Formation of new organizational forms in organizational populations: A study in the context of Türkiye and Europe

Organization theory views businesses as social actors. These units, which consist of complex systems, act with the motivation to protect their borders and existence in the presence of changing competitive conditions and established institutional norms. Organization theory, which examines the interactions of businesses with each other and their other stakeholders, is a field that sheds light on modern management issues. In this regard, the emergence of new management styles, strategic activities and organizational structures in industries and their evolution with sectors are discussed in the research. The 50-year development of the trade sectors related to the automotive spare parts and power tools industries in Turkey and the companies operating within them constituted the scope of the research. A comparative case study framework was created by including relevant industries in Europe, as a center of innovation and diffusion, within the scope of the research. The features that enable businesses to be examined by defining their boundaries are referred to as "organizational forms". Organizational forms refer to classes that are similar in terms of their core features and differentiated from other classes in certain aspects by the evaluative audience (Fiol and Romanelli, 2012). The concept of organizational form can be characterized by various dimensions. These can be expressed as the workforce of the business, the product or service it offers, machinery-equipment and technological infrastructure features, degree of division of labor, control structure, ownership and management features, position within business and resource networks, main areas of activity and basic market strategies (Heydebrand, 1989; Hannan and Freeman, 1989). Determining organizational forms empirically, specifically in terms of sectoral and cultural context relations, with the help of literary typologies, has a conceptual purpose in terms of primarily "understanding" the phenomenon under investigation and forming a basis for analysis. The research aimed to elucidate the processual nature of the formation of new organizational forms. Toward this end, many businesses operating in multiple sectoral and cultural contexts were selected through deliberate sampling to be examined longitudinally. By incorporating the unique structural dynamics of sectors and businesses and the personal characteristics of actors such as perception, interpretation and assimilation into the framework, it was aimed to reach social reality in a versatile way. In this respect, the aim of the research is to increase the generalizability criterion with the sample that best represents the context and to produce in-depth learning and knowledge that will provide insight into the validity beyond the context. Thanks to the integrative research framework created by examining many different theories, the phenomenon of "formation" has been discussed on an event-based basis, from both a relational and pattern-seeking perspective. In this sense, the research is an evolutionary investigation in which reductionist and holistic approaches are used together. The created research model helped to explain the set of relationships through which the structural features and form diversity of different industries occur. The research began by conducting sectoral field research and expert interviews in order to lay the groundwork for the examination of industries and to define dimensions and scales. Thus, the model of the research was created and its scope and sample were decided. Data were collected using semi-structured in-depth interviews and document review methods. The data was interpreted and analyzed through thematic content analysis. The recorded events and behaviors were used to explain the phenomenon with relational and interactional methods. Turkey and the global business world witnessed great change in the 1980s in line with technological and social developments. Globalization, which has gained great momentum in this process, and developments in information technologies, professionalization of production and management, the producing segment becoming the consuming segment at the same time, the changing workforce profile, product diversity and competition, have carried the pace of change and transformation to a different dimension in mutual and chain relationships, and the company Life spans have shortened, organizational boundaries have blurred and new organizational forms have emerged. The expectation of responsibility towards the environment and social life, along with changing consumer values, has made it impossible for companies to gain returns above the sector average by resigning from the ongoing efficiency methods that emerged with the effects of the industrial revolution, and to gain legitimacy in line with the institutions of the new order, to create strategic cooperation networks, to meet the needs. The concepts of creating new niche markets, social and intellectual capital, absorptive capacity, learning organizations, organizational culture and transformational leadership have gained importance. Planning, basic management functions consisting of the classical understanding of command-command-control and basic elements of organizational design, crisis management, elements of organizational culture, coordination, motivation and effective leadership have turned into an understanding (Koçel, 2003). Effective communication, teamwork, strategic action and global thinking roles have been added to the manager's planning and management roles. The traditional effectiveness of the concept of strategic planning in the organizational field has begun to be replaced by the concepts of learning and selforganization. Management and organization literature, which was born and developed to understand and explain organizations, started to be renewed in the 1970s in parallel with the developments in social life and business world. The practical literature, which explains how an effective and efficient organization with its traditional mission should be, focuses on how different organizational design models emerge, why organizations are so diverse, and how different organizational design models emerge, using the concepts and methods of natural sciences, in the light of normative and functionalist paradigms, around the system approach. It has turned into a field that seeks answers to questions such as why organizations survive, why organizations are similar to each other, and the other part questions the knowledge produced through interpretive and critical studies within the scope of the post-modern approach (Sargut and Özen, 2007). Since the 1990s, studies representing the continuation of the functional leg of the field have sought to integrate diversified