517899

What Is Organizational Imprinting?
Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Founding of the Paris

Opera
Author(s): VictoriaJohnson
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 113, No. 1 (July 2007), pp. 97-127
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/517899 .
Accessed: 09/11/2015 19:58
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
American Journal of Sociology.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
What Is Organizational Imprinting? Cultural

Entrepreneurship in the Founding of the
Paris Opera1
Victoria Johnson
University of Michigan
Organization theorists have long recognized that organizations take

on elements from their environments in the course of being founded.
This observation, articulated by Stinchcombe in 1965 and known
today as the organizational imprinting hypothesis, is frequently
cited but remains little understood. Advances in cultural sociology
and entrepreneurship studies have provided tools for unpacking this
process. The author draws on these tools to underscore the role
played by entrepreneurs in selecting and incorporating historically
specific elements that may remain for decades or even centuries as
fundamental features of the organization in question. The founding
of the Paris Opera under Louis XIV serves as the basis for theorizing
organizational imprinting at founding as an outcome of cultural
entrepreneurship.
INTRODUCTION
Organizational sociologists have long been interested in explaining the

wide variety of organizations observable at any given time. Among the
most influential explanations for this diversity has been the organizational imprinting hypothesis, according to which organizations differ
from one another not because they adapt to changing environmental conditions, but instead because organizations are of necessity created out of
the specific technological, economic, political, and cultural resources avail1
I would like to acknowledge the following for their helpful comments and suggestions:
Michel Anteby, Wayne Baker, Neil Brenner, Emilio Castilla, Nitsan Chorev, Jerry
Davis, Tom Ertman, Priscilla Ferguson, Michael Jensen, Chris Marquis, John Merriman, Mark Mizruchi, Jason Owen-Smith, Joyce Robbins, Charles Tilly, Duncan
Watts, Harrison White, and the AJS reviewers. I would especially like to thank Mauro
Guillen and David Stark. Direct correspondence to Victoria Johnson, Organizational
Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. E-mail:
vjohnsn@umich.edu
2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0002-9602/2007/11301-0003$10.00
AJS Volume 113 Number 1 (July 2007): 97127

97
American Journal of Sociology

able in the founding context. By making particular organizational structures and practices appear both possible and desirable, the resources available in a particular founding context exercise an enormous influence over
the character of a new organization. Given that the nature and distribution
of these resources vary from one historical epoch to another and that
initial structures and practices often persist beyond the founding phase,
it follows, according to this argument, that observed organizational diversity is a product not of past adaptation to changing environments but
of variation in organizational age across the population in question.
It was Stinchcombe (1965) who first drew attention to the fact that
organizations are shaped by the historically specific resources upon which
their founders draw. Once founded, he hypothesized, organizations may
survive far into the future with their founding structures largely intact
because the latter continue to be efficient, because of inertial forces such
as tradition, vested interests, or ideology, or because of a lack of competition (Stinchcombe 1965, p. 169). Building on this idea, researchers
have shown the lasting impact of founding context on a variety of phenomena, such as managerial structure (e.g., Baron, Hannan, and Burton
1999), the structure of interorganizational networks (Marquis 2003), and
survival rates (e.g., Romanelli 1989). Despite the utility of Stinchcombes
insight and the research it has inspired, however, there is still much that
we do not understand about organizational imprinting.
As several scholars have noted (e.g., Hannan et al. 1996; Sastry and
Coen 2000), the idea of imprinting actually combines two distinct processes under one hypothesis: first, the process by which technological,
economic, political, and cultural elements of the founding context shape
the characteristics of a new organization; and second, the process by which
these founding characteristics are reproduced during the organizations
subsequent history. The reproduction of organizational structures and
practices is more familiar territory for most organizational sociologists
than is the process by which new organizations are founded. Organizational ecologists, for example, have argued that the inertial tendencies of
most organizations contribute to the persistence of organizational structures, while neoinstitutionalists have made the persistence of particular
organizational practices one of their primary explanatory tasks (e.g.,
Meyer and Rowan 1977; Zucker 1977; Clemens and Cook 1999). Although
these inquiries have helped us understand how the elements incorporated
at founding may be reproduced, we know less about how imprinting
actually occurs in the course of founding. In this article, therefore, I focus
on the process by which elements of a founding context are incorporated
into a new organization. Once in place, these elements represent a link
between the organization and its context, and to the extent that these
elementsor vestiges thereofremain in place as the organization ages,
98

Organizational Imprinting
they constitute a relationship to the founding context which may be of
causal significance long after the founding phase. Thus the first step in
unpacking the imprinting phenomenon is understanding how the original
relationship between an organization and its founding context is produced.
A robust approach to analyzing this process requires attention to the
full range of resources and relationships that contribute to the structure,
status, and other characteristics of a new organization. Within technological, economic, political, and cultural limits, the process of organizational foundingand therefore that of imprintingentails the activation
and recombination of elements from organizational repertoires by thinking, creative actors. Recent neoinstitutional analyses of a variety of organizational-level phenomena draw on the work of cultural sociologists
(e.g., Giddens 1984; Swidler 1986; Emirbayer and Mische 1998) to explain
how social action is structured, but not determined, by cultural schemas.
I offer an explanation of the imprinting phenomenon that is similarly
grounded in recent advances in cultural theories of actor/environment
relations. The tension between individual creativity and environmental
constraint that I find to be at work in the organizational imprinting process
is captured in the idea of cultural entrepreneurship, which here refers
both to the creativity and initiative of the founder and to the constraint
and opportunity represented by the specific cultural schemas that structure
the historical context in which the founder is embedded.2
In order to illustrate how imprinting is grounded in the phenomenon
of cultural entrepreneurship, I analyze the 17th-century founding of the
Paris Opera, one of the oldest extant arts organizations and for much of
its history one of the most celebrated opera houses in the world. My
analysis of the Operas founding phase addresses the theory of imprinting
in two ways. First, drawing on theories of agent-environment relations
developed by cultural sociologists, as well as on neoinstitutional accounts
of cultural entrepreneurship, I show that our understanding of organizational imprinting is strengthened considerably when we maintain a clear
distinction between the two main phases of imprinting: (1) the active
incorporation of environmentally available elements into the new organization by the entrepreneurs engaged in its creation, and (2) the repro2
While some organizational theorists have employed the term institutional entrepreneurship to describe the cultural character of entrepreneurial activities (e.g., Rao,
Morrill, and Zald 2000; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006), I prefer the term cultural
entrepreneurship because it calls to mind the wide array of cultural phenomena that
are involved in entrepreneurshipnot only institutions, but also those symbols, meanings, and narratives that are undeniably cultural in nature but that may not yet have
been firmly institutionalized in a given historical context. (My use of the term cultural
entrepreneurship is thus broader than DiMaggios [1982] earlier use, which designates
entrepreneurship in the arts.)
99


duction of some portion or version of these elements beyond the founding
phase. While neoinstitutional theorists and other students of entrepreneurship have in recent years generated illuminating studies of organizational creation, these studies have not explored the connection between
entrepreneurship and organizational imprinting. Theorizing the first phase
of imprinting as a process of cultural entrepreneurship, I argue, will enable
organizational sociologists to explain how and why certain elements from
the founding context, but not others, are built into the new organization.
This recognition, in turn, stands to help investigators generate more accurate causal explanations of postfounding organizational behavior.
Second, the case of the Paris Opera sheds light on the nature and
importance of entrepreneurs interactions with key stakeholders in their
social environments. My archival analysis of the process through which
the vision of the Operas founder (Pierre Perrin) was altered by a powerful
external authority (Louis XIV) shows that despite entrepreneurs predictable attempts to build legitimacy through mimetic isomorphism, the
backing of key stakeholders may in fact transform an organization as it
is being founded.3 Thus while cultural entrepreneurship, the mechanism
by which organizational imprinting initially takes place, may result in
isomorphic organizations, it may also result, intentionally or otherwise,
in innovative organizations. Important stakeholders in the organizational
environment such as, for 17th-century France, Louis XIVwhose modern
(albeit significantly less powerful) counterparts we find in the persons of
venture capitalists, philanthropists, legislators, and corporate lawyers
may thereby play a significant role in determining which elements from
an organizations environment will be incorporated in this first phase of
imprinting. Drawing on a rich and detailed empirical case study, I show
that these actors take their place alongside primary entrepreneurs in shaping both the early phase of imprinting and the trajectory of the second,
reproductive phase. While the degree and direction of stakeholder impact
depends on the specific circumstances of founding, the case study presented here provides a template for analyzing the inescapably collective
3
No modern study of the Operas founding process exists, although useful information
can be found in Auld (1986). The major works on the early years of the Paris Opera
(Beaussant 1992; La Gorce 1992, 2002) focus on its second and far more famous director,
Jean-Baptiste Lully. The research on which this article is based followed the Opera
from Louis XIV to Napoleon and was conducted over two years in the Bibliothe`que
de lOpera, the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, the Archives Nationales, and the
Bibliothe`que de la Ville de Paris. Documents consulted included the charters of the
royal academies, regulations concerning the Parisian theaters, personal correspondence
of relevant figures, contemporary periodicals, reports by court officials, and the administrative records of the Opera itself.
100

