Mechanisms of Organizational Imprinting: From Entrepreneur to Organization

Empirical Context

For my empirical context, I chose the Zeiss firm, a manufacturer of optical instruments such as microscopes. It was founded by Carl Zeiss in Jena, Germany in 1846. In 1865, Carl Zeiss asked Ernst Abbe, a professor of physics at Jena University, to find a scientific basis for developing microscopes, to substitute craftsmanship and trial and error. Abbe joined the firm in 1866. By 1872, he had developed an analytical theory of the microscope that provided the scientific basis for designing microscopes, as Zeiss had envisioned. Thus, Abbe was the second central figure in the Zeiss firm, similar in importance to Carl Zeiss himself: Abbe realized the science-based product development that the Zeiss firm pioneered in the optical industry. Abbe became co-owner of the firm in 1876 and assumed its leadership when Carl Zeiss passed away in 1888. In 1891, Abbe transferred ownership to the Carl Zeiss Foundation, which he had set up. In 1945, the Zeiss firm was split into East German (in Jena) and West German (in Oberkochen) firms. Although the U.S. Army reached Jena first, in April 1945, on July 1, 1945 they left Jena, which was to be part of the Soviet occupation zone (subsequently the German Democratic Republic). The U.S. Army brought the 77 most important Zeiss staff to the U.S. zone, where they started the West German Zeiss firm. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the two Zeiss firms merged again (Paetrow and Wimmer, 2016). Figure 1 provides a visual of the timeline.

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Figure 1.

Timeline

I selected the Zeiss firm through theoretical sampling (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007; Siggelkow, 2007). The first sampling criterion was data availability from the time of the firm’s founding, given the importance of founding as one of the sensitive periods during which the focal entity exhibits high susceptibility to external influences (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013: 195). Zeiss has a company archive that goes back to the firm’s founding in 1846. The second criterion was that some individuals had a strong and clearly discernible organizational impact that persisted, which enabled tracing of their actions and their impact on the firm (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013). Corporate histories and biographies document that beginning in 1846, Carl Zeiss (and Abbe, after having joined in 1866) practiced high precision in manufacturing microscopes. Zeiss also pushed to apply scientific principles in developing new microscope objectives, or lenses, which was realized starting in 1872, after Abbe had discovered these principles (Auerbach, 1925; Schomerus, 1952; Feffer, 1997; Mütze, 2004). The third criterion was that some features of the organization needed to be persistent despite subsequent environmental changes (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013; Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015). The secondary literature suggested that Zeiss represents an extreme case in this regard, providing a strong instantiation of the phenomenon of interest that makes it easily discernible (Pettigrew, 1990; Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007; Siggelkow, 2007). In 1934, an academic observer wrote of Zeiss, “The organization has withstood the test of many years of growth and change without essential alteration in its structure or its philosophy. It has met successfully the shocks of the Great War; the Revolution, the Inflation Period, and several severe industrial depressions” (Young, 1934: 292). Subsequently, World War II brought further massive and discontinuous changes: all patent documents and technical drawings (codified knowledge) disappeared; the firm lost many of its employees; it was split into West and East German firms; and the business environment in Germany in 1945 was substantially different from what it had been prior to the war (Hermann, 1989; Mühlfriedel and Hellmuth, 2004). Yet, despite such massive changes, the West German Zeiss firm recreated some of the pre-war organization structures related to science-based product development and high precision (Köhler, 1983; Hermann, 1989; Kogut and Zander, 2000). Because of these features, the Zeiss case has already drawn attention in the literature (Young, 1934; Weiss, 1949; Kogut and Zander, 2000; Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005).

