Exploring New Space: Governmental Roles in the Emergence of New Communities of High-Technology Organizations

Abstract

This exploratory dissertation examines governmental influences during the ongoing emergence of NewSpace, which is a community of private, entrepreneurial organizations pursuing space-related business opportunities outside of the traditional NASA-Military-Industrial complex model.

While recent research has provided significant insights into how organizations, populations and communities emerge, our understanding of the influence of government in this process has been minimal. Since government is the single most important actor in the modern economy, correcting this oversight is crucial to any modeling of community emergence. As emerging communities are lacking in traditional quantitative data, and the goals of this research are exploratory rather than theory testing, an inductive, qualitative methodology is utilized. The first step towards understanding governmental influence during the emergence of a new community is documenting exactly what the government does in this environment. Chapter IV uses grounded theory methodology to produce a Taxonomy of Governmental Roles in the Emergence of High-Technology Communities. The question of whether government facilitates the creation of new industries - or whether entrepreneurs manipulate government - is of critical importance to researchers of entrepreneurship and policy. Chapter V uses historical analysis to consider the causal role of government in the establishment of the environment in which this new community of organizations is emerging. Institutional legitimacy is crucial to the survival of entrepreneurial firms as well as to new populations and communities. Chapter VI considers the government's key role as legitimizer, and proposes a theoretical model for the process of legitimacy transfer from governmental agencies to entrepreneurial firms, populations and communities.

This dissertation makes contributions to the literatures of organizational evolution, community emergence, institutional theory, entrepreneurship and policy. It offers researchers a framework to better model governmental influence. It also provides entrepreneurs with a holistic view of governmental influence on their environments and offers governmental actors a fuller understanding of the impact that their legislation and enforcement activities have on new organizations and industries.