Dissertation topic: The invisible hand and the good of communities: How institutional logics matter in local banks
Description
How do individuals’ backgrounds and identities influence the strategies and success of newly founded ventures? In my dissertation, I explore the impact on local bank startups of their founders’ community and financial identities. Those identities have important effects on the institutional logics of the bank, its likelihood to achieve the necessary resources to open, and its loan growth after opening. This dissertation contributes to the engagement of the scholarship on institutional logics and entrepreneurship by exploring micro-level phenomena associated with these logics at the organization and founding team levels. This dissertation is divided into three main empirical chapters, which are separately publishable.
Imprinting institutional logics on local banks: The impact of founder identities. This study explores the process of logic imprinting and the association of founders’ community and financial identities with competing community and financial institutional logics. Community identities in founding teams lead to greater emphases on such community strategies as commitment to the community and reliance on local founder networks. Financial identities, by contrast, lead to greater emphases on profits and bank growth.
Arriving at the starting line: The impact of community and financial logics on new banking ventures. This study explores how those same founder identities and related societal logics have an impact on team commitment and community support, which in turn make community founder identities more likely and financial founder identities less likely to succeed in getting the bank established.
Striking a balance between risk and return: The impact of community and financial logics in bank founding groups. This paper focuses on how those institutional logics at the founding team level affect the bank’s tolerance for certain types of risk.