(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
As plants sprout and grow, so do social organizations—but only when the soil in which they grow is conducive. That’s the argument of new research based on a case study of two botanical gardens in New York City, one of which failed and the other of which, a century later, continues to thrive today.
The researchers, Victoria Johnson of the City University of New York’s Hunter College and Walter W. Powell of Stanford University, use ideas from the fields of institutional entrepreneurship, social movement research, and organizational ecology to study how new organizations emerge in a particular historical and social context. The linchpin of their analysis is the concept of “poisedness,” defined as “the availability or vulnerability of a social and historical context to the reception of an innovation and subsequent reconfiguration by it.”
The key questions when examining poisedness, Powell says, are: “Could this have happened at other points in history? Who could climb through that window of opportunity?”
The idea for the chapter came out of a book that Johnson was writing about David Hosack, a medical professor at Columbia University in late-18th-century New York who started a botanical garden in then-rural Manhattan for medical research modeled after European counterparts. The project foundered, and Columbia, which took over the garden, later sold the land at a vast profit so that it could become part of Rockefeller Center.
In the late 1800s, Nathaniel Lord Britton, another Columbia professor, launched a second attempt to start a botanical garden that would rival the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England. Although his pedigree, résumé, and aims were strikingly similar to Hosack’s, Britton was able to muster funding and support for his project from Gilded Age barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. A major public institution today, the New York Botanical Garden fulfilled Britton’s vision of not only a nature attraction but also a botanical and pharmaceutical research center.
After an exhaustive reading of Hosack’s and Britton’s papers, requiring visits to some 35 historical archives around the United States and Europe, Powell and Johnson were able to inspect the interactions between the two professors and those from whom they sought help in pursuing their garden projects.
“What really grabbed both of us about it was that they were very similar cases across many dimensions, but they also lived in such different historical times—social, political, economic, cultural, organizational times,” Johnson says. “In a way [Hosack] was just born at the wrong time.”
Politically, Hosack was trying to get the State Legislature interested in funding a research garden for medicinal uses while the country was preoccupied with the embargo of products from Great Britain that depressed the New York economy. Socially, he was unable to secure funding from wealthy elites.
Britton, on the other hand, had the opportunity—which he seized—to make the garden sound useful to influential people who might not care about botany but who harbored grand aspirations and valued the expertise necessary to realize them. It was a time when wealthy benefactors wanted to create New York institutions, such as museums and opera houses, that would rival the city’s European counterparts, while also preserving natural beauty in a rapidly urbanizing and crowding city.
“When Britton appealed to the Gilded Age elite, he strategically found the language to activate an abiding interest they already had in trying to help provide green spaces in cities to address some of the potential worker unrest that came from long hours and polluted cities, and an interest in making sure real estate values stayed high by maintaining parkland,” Johnson says.
The chapter contributes to innovation research by examining not only why Britton’s garden took off, but also why Hosack’s garden did not. The academic literature on entrepreneurship, including cultural and institutional innovators, looks mainly at success, not failure, because failures don’t leave as many primary sources behind, Johnson says.
“We had an incredible opportunity to study this failure and what was it about the two different cases that made one something we still live with today: the New York Botanical Garden,” she says.
Powell and Johnson raise an important point about existing research into the causes of change, says sociologist Nitsan Chorev of Brown University. Researchers often point to specific events that precipitate changes—Black Tuesday, 9/11, a presidential election—but in this case, there were no such events.
“There was no critical juncture, no exogenous shock,” Chorev says. “The process is so long that the participants almost don’t see it.”
Victoria Johnson and Walter W. Powell, “Organizational Poisedness and the Transformation of Civic Order in 19th-Century New York City,” from the forthcoming Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report), Lamoreaux and Wallis, eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.