2. Organizational heterogeneity and the production of new forms: Politics, social movements and mutual companies in american fire insurance, 1900–1930

Abstract

What are the social, political and institutional conditions for organizational heterogeneity and the production of new organizational forms? I address this question using historical methods and time series analyses of 3145 mutual fire insurers — important cooperative alternatives to markets and hierarchies. Developing politically oriented neo-institutional arguments, I show that mutuals were vehicles by which property owners and agrarian interests resisted corporate consolidation and secured conditions for autonomous economic development. Mutuals embodied a vision of a decentralized, “cooperative commonwealth” of farmers, merchants and independent producers. And they rested on a socio-industrial order characterized by political struggles against corporations; anti-monopoly social movements; immigrants and other cultural carriers of mutual organizing templates; and an institutional infrastructure of protestant churches and local movements.