Organizational mimicry in American social movement communities: An analysis of form communication effects on the evolution of crisis pregnancy centers, 1989--2009

Communication scholarship has significantly improved organizational ecology models by emphasizing that the members of organizational communities are participating actively in the enactment of their environment. Organizational forms are viewed as contested and multi-faceted action frames which emerge from community interactions and simultaneously shape them. Form negotiations mediate the evolutionary fate of population members adhering to a form. Existing institutional ecology approaches focus on discursive strategies foregrounding the distinctive and unique organizational identity underlying a certain form. The assumption prevails that organizational populations can only thrive if their form is recognized clearly by diverse audiences as this entails that it has achieved cognitive legitimacy. But not all organizational populations benefit from clearly communicating who they are, particularly if they are operating in an environment that attaches low cognitive legitimacy to their form. The biological concept of aggressive mimicry, which refers to a competitive evolutionary strategy based on form ambiguity, illuminates the circumstances when members of a population exploit the lack of clarity about their form to their benefits. Among other tactics, aggressive mimics in organizational populations engage in purposive labeling of their names to increase their resemblance with a population of models.;For the purpose of this investigation, aggressive mimicry is introduced and the conditions under which organizational populations might employ it as a strategy are examined. The short-term and long-term consequences of its use are presented along with suggestions about how to revise existing ecological models to account for the evolutionary benefits of ambiguous form communication. A longitudinal investigation of the changing population composition of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in the United States provides an opportunity for testing a revised set of expectations in an empirical setting. Some CPCs routinely engage in aggressive mimicry when they closely imitate the organizational forms of reproductive health care providers (RHPs) in an effort to compete with them for the same "clients," women facing unwanted pregnancies. There are two ways to enter the subpopulation of mimics: (1) CPCs select organizational labels reminiscent of the organization names typically chosen by RHPs at the time of founding, and (2) CPCs change their existing organizational names so that they resemble those of RHPs at some point during their existence.;Drawing on multiple archival data sources, the effects of differing cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy levels on the organizational vital rates of CPCs are investigated. As a measure of cognitive legitimacy in the sense of communicative form stabilization, the study relies on a content analysis of media discourse about CPCs. Based on the analysis of newspaper coverage of CPCs spanning a period of over two decades, textual network approaches are employed to develop a novel longitudinal measure of cognitive form legitimacy. The influence of legitimacy effects and other factors such as density-dependent effects, the availability of environmental resources, and cohort effects are examined in a variety of ecological models. Negative binomial regression models are used to examine the dynamics of CPC founding events. The CPC label transformation events, which represent their employment of a mimicry strategy, are estimated with piecewise constant exponential hazard models. The effects of the covariates on CPC failure rates are examined in a series of Cox proportional hazard models.;The results of the analyses suggest that as cognitive legitimacy levels rise, CPCs engage in mimicry transformations at a higher rate. At the same time, their mortality rates increase under conditions of increasing levels of cognitive legitimacy. Thus, mimicry strategies seemingly bear penalties for both impostors and non-mimicry subpopulations. However, mimics among CPCs are found to have superior survival chances when compared to non-mimics. Additional findings indicate that organizations entering the mimic subpopulation through adaptation disband at a lower rate than CPCs that are "born" into mimicry via differential selection.;Keywords: cognitive legitimacy, community ecology, Cox regression, event history analysis, evolution, institutional ecology, labeling, mimicry, negative binomial regression, nonprofit organizations, organizational forms, organizational identities, piecewise constant exponential models, population ecology, pro-life, meta network analysis, social movement organizations.