Archetypes of organizational success and failure

Abstract

Historical comparative analysis of the high-tech rivals General Electric and Westinghouse over twelve decades suggests that each firm’s responses to five organizational challenges affected their chances of enjoying long-term success. Inductive theoretical work advances two polar ideal types of organizational success and failure: the self-perpetuating and the self-destructive archetypes, respectively. These should be seen as extreme states of the existence of firms since, in reality, firms operate in some intermediary state. A processoriented perspective of theory building advances relations of necessity towards organizational long-term success, and integrates the challenges’ responses into a requisites model for the development of organizational self-perpetuation propensity.