In 2013, people in Michoacán and Guerrero, especially from rural areas, armed themselves against criminal cartels. Although their movements emerged from comparable contexts, their leaders and organizational forms differed in ways that affected their tactics and targets, as well as the timing of de-escalation. Whereas Guerrero’s leaders understood their struggle as defensive, Michoacán’s leaders were businessmen who saw themselves engaged in an offensive campaign. This partly explains why fatalities were greater there than in Guerrero. I further demonstrate that movement fragmentation led to lethal violence, and their organizational forms also contributed to dynamics of escalation or de-escalation in ways not fully appreciated by scholars. Specifically, the organizational form of Michoacán’s patron-sponsored autodefensas made them more vulnerable to lethal violence than were Guerrero’s community-sponsored organizations.

Banians acted as intermediaries for European merchants in Bengal. They were highly influential in the eighteenth century but their importance waned thereafter. This article reexamines their role in the nineteenth century and argues that their importance persisted but evolved in response to changes in the Bengal economy and issues of contracting and governance. It shows that the banians remained a nexus between the local and global economies, facilitating a bidirectional transfer of knowledge. They enabled the development of innovative Indian business forms and contributed to the emergence of a diverse ecology of organizational forms and ownership in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century.

By the start of the twentieth century, the two organizational forms most used by Dutch banks to raise capital through the dispersal of their ownership were the cooperative association and the public company. Share ownership in cooperatives was typically restricted to customers, while companies permitted outside investors. Neither organizational form dictated specific shareholder liability arrangements. New specialist banks targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) combined these two organizational forms and flexible liability rules to create hybrid forms. I find those that took the public company form were more likely to suffer distress during the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s. Liability arrangements for shareholders, by contrast, had a negligible impact on these banks’ resilience.

This paper elaborates theories of organizational knowledge creation by exploring the implications of institutional change for organizational knowledge creation in Chinese organizations of different ownership forms. Using a dynamic institutional perspective, we discuss prominent characteristics of the Chinese context and develop propositions about knowledge creation patterns in different organizational forms. We also theorize about the effects of increasing institutionalization on patterns of organizational knowledge creation in China and the consequent implications for innovation. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of this model and suggestions for further research.