Hong Wei Xu
Motivated by general theoretical ideas about the societal consequences of diversity among organizations, I examine how the diversity of organizational forms in a local community shapes the formation of its museums. I argue that the diversity of organizations that cut cross major community segregation lines enhances the public-spiritedness of the whole community and the community's ability to act collectively by increasing public participation and interaction of citizens with different backgrounds. In contrast, the diversity of organizations that are confined to the major segregation lines should further community cleavage and decrease the likelihood of establishing a museum to serve the community. Empirically, I investigate how diversity in the local newspaper industry, the financial service industry, and the religious arena affected the formation of museums in American counties from 1872 to 1976. I find that the diversity of general content newspapers has a positive relationship with the formation of museums, implying the integrating effects of general content newspapers that cut across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and economic strata. In contrast, there is a negative relationship between ethnic newspaper diversity and museum formation, showing the segregating effects of ethnic newspapers by race and ethnicity. Moreover, I find the diversity of financial service organizations has an unexpected negative effect on the formation of museums, demonstrating that diverse financial service organizations may segregate a community by economic strata or by geographical area. The findings show that there is no systematic relationship between the diversity of church members in a community and its museum creation. I conclude with a discussion of this study's implication for a general research program on the social, political, and economic consequences of organizational distributions in communities.
INSEAD, Singapore 138676, 1 Ayer Rajah Avenue, Singapore
