Conditions at an organisation's founding leave structural and strategic marks that persist long after those conditions have gone.
Stinchcombe observed in 1965 that industries founded in the same period resemble each other in structure more than they resemble later firms in their own sector, because each cohort locked in the technology, labour relations and assumptions available at the time. What looks like a considered structure is frequently a fossil of the founding year.
In practice
- A firm founded during a hiring freeze still runs lean thirty years later and calls it culture.
- A charity set up under a grant regime that ended in the 1990s still reports in that regime's categories.