nature of the cultural entrepreneurship involved in any instance of organizational imprinting.
UNPACKING THE IMPRINTING HYPOTHESIS
Stinchcombes provocative idea regarding the impact of founding conditions on organizations has been operationalized primarily by organizational ecologists and, more rarely, students of entrepreneurship, with
neoinstitutionalists frequently citing the imprinting hypothesis while producing few empirical studies (Scott 1991, p. 178). The idea that founding
phases can importantly influence later organizational trajectories inspired
a major line of ecological research attempting to establish a relationship
between conditions at time of founding and subsequent mortality rates
(Singh and Lumsden 1990, p. 17). For their part, entrepreneurship scholars
have shown the importance of founders to key dimensions of subsequent
organizational history including survival (e.g., Boeker 1988), strategy (e.g.,
Harris and Ogbonna 1999), and performance (e.g., Bamford, Dean, and
McDougall 1999). While these lines of research have provided strong
support for Stinchcombes hypothesis, they have also left some key questions about imprinting unanswered, chief among them the question of
how and why certain organizational building blocks, but not others, are
incorporated into a new enterprise. For example, by focusing on population-level founding conditions such as density or industry age, ecological
research has offered little insight into how imprinting at time of founding
actually takes place, while even those ecological studies that do investigate
foundings in more detail have focused on rates of founding events (e.g.,
Carroll and Swaminathan 1991) rather than approaching founding as a
process calling for analysis in its own right. Meanwhile, thanks to a longstanding focus on the attributesfirst psychological, and more recently
demographic, material, and/or network basedof entrepreneurs rather
than on the process through which entrepreneurs contribute to the structuring of their new ventures, entrepreneurship studies have similarly left
the imprinting process black boxed.4
Recent developments in both organizational ecology and entrepreneurship studies, however, have begun to provide the tools needed to
4
While the term was not Stinchcombes own, the notion of imprinting came to
permeate discourse regarding the link between the nature of a new organization and
the context in which it was founded. Mayer Zald (1990, p. 103) suggests a less problematic but somewhat unwieldy label, calling it the impact of foundations hypothesis.
In the interest of both economy of language and consistency with current practice, I
retain the term imprinting in this article while aiming to draw attention to the lessthan-productive connotations of its imagery.
101


address key unanswered questions about the imprinting process. Most
important, studies by Baron, Burton, and Hannan on the founding phases
of Silicon Valley technology companies have demonstrated how processual
and cultural data can be incorporated into the ecological study of organizational imprinting at founding by analyzing the relationships between
founders management models and the rate and scale of subsequent organizational change (Baron, Burton, and Hannan 1996; Hannan et al.
1996; Baron et al. 1999; Burton 2001). At the same time, students of
entrepreneurship critical of the long-standing focus on the psychological
traits or social attributes of entrepreneurs have, following the lead of Low
and MacMillan (1988), retheorized entrepreneurship as a socially embedded and processual phenomenon (e.g., Mezias and Kuperman 2000; Aldrich and Martinez 2001; Baker, Miner, and Eesley 2003). Some scholars
have called for increased attention to the social contexts in which entrepreneurial activity takes place, while others have begun to draw on advances in cultural theory to analyze novel dimensions of entrepreneurial
activity, including stories, cultural frames, and the use of metaphor (e.g.,
Lounsbury and Glynn 2001; Haveman and Khaire 2004; Delmar and
Shane 2004; Downing 2005). Scholars interested in the emergence of new
organizational forms have likewise contributed importantly to the reconception of organizational creation as a phenomenon requiring historical
and processual analysis (e.g., Lewin, Long, and Carroll 1999; McKendrick
and Carroll 2001). This important research on organizational creation,
with its emphasis on the importance of both individual choices and institutional contexts, points the way toward the elements of a theory of
imprinting, especially when considered together with similar advances in
neoinstitutional theory, considered next.
As the prime locus of organization-level historical research, neoinstitutional theory seems well suited to the examination of the imprinting
process. However, neoinstitutionalists have long focused their analytical
lenses on aspects of organizational life other than foundings. Since their
earliest formulations in the 1970s, neoinstitutional students of organizations have been interested in explaining the origins of institutions, but
they have been far less concerned with explaining the origins of individual
organizations through the activities of entrepreneurs. This fact is tied to
the strong neoinstitutional critique of interest-based theories of organizational behavior, a critique that was especially important in distinguishing early neoinstitutional studies from competing approaches (Dobbin
1994; Beckert 1999). Because organizational change, especially change
induced by entrepreneurial activity, did not seem to provide as fertile a
ground for institutional analysis as did stable organizations, early institutionalists shied away from empirical investigations of the role of entrepreneurs in foundings. However, reflection on the problem of agency in
102

institutional analysis, launched by DiMaggio (1988), bore fruit particularly
in the 1990s, as neoinstitutionalists developed theories of agency compatible with institutional analysis and produced a spate of empirical studies exploring the role of social actorsunderstood as both interest driven
and shaped by institutionalized meaningsin sustaining or transforming
organizations and their environments (e.g., Fligstein 1990; DiMaggio 1991;
Dobbin and Dowd 1997). This research has been crucial in allowing
neoinstitutionalists to move beyond the study of static institutions toward
the study of the dynamics of institutionalization. This work has also provided neoinstitutionalists with more adequate tools for the study of foundings by directly addressing the role of entrepreneurs in creating and changing organizations.
Although the foregoing studies do not address the question of organizational imprinting explicitly, their advances regarding the nature of entrepreneurship and foundings permit a fruitful reconsideration of the imprinting phenomenon itself. For if imprinting is conventionally conceived
as the persistence of those organizational features originally derived from
the founding context, a complete explanation of this persistence must rest
on an adequate analysis of the process by which those elements were first
incorporated. Because such incorporation is necessarily the result of social
action (intentional or otherwise), any full explanation of imprinting must
be grounded in an analysis of the social action that led to the creation of
the organization in question. Furthermore, since entrepreneurship, like
any other social action, is always at least partly a cultural process, a
complete account of organizational imprinting must include an assessment
of the organizational and other repertoires on which founders draw or
by which they are unconsciously influenced as they construct new
organizations.
While ecologists have demonstrated that the fact of imprinting is visible
at the populational level, the process by which imprinting takes place is
best observed through an in-depth analysis of the founding of an individual organization. Such an analysis aims not to produce universally
generalizable results but instead to demonstrate the potential of the theoretical approach presented (Sewell 1996; Hargadon and Douglas 2001).
Furthermore, the more remote the founding, the more apparent the presence of imprinting is likely to be. Researchers studying contemporary
organizations are as a matter of course more likely to share the takenfor-granted assumptions governing contemporary organizational life than
are researchers studying the past. Substantial alterations in organizational
repertoires over the course of centuries mean that imprinted elements, to
the extent that they persist, are likely to be highly visible in organizations
founded in a historically remote setting. Long-term historical case studies
thus throw into relief organizational processes difficult to pinpoint in
103


short-term studies. While historical foundings are often more challenging
to document in detail than recent ones, the organization analyzed here,
the Paris Opera, has been heavily documented by its contemporaries
throughout its history.
The Founding of the Paris Opera
Chartered in 1669, the Paris Opera (as it was popularly known from its
earliest years), has borne traces of its founding context up to the present
day. Analysis conducted in four Paris archives reveals that government
policies toward the Opera as well as internal organizational dynamics
have been influenced for more than three hundred years by key organizational models of 17th-century France, chief among them that of the
royal academy. In 1666, a poet named Pierre Perrin proposed the creation of a royal academy devoted to the development of French opera,
an art form which did not yet exist despite seventy years of Italian operatic
output. In suggesting that French opera be created in the context of a
royal academy (an organizational form sponsored by the king and traditionally devoted to private discussion among academy members), rather
than petitioning for the right to open a public theater (where operas would
be performed before a paying audience), Perrin was drawing on what
seemed to be the most legitimate and the most efficient of those models
that constituted his organizational repertoire. This single act of cultural
entrepreneurship was to have an impact for centuries.
Perrins choice of a royal academy conforms with what neoinstitutionalists, ecologists, and students of entrepreneurship would predict of entrepreneurs attempting to mobilize support for new enterprises, and particularly for initiatives (such as the Opera) whose purpose was to bring
a new product to market (Aldrich 2005, p. 32). As is well known, following
DiMaggio and Powells (1983) influential discussion of isomorphism,
neoinstitutional organizational scholars have argued that structural and
operational similarities among organizations may be due not to efficiency
considerations but instead to mimetic behavior intended to maximize legitimacy, a key resource in any case, but one of special relevance to the
successful introduction of new technologies, products, or services (e.g.,
Rao 1998; Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000). At the same time, and going
hand in hand with their increasing interest in the institutional dimensions
of organizational environments, ecologists have begun to investigate the
organizational impact of those legitimate organizing models that are available to entrepreneurs in a given time and place (e.g., Baum and Oliver
1996; Burton 2001). Students of entrepreneurship working with other
theoretical frameworks (e.g., Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Low and Abrahamson
1997) have likewise converged on the recognition that imitation of legit104