organizational approaches and integrate the knowledge produced, while the critical leg, with the influence of institutional pressures, has turned its direction to interpretive studies that will contribute to functional knowledge (Üsdiken and Leblebici, 2001). The most important differences that stand out in the basic perspectives of postmodern organization theories, which have diversified since the mid-1970s with the influence of theorists coming from different origins such as biology, economics and sociology, and that feed the research and discussions in the relevant literature, are adaptation regarding the formation and survival of organizational forms. It is formed around the dualities of selection, free will-determinism and structure-action. The free will approach arising from rationality theories has formed the basis of management practice and research (Lewin and Volberda, 1999). While organizational strategy, resource dependency, transaction cost and agency theories, which evolved from the free will approach, emphasize the logic of conscious "strategic choice", the organizational ecology approach emphasizes that actions and choices remain unimportant under limited rationality, in the face of the speed and uncertainty of changing environmental conditions, and that selection is essential. Institutional theory, on the other hand, consists of approaches that have developed and diversified along a unique line, essentially advocating a structural drift based on internal harmony and the selection pressure created by the institutional environment. The common feature of all of them is to offer an understanding and explanation independent of the difference that intra-organizational human relations will create within the existing social order and a social reality understanding, within the framework of the open system and the undeniable environmental factor. The fact that theoretical perspectives examining the behavior and dynamics of organizations from different perspectives are incomparable with each other and even contradict each other's basic axioms has been evaluated as damaging the knowledge production of the field and has brought forward suggestions for unification around a meta-theory (meta-theory) in the field. While the debate continues between integrating the diversified post-modern theories of this meta-theory while avoiding their sharp corners that falsify each other, or adopting the principles of the most basic modern period theory, the acquisitions of complexity and chaos theory in the natural sciences have begun to attract attention in the organizational literature. The co-evolution approach, based on the principles of complexity and chaos theories, has aroused wide interest in the management and organization literature to ensure systematic and useful knowledge production. In this current approach, unlike the balance-oriented traditional understanding of Newton and Darwin science, the axioms of instability, non-linearity and multi-directional causality are adopted as principles. The multi-faceted, multilayered and non-linear characteristics of the relational variables of the phenomenon require exploratory research based on meaning. A co-evolutionary approach based on complexity and chaos theories promises richer and more systematic knowledge generation in a historically informed and context-specific manner. In the first part of the thesis, various organization theories are introduced according to their emergence periods and reasons, the central dualities in the organization literature are explained, and the roles assigned by all these approaches to the environment and the manager are discussed. At the end of the chapter, the thesis's attitude towards the central dualities and its position in environment-manager activity are explained. In the second chapter, the concept of organizational form is discussed in depth. The chapter started by explaining the instrumental importance of defining organizational forms, definition discussions in the literature, compilation of definitions in the literature, and the framework definition adopted by the thesis. Then, traditional and current theories that contribute to explaining the dynamics of the formation of new organizational forms are introduced. These theories formed the pillars of the research model of the thesis. The third section includes the methodology of the research. The chapter started with the purpose and importance of the research. Then, the research method, sampling method, scope, model and propositions created for the purpose and theses of the research were discussed. In the following sections, data collection and analysis methods are introduced, and finally, the exploratory (understanding), descriptive (definition) and relational (explanation) findings of the research are included. The main conclusions drawn according to the basic findings obtained in the research are presented in three branches: the formation of new organizational forms, which is the main purpose of the research, and the definition of the concept of organizational form, which are the functional sub-goals of the research, and the results regarding the methodological research program discussion in the organization literature. It has been found that new organizational forms in organizational fields arise from the interaction of actors with the resource pool in their environment. The changing combinations of forces of balance and transformation in the organizational field produce certain configurations. Although the general patterns of these formations are observable, their duration and route are not predictable due to the complex nature of social phenomena. Intermediaries such as actors' meaning-making characteristics, cognitive perceptions and managerial competencies, and regulators specific to firms and industries interact mutually, giving rise to disproportionate and unpredictable developments. It has been revealed that organizational forms gain identity by producing certain context-specific configurations according to various typological bases. It has been shown that the systematic knowledge in the literature is at a level that will increase the quality of research in the field. It has been concluded that starting research by defining organizational forms and their context relationships will support the representative power of the sample and the clarity of the research's generalizability criteria. The structure of organizational theories in macro management literature, which can communicate and integrate with each other through their positivist epistemological features, has been supported. In addition, it has been shown that a methodology for a deeper understanding of organizational phenomena can be created by supporting the interactional discourse of the holistic approach in current organization theory with reductionist and deterministic traditional theories.