Institutional Linkages and Organizational Mortality

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Office of Research Administration, University of Toronto. For helpful comments on this paper, we thank John Freeman and three anonymous ASO reviewers. For assistance with data collection and coding, we also thank Debbie Freeman, Brian Gaon, Gayle Greenbaum, and Sonja Saksida. This study examined the impact of institutional linkages on the failure of child care service organizations in Metropolitan Toronto, Canada, between 1971 and 1987. A dynamic analysis shows that organizations with institutional linkages exhibited a significant survival advantage that increased with the intensity of competition. The effectiveness of institutional linkages in contributing to survival also depended on the characteristics of organizations that established ties and theexternal legitimacy of the ties themselves. Institutional linkages also had a significant moderating influence on the relationship between organizational transformation and the risk of failure. The findings of this study suggest that efforts to establish the prepotency of institutional versus ecological explanations of organizational survival should not preclude inquiry into the causal consistencies and interactions between these theories' predictions.'