Organizational Task and Institutional Environments in Ecological Perspective: Findings from the Local Newspaper Industry

Drawing on the distinction between task and institutional environments, this article analyzes changes in the organizational structure of a local newspaper industry over a 125-year period. The ananlysis first examines the relationship, between environmental phenomena and the patterns of founding and failure observed in the lives of 2,168 newspaper organizations. To study another relationship, that between organizational environments and performance levels, four long-lived newspapers were investigated separately. The findings show that institutional environmental variables, especially political turmoil, strongly affect the rates of founding and failure but only weakly affect performance. In contrast, task environmental variables are more closely associated with the performances of individual organizations and less with the organizational demographics of the industry.