imate forms may constitute as crucial a strategy for founders as does the
mobilization of material, technological, and financial resources. My study
of the Paris Opera provides empirical support for this theoretical convergence among students of foundings. It does so by allowing us to observe
an entrepreneur (Pierre Perrin) at work in a different historical context
from our own (17th-century Paris) in the very process of invoking, as
would any prudent entrepreneur today, an organizational model whose
legitimacy might help mobilize the required backing for his new
enterprise.
Perrin was correct in his assumptions. As we will see, Louis XIV, whose
permission was required for the establishment of any new enterprise, was
strongly drawn to Perrins causethe development of French operafor
both personal and political reasons. In June 1669, the king signed a charter
granting Perrin the right to establish an academy of opera. However, a
comparison of the typical form of the extant royal academies with the
founding form taken by the new academy of opera reveals a striking
difference. Despite Perrins attempt at straightforward imitation of the
royal academies, his new organization emerged as a hybrid of the royal
academy form with another contemporary organizational form, that of
the commercial theater. The historical evidence points to one cause: the
interaction of Louis XIVs political and cultural preferences with the
organizational vision initially set forth by Perrin. The case thus alerts us
to an understudied organizational outcome of entrepreneurial attempts at
isomorphism. In addition to successful isomorphism or outright organizational failure, an organizations founding characteristics may instead
represent a partially or completely unintentional recombination of elements through the interaction of multiple stakeholders wielding differing
resources with differing degrees of power. Analyzing the interactions of
entrepreneurs with the relevant actors in their organizational environments is thus an indispensable step in pinpointing the source of the characteristicswhether imitative or innovativethat are built into an organization during the imprinting process. In the next section, therefore,
I provide a brief introduction to the founder of the Paris Opera before
discussing how his relation to the historical context in which he was active
led to the incorporation of certain elements, but not others, in the new
organization.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL IMPRINTING OF THE PARIS OPERA
Born in Lyon around 1620, Pierre Perrin was a poet who had published
his first collection in his mid-twenties under the title (eccentric even by
17th-century standards) Various Insects: Works of Poetry (Perrin 1645).
105


As early as 1648 Perrin had shown entrepreneurial energy in dedicating
a literary work to the powerful minister Mazarin, but his real ambition
was to create French opera, which did not yet exist. Perrin was one of
the first poets to contravene the conventional wisdom of the day regarding
French opera, which held that there was as yet no such thing for the
simple reason that the language was intrinsically unmusical: We have
only to prove [something] that, despite being novel and surprising, is no
less valid, that our French language, when all is said and done, is more
suitable to music than the richest and sweetest of languagesGreek,
Latin, and Italian (Perrin 1671, p. 7).5 Given this perceived unsuitability
of the language, very few believed that there ever could be such a thing
as French opera, but Perrin persisted in attributing the dearth of French
opera to a mere lack of adequate talenttalent that he felt he had and
should be cultivated in others as well.
Pierre Perrin, Cultural Entrepreneur
Perrins hopes for a French operatic genre accorded well with Louis XIVs
ambition for French excellence in all the arts and sciences. In the performing arts, the situation was especially delicate: though the French were
the undisputed masters of dance, the Italians had a virtual monopoly on
opera, since no French operatic genre had been established by the 1660s.
Familiar with the Barberini familys operatic productions in Rome, the
minister Mazarin had invited many accomplished Italian singers, composers, librettists, and set designers to work their magic at the French
court in the 1640s and 1650s (Zaslaw 1989). While the Italians vocal
fireworks and florid music were received with little enthusiasm, the fantastic sets, with their mechanical contraptions designed to lower chariots,
storms, and gods from the heavens, quickly captured the French imagination and proved an enormous success (La Gorce 2002, p. 75). Against
this backdrop of Italian supremacy in opera, Perrin published extensive
writings on Italian music in general and Italian opera in particular, by
turns admiring and polemical. His constant goal in these writings was to
persuade the French public that French opera would be far more intelligible, entertaining, and visually splendid than Italian opera. The desire
to surpass the Italians in opera was both natural for an aspiring creator
of opera in French and thoroughly in step with the surge in anti-Italianism
after Mazarins death in 1661, most powerfully expressed in the dismissal
from the French court of accomplished Italians such as the architect and
sculptor Bernini, the stage designer Giacomo Torelli, and the castrato
Atto Melani (Cowart 1981, p. 19).
5
Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this article are my own.
106

As we have seen, the organizational repertoire of an entrepreneur is
constituted by the range of models socially and culturally available. Perrin
had several obvious models on which to draw as he strove to create an
organizational context in which to realize his vision of a French operatic
genre. The first was that of the commercial theater. In the 1660s, Paris
was home to a handful of troupes performing dramatic works in French
and Italian. The most prominent of the French troupes was one directed
by Molie`re, which would in 1673 become the Comedie-Francaise. Housed
from 1660 at the Theatre du Palais-Royal, this troupe offered mainly
French comic works, many written by Molie`re himself, containing spoken
dialogue, music, and dance (Jomaron 1988, p. 154). Performing in alternation with Molie`res troupe at the Palais-Royal was a highly regarded
Italian troupe specializing in commedia dellarte. Run as for-profit enterprises by the players, who divided profits from ticket sales among
themselves according to predetermined percentages, both troupes also
received subsidies and pensions from the kings treasury (Campardon
1880, p. xvii). Such signs of royal favor conferred an undeniable prestige
on these theaters, particularly relative to those operating on the grounds
of the two Parisian seasonal markets. Nevertheless, among the professions
devoted to the production of cultural works in 17th-century France, acting
constituted one of the most stigmatized; actresses were widely suspected
of prostitution and were often, along with actors, denied church weddings
and burials (Mongredien 1966, p. 10). As an organizational model, the
French commercial theater closely resembled another available inspiration
for Perrin, namely, the Italian for-profit opera company, for which the
Venetian Republic as well as some smaller Italian cities had become famous across Europe by the 1660s (Piperno 1998, pp. 1619). Run either
by professional managers or by the singers themselves, these companies
were, like their Parisian dramatic counterparts, subject to occasional
charges of immorality while at the same time enjoying the patronage of
wealthy and often noble families.
In addition to the commercial theater, another model that would have
presented itself to Perrin as a potential context for French opera was that
of the royal academy. In the late 1660s, when the Paris Opera was founded,
five royal academies were in operation: the Academie Francaise, the Academie de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Academie des Inscriptions (also
called the Petite Academie), the Academie de Danse, and the Academie
des Sciences; a sixth, the Academie dArchitecture, would be founded in
1671.6 As a poet working at the margins of court life, Perrin would have
6
Thanks to the academic division of labor, following which art historians have studied
the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, historians of science have studied the Academy
of Sciences, and so on, no comparative study exists of the various royal academies,
despite useful individual studies (e.g., Stroup 1990; Scholler 1993; Needham 1997).
107


seen ample evidence of the prestige and power accruing to the members
of these academies. While most academicians were not nobles, many did
come from the upper (professional) echelons of the third estate, and their
status was further enhanced by the association of their academies with
Louis himself. The ties of the academies to the throne were felt practicallythe academies received organizational subsidies, stipends, and pensions from the royal treasurybut also symbolically: at the Academie
Francaise, one chair, larger than the others, was always left empty to
remind members of the kings authority; meanwhile, the Royal Academy
of Sciences was permitted to hold its assemblies in the kings library
(Stroup 1990, p. 7).
Louis XIV had spent a great deal of energy and money on the creation
of this system of academies because it occupied a key position in his efforts
to centralize the administration of France around his person and to raise
France above all other countries in cultural production.7 In the late 17th
century in France, the most direct way to the achievement and preservation of advancements in the arts and sciences was considered to be the
elaboration of explicit codes for practice in a given field (Fumaroli 1987,
p. 74). Louis and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert accordingly specified
codification as the main goal of each academy, with the exception of the
Petite Academie, which coordinated the activities of the other academies.
If the royal academies main goal was codification of guidelines for production in an academys given area of cultural or scientific specialization,
the best means for arriving at this goal was assumed by most 17th-century
scholars to be regular, formal discussions among members in which principles were debated and, ideally, agreed upon. Because the conventional
wisdom in the halls of government and within the academies held that,
in general, academicians and their projects flourished most freely when
protected from the prying eyes of nonmembers, the public was excluded,
except on specially designated days. To further foster productive deliberations, most academies statutes were formulated to ensure an even
distribution of decision-making powers. Rules governing the rotation of
posts and the equality of votes regarding potential new members were
meant to preserve a horizontal structure and harmonious interactions
among academicians, all of whom were, of course, subordinate to the
king.
In terms of structure, goals, and status, the royal academies thus differed
7
Louis drive to centralization, extending over the several decades following the death
of Mazarin in 1661 and the commencement of the kings personal reign, would eventually touch on every domain in the administration of France: the judicial system, the
structure of government, the policing of cities, the relations among social orders, and
foreign, economic, and cultural policyeven, as Chandra Mukerji has shown, the very
organization of plants in the royal gardens (Mukerji 1994, 1997).
108

