Technology, local communities, and market evolution: The rise, fall, and perseverance of the American movie theater industry, 1896-2020

Major shifts in an industry’s evolution are often triggered by technological innovations. However, how entrepreneurs and managers in different geographic communities perceive the meanings of the same technological innovation may greatly differ, leading to geographic variance in industry dynamics. In this mixed-method dissertation, which covers critical periods of the American movie theater industry’s development from its inception in 1896 to its recent crisis in 2020, I investigate the role of local communities in shaping localized understandings of technological innovations and thus shaping localized patterns of industry evolution. Specifically, this dissertation consists of four core chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how community-specific experimental spaces for a technological innovation provide entrepreneurs with community-specific cues for interpreting the cultural meaning of an innovation. Therefore, more than one organizational form emerges across communities to exploit the same innovation. Chapter 2 reveals how naming an organization after a local community can signal a strong local commitment that discourages potential entrants and, therefore, decreases entry rates in this community. Chapter 3 explains how the perception of substitutability between an emerging industry’s novel offerings and an incumbent industry’s old offerings matters differently to incumbent organizations’ survival in different communities. Finally, Chapter 4 explores how the organizational values of serving local communities enable organizations to transcend categorical boundaries to innovate in the face of an industry-wide existential crisis. Overall, this dissertation puts forward that local communities as a cultural and cognitive collective have a critical influence on the localized patterns of organizational form emergence, organizational foundings, organizational failure, and organizational adaptation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business Administration

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Li, Ying

Contributors dc:contributor

• Khessina, Olga M
• Kraatz, Matthew
• Ocasio, William
• Shah, Sonali
• Sorenson, Olav

• Market emergence and evolution
• cultural meanings of technological innovation
• local communities
• cultural and creative industries

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Ying Li

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115530

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115530