It’s Not About the Beer, Really

Many organizational theorists started studying complete organizational populations in the 1980s and 1990s. In attempting to document and record the initial founding periods of populations, analysts conducting these studies often found themselves challenged by what they commonly regarded as novel “coding” problems. The coding problems occurred because the early entrants to a population often look and act very differently from each other, and bear little resemblance from the arch-typical firms that later characterized the population’s organizational form. (In our historical automobile study, I recall a prototype for a flying car with wings!). In short, in the periods of formation, it is difficult to discriminate the “real” firms from others and to know which of these entities are actually part of the population or something else. Practical minded researchers (including me and most of my colleagues) develop objective coding rules to deal with these ambiguities; we then proceed to compile data and conduct analyses.