decidedly from the commercial theaters. While either organizational model
could have served the cause of French opera, it was the far more exclusive
royal academy that attracted Perrin, as he made clear in the preface to
a 1666 book of lyric poetry that he dedicated to Colbert (Perrin 1666).
There he took the bold step of proposing that the king charter an academy
whose goal would be to synthesize French language and music into an
entirely new lyric formFrench opera: It would be desirable, in order
to examine and establish the rules of this Art, rules so useful for the
advancement and the conciliation of Poetry and Music, that His Majesty
decree the establishment of an Academy of Poetry and Music, composed
of Poets and Musicians, or, if possible, of Musician-Poets, who would set
themselves to accomplishing this task, which would be of no little benefit
to the public and bring no little glory to the nation (Auld 1986, p. 30).
It is clear from this text that the organization Perrin envisioned was to
be modeled on the extant royal academies. Brief as it is, the passage
invokes the core features of this organizational model: in addition to
mentioning the academy form by name, Perrin proposes, on the model
of the other academies, an organization that would bring together a group
of relevant experts to theorize and codify French opera as a genre.8 What
is missing from this text is also telling: there is no mention of performing,
either in private or before an audience. The model of the commercial
theater clearly did not appeal to Perrin, probably for one or more of the
following reasons: (1) it would have been infinitely more expensive to
stage opera than to convene discussions thereof, (2) Perrin may have
aspired to the prestige of an academy, (3) he may have felt that an academys legitimacy would heighten his chances for royal approval of his
plans, and (4) he may have believed sincerely that discussion among poets
and musicians was the best method for developing the new genre of
French opera. Whatever the reason, the suggestion did not fall on deaf
ears. In late June of 1669, Louis signed a charter in Perrins name that
allowed him to found an academy for opera.
The Founding Form of the Academy of Opera
Founded hard on the heels of the Royal Academy of Sciences, this new
academy was explicitly understood by Louis XIV to be an organizational
sibling of this and the other extant royal academies; as with the other
8
While this proposal to the king may appear brief and informal in light of the filing
requirements facing would-be entrepreneurs today, it is typical of 17th-century French
foundings, which tended to emerge out of public statements and private conversations.
Formal documentation was not generated until the issuing of a royal charter permitting
the creation of a new enterprise.
109


academies the king wished thereby to contribute to the advancement of
the arts in his lands (Louis XIV 1669). However, instead of creating an
academy that conformed to the royal academy model that Perrin had
invoked, Louis breathed legal life into an organization the likes of which
France had never before seen. The striking contrast between Perrins
1666 vision of a conventional, discussion-based academy and the organization actually founded can be seen both in the language of the 1669
charter and in the structure and operations of the new academy itself.9
The most significant difference between Perrins proposal and the charter he was issued lay in the stated purpose of the new organization. While
perfection in the art of French operaa very academic goalwas one
of Louis explicit hopes for the new academy, the path to this perfection
was not to be codification through discussion. Instead, the charter granted
Perrin the exclusive right to establish an academy pour y faire chanter
en publicto have sung in public thereoperas in French (Louis XIV
1669). Louis hoped, the charter explained, that not only will these things
[i.e., the performances] contribute to our Entertainment and to that of
the Public; but further that our Subjects will become accustomed to the
taste of Music, [and] will progress gradually toward their own perfection
in this Art (Louis XIV 1669). The new academy was thus defined as an
institution wholly oriented toward the public, in stark contrast to the
exclusivity of the other academies. Consider, for example, Article 34 of
the statutes of the Academy of Sciences, which stipulated that those who
are not attached to the Academy may not attend nor be admitted to the
regular assemblies, except when they are brought in by the Secretary to
present new discoveries or new machinesor on the two open-house
days held each year (Fontenelle 1709, p. 38). Similarly, no nonmember
was allowed to attend or be admitted to the assembly of the Academy
[of Architecture] in the presence of the Superintendent without his consent (Academie Royale dArchitecture 1717).10
9
This new academy was referred to as the Academy of Opera in the 1669 charter
and by its contemporaries, although the latter also referred to it simply as the Paris
Opera. In 1672, after Perrin had sold his directorship to Lully in order to pay longstanding debts, it was renamed the Royal Academy of Music, probably to distinguish
the tenure of its new director, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was a favorite of the king,
from that of its first director.
10
It is worth noting here that the only other academy dedicated to a performing art,
the Royal Academy of Dance, was founded (in 1661) for the purpose of codification
rather than public performance. The members of this academy were directed by the
charter to assemble once per month . . . in order to confer among themselves on the
present status of Dance, to speak and deliberate on the means of perfecting it and
correcting those abuses which may have been or may yet be introduced (Needham
1997, p. 182). Codification was prioritized in this case (in contrast to the case of the
new opera academy) because there was no reason to prove French ability in this art
110

At the Paris Opera, however, there would be no secretive weekly meetings assembling composers and poets to debate, in a genteel manner and
on equal footing, the rules of opera creation. Unlike any other academy,
the new opera academy had as its explicit and primary goal the presentation of its product directly to the general public, and for money, no less:
In order to compensate the presenter for the great expenses that he will
have to incur for the said performances, for the stage, stage machinery,
sets, costumes, and other necessary things, We grant him permission to
exact from the public whatever sums he deems necessary.11 In its orientation toward the public, thenand despite its academic-sounding goal
of perfection in the art of operathe raison detre of the new academy
differed starkly from those of the other academies.
The actual operations and employment structure of the new opera
academy likewise differed. The 1669 charter granted Perrin the right to
employ whatever number and quality of persons he deems advisable
(Louis XIV 1669). Typically, by contrast, the original members of a royal
academy were appointed en masse, with future appointments voted on
by members and subject to approval by the king. Nothing resembling
this procedure was put in motion as the Opera was created, nor, in fact,
were any statutes issued at all. For unlike the royal academies, including
the only one founded after it (the Royal Academy of Architecture of 1671),
the new opera academy was a for-profit and privately run organization
established in a privately leased building. The performance mandate stipulated in its charter had, in other words, brought to the new academy
organizational characteristics typical not of the royal academies but instead of the commercial theaters, as the technological requirements of
opera performanceas opposed to discussiongave rise to an army of
salaried and contract workers who took their orders from Perrin and his
management team. By contrast, with the exception of a few lab assistants
at the Royal Academy of Sciences, employees were absent at the other
royal academies. What is more, beyond the basic expectations of operatic
performancesingers, instrumentalists, and a stagePerrin added an array of other expensive human and material resources that contributed to
the complexity of his nascent organization: dancers, designers, and carpenters; choreography, fireworks, cables, paint, and wood.
In part, this was because the founder of the Paris Opera meant to
persuade skeptical Parisians to swallow the strange pill of sung French
by means of a blast of visual splendor. But these richer, more expensive
form through performance; the French were already considered across Europe to be
superior to all other nations in dance.
11
While we cannot know precisely who drafted the charter, Louis, Colbert, and Perrin
would likely each have influenced the formulations of various passages. Final approval
lay, of course, entirely with Louis himself.
111


elements of operatic production also emerged through entrepreneurial
engagement with 17th-century theatrical genres. As they wrote and staged
the first work in French to be designated by the term operathe work
was entitled Pomone, opera ou representation en musique and premiered
on March 3, 1671Perrin and his artistic collaborators drew on the firmly
established French genre of the ballet de cour as well as on Italian opera.12
The material and organizational complexity required to stage Pomone
(and subsequent works in the new genre of French opera), which featured
lavish costumes and breathtaking special effects, contributed still further
to the already marked divergence of the Operas organizational structure
and operations from those of the relatively less complex organizational
form of the royal academy.
The hybrid nature of the Operas early identitypart theater, part
academyis captured in a treatise written a decade after its founding.
In one section of this work, Perrin and his associates are described as
having founded the Opera as a public theater, while in another section
Louis XIV is described as having founded the same organization as a
royal academy: Perrin and his two business partners undertook to open
a public theater where one could perform theatrical works set to Music
and composed in French Verse . . . and [gave it] . . . the name of Academie de Musique to distinguish it from the actors (Menestrier [1681]
1972, pp. 20910).13 In 1669, the king established various Academies of
Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Physics and Mathematics; and by patent letters of June 28 he accorded to Sieur Perrin, who had been the first
to present actions in music in our language, the permission to establish
in Paris and other cities of the Kingdom, Academies of Music to sing
theatrical pieces in public, as is the practice in Italy (Menestrier 1972,
pp. 23536). Thus while the gods and goddesses of the Operas stage
fulfilled their royal-academic mission by celebrating Louis reignwhich
they did both explicitly through sung praises of the king himself and
implicitly through their own splendorthey inhabited an organization
that differed profoundly in form and identity from the academies with
whom they shared royal favor.
12
It is important to note that although today it is conventional to think of operas as
the work primarily of their composers (e.g., Mozarts Don Giovanni or Verdis La
Traviata), in the 17th and well into the 18th century operas were considered first and
foremost the work of the librettist rather than of the composer.
13
Menestrier has erroneously assigned Perrins organization the name it held from
1672, when it was officially named the Royal Academy of Music.
112

