UNVEILING THE FOUNDER EFFECT: A PROCESS-ORIENTED FRAMEWORK ON ENTREPRENEURIAL IMPRINTING

Imprinting has often been evoked to explain the resilience of firms’ traits as they grow and age. Unfortunately the process has often been implicitly assumed, loosely defined or treated fragmentarily with scarce, if any, sedimentation of shared definitions and theoretical frameworks. Building on a recent systematic literature analysis, the paper aims at deepening our understandings of imprinting through the identification of the imprints –what gets stamped on an organization– and the elaboration of a dynamic view of the process aimed at explaining the mechanisms involved in the replication, substitution or re-negotiation of imprints in time. Relative to imprints, the paper identifies entrepreneurs’ cognitive frameworks as both the devices entailed in the selection and enactment of environmental features and as the imprints that are stamped on the organization. Relative to the process, we build a process-model of imprinting drawing from recent literature on resource mobilization by social movements emphasizing the centrality of political aspects and mobilizing practices in the persistence –or lack thereof– of founders' frames. We discuss the methodological implications of the proposed framework for future investigations