and competition. It distinguishes pioneer from follower countries, and uses this distinction to advance how observable patterns of population evolution-that is, density growth and decline-may be related to and sustained by spillover effects across countries. The proposed model is largely inspired by that literature in biology, in which the form and the strength of densitydependent evolution are modelled.