Founding the Hybrid Opera
As the foregoing analysis shows, the early Opera partook of the identity,
privilege, and prestige of a royal academy while in other respects completely diverging from the defining features of this organizational model.
Understanding the process by which a 17th-century entrepreneurial vision
was transformed by the political, economic, and cultural realities of the
day sheds light on the processpartly individual, partly collectiveby
which organizations in any historical conjuncture take on elements of
their founding contexts, elements that may bear important consequences
for their later organizational trajectories. How, then, did the transformation of Perrins original idea take place? The historical evidence suggests that the cause was an interaction of Perrins vision with Louis XIVs
political goals, which called for public opera performances rather than
private academic discussions. The record is incomplete on precisely what
transpired in discussions among Louis, Colbert, and Perrin to result in
the founding of the Academy of Opera as a forum for performance rather
than discussion. It is highly likely, however, given the great deal we do
know about the Sun Kings own consummately theatrical displays of his
power before his court and his kingdom, that Louis himself saw great
potential in this novel French genre to bring together the Paris elite in
attendance at what amounted to a public celebration of the greatness of
his reign and its cultural accomplishments, especially vis-a`-vis the Italians.
Although it is difficult to ascertain precisely how the recombination of
multiple organizational models took place, we can be certainbecause
Louis had ultimate and absolute control over the organizational form
designated in the founding documentsthat he favored the establishment
of an organization dedicated to public performance over one dedicated
to academic discussion. If Louis wanted French opera brought before the
public, however, why did he not simply grant Perrin permission to found
a commercial theater modeled after Molie`res troupe or after that of the
commedia dellarte players?
Clues are to be found in the charter itself, which strategically invokes
an Italian academy-based model for operatic production in a clear bid to
bolster the prestige of the new opera company vis-a`-vis other kinds of
theatrical troupes while nevertheless placing opera directly before Parisians in a commercial setting. For some years now, the charter states,
the Italians have been establishing various academies, in which they put
on musical performances called Opera . . . these academies, being composed of the most excellent musicians of the Pope, and of other Princes,
even of persons of good family, nobles and gentlemen by birth, very knowledgeable and experienced in the art of music, who sing there, are at present
113


the most beautiful performances and the most pleasant divertissements, not
only in the cities of Rome, Venice and other courts of Italy; but those of
the cities and courts of Germany and of England, where said academies
have also been established in imitation of the Italians. (Louis XIV 1669)
The Italians had indeed staged opera under the auspices of accademie.
These academies, fruits of the same Renaissance movement that would
eventually inspire the founding of the French royal academies, were gatherings of learned men who came together to study and practice in domains
ranging from the philological to the equestrian. Particularly in Florence,
but also in Venice, opera was, on occasion, produced in theaters built and
run by academies. The Florentine Accademia degli Immobili, for example,
built a theater in which its noble members organized the production of
operas starting in 1652, while in 1655 the Accademia dei Sorgenti, also
in Florence but composed of commoners, began producing operas in a
competing theater (Holmes 1993, pp. 1314).
Knowledge of this academy-based model for operatic production
reached Paris by various routes, not least through the importation of
singers for the 1649 court production of the hit Italian opera La Finta
pazza; many of these singers had strong ties to the theater run by the
Accademia degli Immobili in Florence (Mamone 2003, p. 5). However,
both Louis and Colbert, not to mention Perrin, would have known perfectly well that Italian opera was not only or even typically produced in
such organizational contexts. Two other production models prevailed in
mid-17th-century Italian opera: that of the noble patron and (as noted
above) that of the commercial theater. The patronage model, which flourished particularly under the Barberini in Rome and the Medici in Florence, dominated the early decades of operatic performance in Italy. Producing opera in this fashion entailed great expenditures for single
performances of works whose sheer grandeur was meant to affirm the
political power of the patronoften a princeand his family.14 By contrast, commercial theaters, typically backed by wealthy investors and run
by professional managers, were designed with economies of scale in mind.
In this approach, fixed organizational structures permitted repeat perfor-
14
It was this model that Mazarin had applied when he brought Italian opera to the
French court in the 1640s and 1650s, and it was this model that was employed in the
lavish stagings of the French ballets de cour in which Louis himself danced in the
1650s.
114

mances of specific productions and thereby increased the possibility of
recouping expenditures and making a profit (Piperno 1998, pp. 910).15
Given the strong organizational resemblance of the for-profit academy
for opera that was actually created by Perrins charter to the model of
Italian commercial opera (as well as to that of the French commercial
[spoken] theater), it is highly significant that the charter omitted any
reference to commercial precursors, whether Italian or French, while instead citing the Italians opera-producing academies.16 The latter presented the dual advantage of calling to mind the high status of their noble
or professional members while offering an example of academies that did,
on occasion, stage operatic performances. In setting his name to this document, Louis appears to have recognized that while the production of
lavish French operas in the heart of Paris constituted an excellent means
by which to trump the operatically accomplished Italians and to remind
his subjects of his glory and power, it would also be important to avoid
the sullying of the new opera academy by explicit association with the
lower-status commercial theaters. In appealing to the organizational
model of the Italian opera-producing academy, the charter strove to confer
academic prestige on the new Opera in three specific ways.
The first and most important of these efforts was the bestowal of the
academy title on the new opera company, which associated it with the
higher-status royal academies on which Perrin had modeled his proposal,
while distinguishing it from the commercial theaters. As in Italy, then,
where the academic system aimed at combining the social and cultural
prestige of court opera with the organizational and financial criteria of
commercial management (Piperno 1998, p. 21), the French foray into
opera was designed to cloak commercial management in royal prestige.
Second, the charter hints at the respectability of operatic performance by
claiming that academicians of noble birth performed in for-profit Italian
operatic productions. In fact, when Italian noble academicians performed,
they nearly always did so in opera productions that were open only to
members of the local court and other invited guestsnot to a paying
15
Louis and Colbert had (together with Mazarin) become familiar with the specific
organizational arrangements of Venetian commercial operatic production during
lengthy (and ultimately successful) negotiations to persuade Francesco Cavalli to break
a multiyear contract with the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice so that he could write
and produce an opera for the royal nuptials of 1660 (Prunie`res [1913] 1975, p. 227).
Louis and Colbert would have been further exposed to the Venetian system by the
kings own ambassadors to Venice, who, like many foreign diplomats in the city, held
boxes at one or another of the various opera houses (Glixon and Glixon 2006, pp. 302
3).
16
It is not surprising that Louis, in his charter for the new opera academy, did not
mention the patronage system, since this method of opera production was not grounded
in a permanent organization and would thus require no charter in the first place.
115


audience; the roles of academicians, noble or otherwise, in Italian forprofit opera production were, instead, those of financial backer, manager,
and booking agent (Piperno 1998, p. 21). Third, the charter asserts the
nobility of the new Opera by decreeing that all Gentlemen, Ladies, and
other persons can sing at said Opera, without losing their Titles of Nobility,
or their Privileges, Posts, Rights, and Immunities. That this right was
tied to the founding of the Opera as an academy rather than as a commercial theater was a fact still being acknowledged a full century later,
when the author of the Encyclopedies article Actors noted that, unlike
most stage performers, singers at the 18th-century Paris Opera could
retain any previously held titles of nobility because this theater was
established under the title of Royal Academy of Music (Boucher dArgis
1772, p. 672).17
Together, then, Louis and Perrin had collaborated on the creation of a
commercial theater in academic clothing. This hybrid character, in turn,
which set the Opera apart from the other French theaters and from the
other French royal academies, was to structure behavior toward this organization for centuries to come.18 The unique status of the Opera vis-a`vis other theaters, for example, was expressed and then reinforced by
18th-century laws granting it the right to collect dues and fines from those
theaters; at the same time, however, these rights made the Opera a favorite
target of critics of institutionalized privilege on the eve of the French
Revolution, almost 120 years after its founding. Meanwhile, the Operas
unique status vis-a`-vis the other royal academies also brought it both
benefits and penalties. In 1790, for example, to the anger of its employees,
the Opera was omitted from a decree fixing the budget of the royal academies (Louis XVI 1790); in 1793, however, these same employees were
no doubt relieved to find the Opera omitted from a decree abolishing the
royal academies (Aucoc 1889, pp. cciiccv). Since, as we have seen, the
Operas unique status vis-a`-vis these two sets of organizations was in part
due to Louis XIVs involvement in the founding process, it must be
acknowledged that the king, a powerful stakeholder of the new organization, played a central role in the imprinting of the Paris Opera.
17
Boucher dArgis employs the title given the Opera in 1672, which it still held in
1772; the fact remains that it was thanks to Perrin that the Opera was foundedin
1669as part of the system of royal academies rather than simply as a commercial
theater.
18
It is important to note here that while the Italian academy model played a key (if
misleading) rhetorical role in the charter, the decisive legal, cultural, and economic
interorganizational relations shaping the Operas history from the moment it was
founded were those it had with the French theaters and academies.
116

CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL
IMPRINTING
The foregoing analysis affords two important insights into the organizational imprinting phenomenon: (1) imprinting is an agency-driven process of cultural entrepreneurship rather than a mechanical and discrete
event, and (2) the embedded nature of cultural entrepreneurship means
that the imprinting process is crucially influenced by key stakeholders
who may reinforce or thwart entrepreneurs plans, whether these be isomorphic or innovative in nature. In what follows, I discuss each of these
contributions before reviewing the range of mechanisms by which imprinted elements may be reproduced beyond the founding phase.
Imprinting as an agent-driven process.The story of the ambitions and
efforts of Perrin and Louis XIV, vividly conveyed to us through their
writings and actions despite a historical gap of nearly 350 years, underscores the inadequacy of imprinting as a metaphor for the process by
which entrepreneurs build new organizations out of available materials.
While the language of imprinting implies that the environment itself somehow stamps particular elements onto the new organization, it is in fact
solely through the efforts of entrepreneurial individuals that organizations
acquire the elements from their historical contexts that, should they persist, are often asserted to have been imprinted at founding. Because
most studies that invoke the imprinting metaphor place their emphasis
on demonstrating links between macrolevel conditions at founding and
subsequent rates of organizational survival, mortality, or change, discussions of the role of social agents in enacting the observed links have been
largely speculative. While an emphasis on macrolevel conditions is natural
given the abiding concerns of organizational ecology in particular, the
agency-based approach I propose here, which draws on the insights of
cultural sociology, neoinstitutionalism, and entrepreneurship studies,
could usefully be synthesized with the insights of organizational ecologists
to expand our understanding of the imprinting process as a whole.
There are two primary ways in which an agent-centered approach
stands to enhance theory and research on organizational imprinting. The
first derives from the temporal dimension of agency. Emirbayer and Mische (1998, p. 970) have usefully theorized agency as the temporallyconstructed engagement by actors of different structural environments
. . . which . . . both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. Seen as a particular instance of agency, entrepreneurship can be
understood, following Emirbayer and Mische, both as temporally elaborated, in that entrepreneurial activities unfold across time, and as temporally oriented, in that entrepreneurs engage with their social environ117


ments by drawing on past practices, by imagining possible futures, and
by evaluating present options. An agency-based approach to organizational imprinting therefore calls for attention to the sequence and character of key moments in the founding process and offers a corrective to
the telescoping of founding processes into founding conditions typical
of many ecological and some entrepreneurship studies (Van de Ven 1993,
p. 214; Ruef 2005). The benefits of such an approach can be seen in the
above analysis of the founding of the Paris Opera. Had Perrin decided
at the outset to propose the founding of a commercial theater rather than
a discussion academy, he might easily have ended up running a straightforward theater rather than a hybrid organization whose unique status
influenced much of its subsequent history. It is only through narrative
reconstruction of the sequence and content of Perrins interactions with
his political and cultural environment and with key stakeholders therein
that we can explain how the Opera emerged from its founding phase as
a hybrid of royal academy and commercial theater, and why these forms
rather than others were mobilized. This case therefore suggests that an
assessment of the creative process in which an entrepreneur interacts with
his or her environment to build a new organization is crucial to answering
a question central to any account of organizational imprinting: Why these
environmental elements and not others?
A second contribution afforded by the agent-driven approach proposed
here concerns the role of cultural phenomena in imprinting. Sociologists
from Durkheim forward have recognized that agency takes place within
symbolic structures that constrain and enable thought and action. As I
noted earlier, students of organizational foundings working in several
different theoretical traditions have made great strides in incorporating
the tools of cultural sociology into the analysis of entrepreneurial activity.
This work has corrected a long-standing overemphasis on the economic
and technological resources available to entrepreneurs by demonstrating
the importance of cultural resources such as organizational myths, models,
and symbols to the creation and maintenance of new organizations. This
work has additionally shown that cultural phenomena appear in entrepreneurial efforts not only in the form of resources that can be strategically
mobilized but also in the form of schemas and discourses whose workings
may go unrecognized by the actors in question (Suchman 1995, p. 576).
Taken together, this research and the cultural theory on which it is based
suggest that all entrepreneurship is at least in part cultural in nature.
If, as I have argued in this article, organizational imprinting at founding
takes place solely through the activities of entrepreneurial individuals,
then imprinting must likewise be understood as a process that always
involves an entrepreneurs engagement with and/or constraint by cultural
phenomena. We have seen this clearly for the case of the Paris Opera,
118

where Perrin was constrained by the limited range of organizational models available for the development of a French operatic genre in 17thcentury France while nevertheless consciously choosing to invoke one of
these models in particular. Analysis of the cultural dimensions of Perrins
(and Louis) environment and actions is indispensable in explaining which
features were built into the Opera at founding, and why. This case thus
illustrates the potential gains to be had from increased attention to cultural
phenomena in imprinting processes, although such attention should, of
course, be balanced by continued analysis of other kinds of resources and
constraints.
Imprinting outcomes of cultural entrepreneurship.In addition to illustrating the utility of an agency-based approach to imprinting, the case
of the Paris Opera calls attention to the range of possible organizational
outcomes that may emerge from the cultural entrepreneurship phase of
imprinting. While Perrins effort to gain legitimacy through imitation of
extant organizations conforms with what most ecologists and neoinstitutionalists would predict, the outcome of his effort does not. As we have
seen, Perrins attempt at isomorphism was altered by the invocation in
the royal charter of elements attributed (incorrectly) to another organizational model, that of the Italian opera-producing academy. This unexpected outcome helps clarify the relation of two central sociological
concepts to the imprinting process: (1) the cultural toolkit and (2) institutional isomorphism. First, it suggests that the toolkit approach to entrepreneurship, which portrays the social actor as drawing selectively on
the cultural tools available in his or her repertoire to structure action,
provides only a partial picture of the process by which organizations are
founded. Although the use of available cultural resources on the part of
individual entrepreneurs has indeed been shown to be an important mechanism in organizational foundings as well as in the emergence of innovative organizational forms, the recombination of models that led to the
founding form of the Opera emerged not through the efforts of a single
actor, but instead through the interactions of that actor with influential
others in his environment. This suggests that, to the insights of the toolkit
approach, which has generated a salutary emphasis on the role of culture
in foundings, students of entrepreneurship and imprinting alike might
add increased attention to those powerful stakeholders in an entrepreneurs environment who have an interest in and influence on the outcome
of a given entrepreneurial project.
A second implication deriving from the unexpected outcome of Perrins
efforts concerns the key neoinstitutional concept of isomorphism. Theorized by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) to explain nonutilitarian similarities
among organizational forms, coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures
toward isomorphism have been shown to be responsible for the adoption
119


of extant organizational forms and practices in a variety of organizational
fields (e.g., Fligstein 1985; Mezias 1990; Davis 1991). Pressures toward
isomorphism can thus help explain why particular entrepreneurs select
certain elements, but not others, as they build environmental features into
their new organization. At the same time, however, the case of the Opera
shows that attempts at isomorphism can also be transformed, even as the
organization in question is gaining the very legitimacy targeted by most
such attempts. The joint roles of Perrin and Louis in helping produce a
novel, hybrid form for the new Opera suggests that recent efforts to
evaluate the impact on entrepreneurial processes of external stakeholders
such as venture capitalists and corporate lawyers (e.g., Burton 2001; Suchman, Steward, and Westfall 2001) constitute an important line of inquiry
for our understanding not only of entrepreneurship but also of imprinting
itself. The influence of these stakeholders will likely be most apparent
when their differing models or visions lead to the blocking or transformation of entrepreneurs original efforts at isomorphism or innovation.
Nevertheless, researchers should also attend to the impact of stakeholders
in situations where their roles are somewhat masked because they are
acting in alignment with entrepreneurs efforts, whether these efforts be
directed toward isomorphism or innovation.
The reproduction of imprinted elements.If, as I argue in this article,
all imprinting begins in a process of cultural entrepreneurship, this first
phase may be understood as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for
the second phase, in which the specific organizational elements incorporated at founding are reproduced. How, then, do the historically specific
elements built in at founding actually survive? Some elements simply do
not, of course, since many new organizations fail; and those elements that
do survive may change profoundly in the course of successful adaptation
to new environmental conditions. While my primary aim in this article
has been to analyze the first phase of imprinting, it is nevertheless important to consider the mechanisms by which imprinted organizational
features can be reproduced. Stinchcombe himself identified efficiency, lack
of competition, and institutionalization as the key mechanisms by which
imprinted features persist (1965, p. 169). Subsequent research has deepened our understanding of how such mechanisms operate. Neoinstitutionalists, for example, have offered powerful accounts of persistence
through institutionalization that are grounded in the tendency of actors
in organizations to follow inherited organizational scripts and routines,
while ecologists have usefully theorized and operationalized the concept
of structural inertia (Hannan and Freeman 1984), according to which
persistence is a function of the difficulty of changing course once investments have been made in specific technologies and routines.19
19
The impact of imprinted elements is not confined to cases in which these elements
120

