Embracing Market Liberalism? Community Structure, Embeddedness, and Mutual Savings and Loan Conversions to Stock Corporations

Bibliographic Data

ID4522154
AuthorsMarc Schneiberg (0000-0002-3974-5670, Reed College, corresponding author), Adam Goldstein (0000-0003-1127-3541, Princeton University), Matthew S Kraatz (0000-0002-3574-8858, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Year2023
Volume88
Issue1
Pages53-85
Publication date2023-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00031224221138079
OpenAlexW4313226274
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited89

Integrating research on communities with economic and organizational sociology, we analyze how organizations' responses to marketization are shaped by their embeddedness in communities and the socio-associational structure of those communities. We address these relations via event-history analyses of mutual conversions to stock corporations among savings and loan associations (SLAs) in the United States, a population of depositor-owned and traditionally community-based banks that demutualized amid deregulation during the 1970s and 1980s. Consistent with accounts of social disorganization and declining social capital, SLA managers abandoned mutual for corporate enterprise as SLAs became less locally embedded, and where communities experienced disorganization and declining working- or cross-class associationalism. Yet conversions also depended on elite detachment, civic reorganization, bifurcation within communities, and "upwardly oriented" associations that helped SLA managers reorient SLAs from Main Street to Wall Street. Through this study, we look beyond networks, institutions, and categories to add communities and local associations to economic sociology's toolkit for understanding the social foundations of firms and markets. We show how financialization coupled macro-level political-institutional dynamics of marketization with community-level dynamics of elite disconnection, class and ethno-racial fracture, and civic reorganization, while also shedding light on the contemporary fates of mutual and cooperative forms

Economics · Elite · Embeddedness · Financialization · Gentry · Market economy · Marketization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Social science · Sociology · Cooperative Studies and Economics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Management and Organizational Studies