Contribution
Imprinting had been used since Stinchcombe (1965) at every level from industries to individual careers, usually undefined. The review gives a general definition precise enough to exclude neighbouring ideas, sorts the scattered literature into one framework, and extends the concept in three ways: sensitive periods are transitions, not only foundings, so an entity can have several; imprints persist without being permanent, and can decay or grow; and an entity can take imprints secondhand from others it emulates.
Key insight
Imprinting is history entering at a few moments and then staying. “A process whereby, during a brief period of susceptibility, a focal entity develops characteristics that reflect prominent features of the environment, and these characteristics continue to persist despite significant environmental changes in subsequent periods” (p. 201). An organization is then “layers of imprints”, like strata at a dig, laid down at its sensitive periods and not swept away by later ones.
Assumptions
- The three features hold “across levels of analysis”, but the mechanisms at different levels are “only analogous, rather than identical” (p. 201).
- Persistence at the organizational level is carried by inertia and institutionalization (Hannan and Freeman; DiMaggio and Powell); at the collective level by later entrants copying earlier ones; at the individual level by reduced susceptibility outside transitions.
- Sensitive periods are times of transition and uncertainty (founding, going public, mergers, career entry).
Key results
A review’s results are its distinctions and its framework.
- Definition (pp. 201–204). Sensitive period; stamp of the environment; persistence of imprints.
- Against path dependence (pp. 205–206). Imprinting involves “prominent environmental conditions rather than historical accidents”, “short sensitive periods rather than long-term event chains”, and “the stability of stamped-in features rather than the increasing dominance of a pattern”.
- Against cohort effects (pp. 206–207). A cohort effect is an outcome (similarity within a cohort), imprinting a process. Not all cohort effects are imprinting, and imprinting need not produce a cohort effect, since members of one cohort can be imprinted differently (different mentors, different founders’ blueprints).
- Table 1 (p. 208). Twelve cells. At the collective level imprints persist because “subsequently founded organizations” imitate earlier ones (Stinchcombe’s industries, Marquis’s local corporate networks); at the organizational level by inertia and institutionalization (density at founding and mortality; founders’ blueprints in Baron, Hannan and Burton); at the building-block level, e.g. Burton and Beckman’s “position imprints”, where a job’s first incumbent shapes the turnover of successors to the third and fourth; at the individual level, early career conditions and mentors (Higgins, McEvily et al.).
- Imprint transfer (p. 216). Founders bear imprints from the firms they came from and pass them to new firms (Phillips on women’s promotion in law firms; Burton, Sørensen and Beckman).
- Dynamics (pp. 222–225). Multiple sensitive periods; layering, or “sedimentation”; persistence and decay, with cases of amplification (Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven; Sullivan, Tang and Marquis).
- Origin and current utility (pp. 225–228). Following Gould, an imprinted capability may stay adaptive, become maladaptive or be exapted; Marquis and Huang’s banks reused coordination capabilities built for dispersed branches to manage acquisitions.
- Secondhand imprinting (pp. 228–229). “The social transmission of imprints, a process whereby an actor takes on aspects of an imprint borne by another actor”; a new firm that emulates older ones takes on “imprinted elements from earlier eras that survived in the architecture and routines of older firms”.
- Figure 1 (pp. 229–231). A general model: a sensitive period, a long period of imprint maintenance (with decay, secondhand transmission to others, and adaptive, maladaptive or exapted consequences), and a second sensitive period whose imprint is “layered upon the existing imprint”. The authors call it “more of a road sign for further research than a detailed map”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Imprinting is distinct from path dependence and cohort effects | moderate | definitional argument, pp. 204–207 |
| C2 | Imprinting is documented at four levels of analysis | moderate | review of cited studies, Table 1 |
| C3 | Entities can have several sensitive periods and carry layered imprints | weak | proposed; little direct evidence cited |
| C4 | Imprints can be transmitted secondhand to entities that emulate the bearer | weak | proposed, from Tilcsik (2012) and isomorphism |
| C5 | Origin and current utility of an imprint must be assessed separately | moderate | argued; one study (Marquis and Huang 2010) |
Concepts
- Imprinting: as defined above, three features.
- Sensitive period: “temporally restricted”, of “high susceptibility to environmental influence”; here, any transition.
- Imprint: the characteristics formed in a sensitive period.
- Secondhand imprinting: taking on another actor’s imprint by learning from or emulating it.
- Exaptation: an imprinted capability put to a use other than the one it formed for.
- Organizational building blocks: units, routines, capabilities, jobs, occupations.
Connections
Feldman and Pentland (LIT-1124, NOTE-1386) put the opposite stress on routines, which they treat as changing through every performance; this review lists routines among the building blocks that carry imprints. The two can be squared only if performance keeps re-enacting an imprint, which neither paper shows. The review’s “sedimentation” comes from Cooper, Hinings, Greenwood and Brown (1996).
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-329. The review gives the claim’s distinction between transmission and resemblance a vocabulary the organizational literature already uses, at the level of features rather than of identity. Secondhand imprinting is causal transmission of a characteristic by emulation; a cohort effect is shared resemblance from shared conditions; and the review insists the two are different (pp. 206–207, 228–229). It also gives a case where a feature persists across total turnover in one position: Burton and Beckman’s position imprint constrains the third and fourth successors. What it does not do is say when an entity that carries another’s imprint is that entity continuing; every case it discusses keeps the bearer’s identity fixed by its legal or institutional existence and asks only which features persist. So it supports the claim’s half that transmission and resemblance differ, and says nothing on its half about which transmission makes the same collective.
- QUESTION-118. The layered-imprint picture, in which a later sensitive period adds strata without removing earlier ones, is one candidate answer to what stays continuous through change: the older strata. The review does not test it.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- It is a review and a programme: its extensions (multiple sensitive periods, layering, secondhand imprinting, intersecting imprints) are proposals, with the authors’ own note that the influence of coexisting imprints “has received little empirical attention”.
- The evidence it surveys is mostly correlational: present features regressed on founding-era conditions. The review does not discuss how those studies separate imprinting from selection, in which entities founded in some conditions survive only if they have certain features.
- The definition requires a “brief” sensitive period and then allows any transition to be one, which risks the elasticity the authors warn against at the outset.
- No errors of fact found in what was read. “Sinchcombe” for Stinchcombe on p. 199 and “Stinchcome” on p. 203 are typos.
Open questions
- When does an entity that bears another’s imprint count as that entity continuing rather than a new entity with an inherited trait?
- How would a study separate imprinting from survivorship among entities founded in a given period?