Regardless of the mechanism in question, a major task for researchers
is the specification of the role of social actors in the operation of these
mechanisms. Stinchcombe (1965, p. 167) made this point forcefully with
regard to the mechanism of institutionalization in imprinting processes:
The problem is to specify who it is that carries tradition and why they
carry it, whose interests become vested, under what conditions, by
what devices, whose folkways cannot be changed by regulation, and
why. The same problem confronts researchers investigating the operation
of other possible mechanisms of postfounding reproduction besides institutionalization, namely, efficiency, lack of competition, or inertia. Like
institutionalization, these mechanisms operate solely through social action,
even when this action has the effect of reproducing the organizational
status quo. Therefore, the complete explanation of the second phase of
organizational imprinting requiresas I have argued at length here concerning the first phase of imprintinganalysis of how the embedded actions and interactions of organizational members and stakeholders contribute to the persistence of elements imprinted at founding. A related
challenge for students of imprinting derives from the lack of consensus
concerning the time that must elapse before imprinting can be said to
have taken place. Stinchcombe himself was noncommital on this issue.
Once founded, he wrote, organizations may preserve their structures for
long enough to yield the correlations we observe (Stinchcombe 1965, p.
169, emphasis added). Research on imprinting subsequent to Stinchcombes pioneering work has ranged in time frame from studies focused
only on the founding phase to studies encompassing more than a century
of organizational history. Future research, therefore, might fruitfully focus
on identifying and then comparing the key stages of the imprinting process
across organizations and industries. Such research would serve to further
refine the two-stage process discussed here.
CONCLUSION
Through their engagement with environmental resources and their interactions with key stakeholders, entrepreneurswhose efforts, I have
argued, must always be considered at least in part culturalare the agents
responsible for the initial stages of the phenomenon commonly referred
are reproduced. Also of interest to students of organizational imprinting are cases in
which imprinted features set organizations onto particular technological and institutional paths. Hannan, Burton, and Baron (1996, p. 533) have shown, for example, that
even when founders models for employment relations are not actually reproduced,
certain of these models have significant effects on rates of change in top management,
success in going public, and establishment and elaboration of formal human resource
management.
121


to as organizational imprinting. For the Paris Opera, this collective process
of cultural entrepreneurship involved the following steps: (1) an entrepreneur with a vision for the creation of a new product identified in the
organizational repertoire available to him a single model (the royal academy) as a desirable and feasible structure for the production of the product
in question, (2) this entrepreneur then appealed to the relevant authorities
for permission to establish this organization, and (3) the political goals of
these authorities combined with the creative engagement of the entrepreneur with extant product genres (in this case, artistic genres) to produce
an organization that differed in consequential ways from the class of
organizations on which it was modeled. Taken together, these steps represent, for the case of the Opera, the first of the two phases that constitute
the imprinting process, the second phase being the reproduction of the
organizational elements incorporated in the first phase.
An individual case study such as that presented here is not meant to
yield results that are wholly generalizable across all other cases. Instead,
it provides rich historical and sociological materials through which to
develop and articulate theoretical approaches contributing to improved
social scientific explanation. At the outset of this article, I suggested that
one useful feature of the Paris Opera as a case was the very remoteness
of the setting in which it was founded. This remoteness throws into relief
the historical specificity of the organizational models upon which the
founder drew in the early phase of the imprinting process; the model of
the royal academy is certainly less familiar to us today than that of the
publicly traded company or the 501(c)(3). Yet while the organizational
models, social positions, and personal aspirations of the key players in
the Operas founding may be somewhat foreign to us, the collective process of cultural entrepreneurship that we have seen at work there is as
basic to foundings today as it was to those of the 17th century. The
contemporary founder of an e-commerce firm, for example, or of a nonprofit combating HIV/AIDS, works with available cultural, economic,
political, and technological resources in creating his or her new organization no less than did Pierre Perrin. The content and distribution of these
resources differ today, of course, as do the titles and positions of the key
stakeholders who may influence the founding process. Contemporary
founders usually find their projects supported, thwarted, or transformed
not by an absolute monarch, but instead by a far more differentiated set
of actors, including venture capitalists, politicians, philanthropists, lawyers, consumers groups, and a variety of other key public and private
stakeholders. Despite these differences between past and present, however,
it is always entrepreneurs who stamp new organizations with the distinctive signs of their founding times. The agent-based approach elaborated here through the analysis of a particular historical instance of im122

printing should therefore prove useful to researchers wishing to
understand how this phenomenon unfolds, regardless of the time, place,
and organizations under investigation.
At the same time, however, my theoretical emphasis on the central role
of entrepreneurs in organizational imprinting is balanced by attention to
the embedded and collective nature of entrepreneurship and therefore of
imprinting. In fact, the case of the Paris Opera should serve to confirm
organizational ecologists in their skepticism toward the power of individual founders as well as toward the effectiveness of the quick organizational interventions touted by the popular literature, and by some resource dependence theorists, to save floundering organizations. While
Perrin had a clear impact on the founding characteristics and the subsequent organizational trajectory of the Opera, his original intentions were
mediated and transformed both by the political context in which he was
working and by the interaction of his original intentions with the media
and meaning of opera in 17th-century France. Such transformations are
unavoidable in virtually any entrepreneurial project and may in fact be
necessary to the success of a project, yet they suggest limits to the power
of entrepreneurs to see their initial plans become reality. Furthermore, if
the conditions under which a founder helped to build an organization
may still be evident in its structure, position, and reputation more than
a century later, it is unlikely that easy interventions will succeed in dramatic and speedy reshaping. Such considerations should not, however,
discourage researchers from seeking to understand the processes by which
social actorsin this case, organizational founderscontribute to the
making of the social worlds inherited by their successors.
REFERENCES
Academie Royale dArchitecture. 1717. Lettres patentes pour letablissement de
lAcademie Royale dArchitecture. Bibliothe`que Nationale.
Aldrich, Howard E. 2005. Entrepreneurship. Pp. 45177 in Handbook of Economic
Sociology, 2d ed., edited by Richard Swedberg and Neil Smelser. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.
Aldrich, Howard E., and C. Marlene Fiol. 1994. Fools Rush In? The Institutional
Context of Industry Creation. Academy of Management Review 19 (4): 64570.
Aldrich, Howard E., and Martha A. Martinez-Martinez. 2001. Many Are Called, But
Few Are Chosen: An Evolutionary Perspective for the Study of Entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 25 (4): 4156.
Aucoc, Leon, ed. 1889. LInstitut de France: Lois, statuts, et reglements concernant les
anciennes academies et lInstitut, de 1635 a` 1889. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.
Auld, Louis E. 1986. The Lyric Art of Pierre Perrin. Henryville, Pa.: Institute of
Mediaeval Music.
Baker, Ted, Anne S. Miner, and Dale T. Eesley. 2003. Improvising Firms: Bricolage,
Account Giving and Improvisational Competencies in the Founding Process.
Research Policy 32 (3): 25576.
Bamford, Charles E., Thomas J. Dean, and Patricia McDougall. 1999. An
123


Examination of the Impact of Initial Founding Conditions and Decisions upon the
Performance of New Bank Start-Ups. Journal of Business Venturing 15:25377.
Baron, James N., M. Diane Burton, and Michael T. Hannan. 1996. The Road Taken:
Origins and Early Evolution of Employment Systems in Emerging Companies.
Industrial and Corporate Change 5:23975.
Baron, James N., Michael T. Hannan, and M. Diane Burton. 1999. Building the Iron
Cage: Determinants of Managerial Intensity in the Early Years of Organizations.
American Sociological Review 64 (4): 52747.
Baum, Joel A. C., and Christine Oliver. 1996. Toward an Institutional Ecology of
Organizational Founding. Academy of Management Journal 39 (5): 13781427.
Beaussant, Philippe. 1992. Lully ou le musicien du soleil. Paris: Gallimard.
Beckert, Jens. 1999. Agency, Entrepreneurs, and Institutional Change: The Role of
Strategic Choice and Institutionalized Practices in Organizations. Organization
Studies 20 (5): 77799.
Boeker, Warren. 1988. Organizational Origins: Entrepreneurial and Environmental
Imprinting at Time of Founding. Pp. 3351 in Ecological Models of Organizations,
edited by Glenn Carroll. Cambridge: Ballinger.
Boucher dArgis, Antoine-Gaspard. 1772. Comediens. Pp. 67072 in Encyclopedie,
ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, vol. 3. Geneva.
Burton, M. Diane. 2001. The Company They Keep: Founders Models for Organizing
New Firms. Pp. 1339 in The Entrepreneurship Dynamic, edited by Claudia Bird
Schoonhoven and Elaine Romanelli. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Campardon, Emile. 1880. Les Comediens italiens ordinaires du roi. Paris: BergerLevrault.
Carroll, Glenn R., and Anand Swaminathan. 1991. Density Dependent Organizational
Evolution in the American Brewing Industry, 16331988. Acta Sociologica 34 (3):
15575.
Clemens, Elisabeth S., and James M. Cook. 1999. Politics and Institutionalism:
Explaining Durability and Change. Annual Review of Sociology 25:44166.
Cowart, Georgia. 1981. The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press.
Davis, Gerald F. 1991. Agents without Principles? The Spread of the Poison Pill
through the Intercorporate Network. Administrative Science Quarterly 36:583613.
Delmar, Frederic, and Scott Shane. 2004. Legitimating First: Organizing Activities
and the Survival of New Ventures. Journal of Business Venturing 19:385410.
DiMaggio, Paul J. 1982. Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston.
Media, Culture and Society 4:3350, 30322.
. 1988. Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory. Pp. 321 in Institutional
Patterns and Organizations, edited by Lynne G. Zucker. Cambridge: Ballinger.
. 1991. Constructing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S.
Art Museums, 19201940. Pp. 26792 in The New Institutionalism in
Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. 1983. The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional
Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American
Sociological Review 48 (2): 14760.
Dobbin, Frank R. 1994. Cultural Models of Organization: The Social Construction
of Rational Organizing Principles. Pp. 11741 in The Sociology of Culture, edited
by Diana Crane. London: Blackwell.
Dobbin, Frank R., and Timothy J. Dowd. 1997. How Policy Shapes Competition:
Early Railroad Foundings in Massachusetts. Administrative Science Quarterly 42:
50129.
Downing, Stephen. 2005. The Social Construction of Entrepreneurship: Narrative
124

