The principal goal of this research is to understand how institutional, ecological, and regulatory factors combine to influence characteristics of organizations and of populations of organizations. This study will examine competing environmental approaches to understanding organizations. Population ecology theory, institutional theory, and hypotheses about the direct effects of regulatory changes on firms will be examined using longitudinal data from 1825 through 1925 on several hundred Massachusetts railway firms. The Commonwealth collected extensive annual data from all chartered railways that will facilitate the comparison of competing hypotheses about organizational foundings and failures, and about an array of internal firm characteristics such as administrative ratios and the presence of particular functional divisions.