and Dramatic Processes in the Coproduction of Organizations and Identities.
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 29 (2): 185204.
Emirbayer, Mustafa K., and Ann Mische. 1998. What Is Agency? American Journal
of Sociology 103 (4): 9621023.
Fligstein, Neil. 1985. The Spread of the Multidivisional Form among Large Firms.
American Sociological Review 50:37791.
. 1990. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de. 1709. Histoire du Renouvellement de lAcademie
Royale des Sciences. Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup.
Fumaroli, Marc. 1987. Les Intentions du Cardinal Richelieu, Fondateur de lAcademie
Francaise. Pp. 7078 in Richelieu et la Culture. Paris: Editions du CNRS.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Glixon, Beth L., and Jonathan E. Glixon. 2006. Inventing the Business of Opera: The
Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Greenwood, Royston, and Roy Suddaby. 2006. Institutional Entrepreneurship in
Mature Fields: The Big Five Accounting Firms. Academy of Management Journal
49 (1): 2748.
Hannan, Michael T., M. Diane Burton, and James N. Baron. 1996. Inertia and Change
in the Early Years: Employment Relations in Young High Technology Firms.
Industrial and Corporate Change 5 (2): 50336.
Hannan, Michael T., and John Freeman. 1984. Structural Inertia and Organizational
Change. American Sociological Review 49:14964.
Hargadon, Andrew B., and Yellowlees Douglas. 2001. When Innovations Meet
Institutions: Edison and the Design of the Electric Light. Administrative Science
Quarterly 46 (3): 476501.
Harris, Lloyd C., and Emmanuel Ogbonna. 1999. The Strategic Legacy of Company
Founders. Long Range Planning 32 (3): 33343.
Haveman, Heather, and Mukti V. Khaire. 2004. Survival beyond Succession? The
Contingent Impact of Founder Succession on Organizational Failure.
Administrative Science Quarterly 19:43763.
Holmes, William C. 1993. Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario in the
Early Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jomaron, Jacqueline de. 1988. Le theatre en France. Paris: Armand Colin.
La Gorce, Jerome de. 1992. LOpera a` Paris au temps de Louis XIV. Paris:
Desjonque`res.
. 2002. Jean-Baptiste Lully. Paris: Fayard.
Lewin, Arie Y. Lewin, Chris P. Long, and Timothy N. Carroll. 1999. Coevolution of
New Organizational Forms. Organization Science 10 (5): 53550.
Louis XIV. 1669. Privile`ge accorde au Sieur Perrin pour letablissement dune
Academie dOpera en musique, et Vers Francois. Bibliothe`que de lOpera.
Louis XVI. 1790. Proclamation du Roi, sur le Decret de lAssemblee Nationale, du
20 Aout 1790, qui fixe provisoirement pour cette annee les depenses pour les
differentes Academies et Societes litteraires. Paris: Imprimerie Royale.
Lounsbury, Michael, and Mary Ann Glynn. 2001. Cultural Entrepreneurship: Stories,
Legitimacy, and the Acquisition of Resources. Strategic Management Journal 22:
54564.
Low, Murray B., and Eric Abrahamson. 1997. Movements, Bandwagons, and Clones:
Industry Evolution and the Entrepreneurial Process. Journal of Business Venturing
12:43557.
Low, Murray B., and Ian C. MacMillan. 1988. Entrepreneurship: Past Research and
Future Challenges. Journal of Management 14:13961.
Mamone, Sara. 2003. Most Serene Brothers-Princes-Impresarios: Theater in Florence
125


under the Management and Protection of Mattias, Giovan Carlo, and Leopoldo de
Medici. Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 9 (1): 116.
Marquis, Christopher. 2003. The Pressure of the Past: Network Imprinting in
Intercorporate Communities. Administrative Science Quarterly 48:65589.
McKendrick, David G., and Glenn R. Carroll. 2001. On the Genesis of Organizational
Forms: Evidence from the Market for Disk Arrays. Organization Science 12 (6):
66182.
Menestrier, Claude-Francois. (1681) 1972. Des Representations en musique anciennes
et modernes. Reprint ed. Geneva: Minkoff.
Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. Institutionalized Organizations: Formal
Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83 (2): 34063.
Mezias, Stephen J. 1990. An Institutional Model of Organizational Practice: Financial
Reporting at the Fortune 500. Administrative Science Quarterly 35:43157.
Mezias, Stephen J., and Jerome C. Kuperman. 2000. The Community Dynamics of
Entrepreneurship: The Birth of the American Film Industry, 18951929. Journal
of Business Venturing 16:20933.
Mongredien, Georges. 1966. La vie quotidienne des comediens au temps de Molie`re.
Paris: Hachette.
Mukerji, Chandra. 1994. The Political Mobilization of Nature in Seventeenth-Century
French Formal Gardens. Theory and Society 23:65177.
. 1997. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Needham, Maureen. 1997. Louis XIV and the Academie Royale de Danse, 1661: A
Commentary and Translation. Dance Chronicle 20:17390.
Perrin, Pierre. 1645. Divers insectes, pie`ces de poesie. Paris: J. Duval.
. 1666. Recueil des Paroles de Musique de Mr. Perrin, Conseiller du Roy en
ses Conseils. Manuscrits 2208, Bibliothe`que Nationale.
. 1671. Avant-Propos place en tete de largument de Pomone. Paris: Ballard.
Piperno, Franco. 1998. Opera Production to 1780. Pp. 179 in Opera Production and
Its Resources, edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli. Trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prunie`res, Henri. (1913) 1975. LOpera italien en France avant Lulli. Paris: Champion.
Rao, Hayagreeva. 1998. Caveat Emptor: The Construction of Nonprofit Consumer
Watchdog Organizations. American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 91361.
Rao, Hayagreeva, Calvin Morrill, and Mayer N. Zald. 2000. Power Plays: How Social
Movements and Collective Action Create New Organizational Forms. Research in
Organizational Behavior 22:23781.
Romanelli, Elaine. 1989. Environments and Strategies of Organization Start-Up:
Effects on Early Survival. Administrative Science Quarterly 34 (3): 36987.
Ruef, Martin. 2005. Origins of Organizations: The Entrepreneurial Process. Research
in the Sociology of Work 15:63100.
Sastry, Anjali, and Corinne Coen. 2000. Beyond the Beginning: Building a Theory
of Organizational Imprinting. Working paper. University of Michigan Business
School.
Scholler, Wolfgang. 1993. Die Academie Royale dArchitecture, 16711793. Cologne:
Bohlau Verlag.
Scott, W. Richard. 1991. Unpacking Institutional Arguments. Pp. 16482 in The New
Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul
J. DiMaggio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sewell, William H., Jr. 1996. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures:
Inventing Revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Society 25:84181.
Singh, Jitendra V., and Charles J. Lumsden. 1990. Theory and Research in
Organizational Ecology. Annual Review of Sociology 16:16195.
126

Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1965. Social Structure and Organizations. Pp. 14293 in
Handbook of Organizations, edited by James G. March. New York: Rand McNally.
Stroup, Alice. 1990. A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at
the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Suchman, Mark C. 1995. Managing Legimitacy: Strategic and Institutional
Approaches. Academy of Management Review 20 (3): 571610.
Suchman, Mark C., Daniel J. Steward, and Clifford A. Westfall. 2001. The Legal
Environment of Entrepreneurship: Observations on the Legitimation of Venture
Finance in Silicon Valley. Pp. 34982 in The Entrepreneurship Dynamic: Origins
of Entrepreneurship and the Evolution of Industries, edited by Claudia Bird
Schoonhoven and Elaine Romanelli. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological
Review 51:27386.
Van de Ven, Andrew. 1993. The Development of an Infrastructure for
Entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing 8:21130.
Zald, Mayer N. 1990. History, Sociology and Theories of Organization. Pp. 81108
in Institutions in American Society: Essays in Market, Political and Social
Organizations, edited by John E. Jackson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Zaslaw, Neal. 1989. The First Opera in Paris: A Study in the Politics of Art. Pp.
723 in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque, edited by John
Hajdu Heyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zucker, Lynne G. 1977. The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence.
American Journal of Sociology 42:72643.
127


517899

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

517899

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What Is Organizational Imprinting?

Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Founding of the Paris

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

What Is Organizational Imprinting? Cultural

Organization theorists have long recognized that organizations take

Organizational sociologists have long been interested in explaining the

2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

AJS Volume 113 Number 1 (July 2007): 97127

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

UNPACKING THE IMPRINTING HYPOTHESIS

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

THE ORGANIZATIONAL IMPRINTING OF THE PARIS OPERA

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this article are my own.

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Mon, 9 Nov 2015 19:58:23 PM

You might also like