Data Collection

In the first stage of data collection, I studied the secondary literature on Zeiss to understand the founder, the firm, its development over time, and its historical context; see the top of Table 1. To do so, I searched literature databases for works on Carl Zeiss, the Zeiss firm, and Ernst Abbe, covering English- and German-language sources. To develop a grasp of the context, I also read books on the history of microscopy and the optical industry. I included Abbe because along with Carl Zeiss, he was highly influential on the development of the Zeiss firm during a sensitive period. The time of Abbe’s involvement was not the founding period, but as Simsek, Fox, and Heavey (2015: 296) noted, “the imprinting role of individuals is not limited to . . . the founding period.”Marquis and Tilcsik (2013: 200) wrote that “sensitive periods should be conceptualized as periods of transition.” Abbe strongly influenced the Zeiss firm in its second major sensitive period: its transition from crafts-based to science-based product development. This took place in what a contemporary observer termed the “childhood” stage of the Zeiss firm (Auerbach, 1925: 22) and an “early stage of industry development” (Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015: 292), before the mass manufacturing of microscopes. It represents a “discontinuit[y]” (Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015: 299) in the product development process that Abbe himself had enabled with his scientific discovery. These features provide reason to believe that the Zeiss firm was “more malleable” during this period “than in normal times” (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013: 199). In this transition, Abbe played a key role by bringing to fruition the scientific construction of microscopes that Carl Zeiss had attempted. During this time, Abbe also actively drove the reorganization of manufacturing and the building of an organization structure for product development (Cahan, 1997: 72–73; Plumpe, 2014).

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Table 1.

Data Sources

Source	1846–1904 (Zeiss and/or Abbe Alive)	1905–1990 (Post Zeiss and Abbe)	Covering (Some of) Both Periods	N	Pages
Secondary sources
Books	5	5	11	21	7,932
Newspaper articles	1	1	1	3	7
Academic articles	2	9	7	18	439
Master’s theses	0	6	2	8	50
Total	8	21	21	50	8,428
Primary sources
Biographies	3	2	6	11	522
Memories of time at Zeiss	4	6	12	22	141
Speeches	5	7	0	12	740
Newsletters	0	2	0	2	52
Documents describing firm history	6	9	7	22	179
Correspondence	2	10	0	12	16
Meeting minutes	0	18	0	18	36
Plans	0	10	0	10	11
R&D files	0	73	0	73	254
Reports	6	75	9	90	315
Organizational rules	1	16	0	17	145
Strategy papers	0	2	0	2	76
Documents describing organization structure	0	33	0	33	178
Total	27	263	34	324	2,665

In the second stage, I collected primary data in the company archives of the Carl Zeiss firm and the Schott glassworks (also co-founded by Carl Zeiss) in Jena, Germany. On six trips to these two company archives, over several days for each trip, I consulted several hundred internal documents that describe the organization as it developed over time and how work was accomplished, e.g., documents describing organization structure, meeting minutes, R&D files, plans, reports, speeches, retrospective accounts by individuals of their time at Zeiss, organizational rules, strategy papers, documents describing firm history, and correspondence; see the bottom of Table 1. Overall, I collected or excerpted more than 300 documents. In Table 2, I provide a list of the internal documents (the primary sources) that I cite in this article; for example, a text citation to BACZ 218 refers to the Autobiographie Max Fischer that I found in Zeiss’s internal documents.

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Table 2.

Zeiss Company Internal Documents (BACZ) Cited in This Article

BACZ Number	Title
218	Autobiographie Max Fischer.
226	Boegehold, Hans (1934): Herrn Professor Straubel zum Abschied.
228	Schomerus, Friedrich (1943): Rudolf Straubel zum Gedächtnis.
577a	Schomerus, Friedrich (1944): Unsere Konstruktionsbüros, 1893–1943. Zeiss Werkszeitung. Materialsammlung Die Konstruktionsbüros 1893–1943.
577b	Erinnerungen E. Graul, 11. Juni 1944. Materialsammlung Die Konstruktionsbüros 1893–1943.
577c	Beitrag zur Entwicklung des Konstruktionsbüros. Josef Mahler, 23. Dezember 1943. Materialsammlung Die Konstruktionsbüros 1893–1943.
578	Erinnerungen über den Werdegang des Konstruktionsbüros, Georg Orth, 6. Januar 1944
1535	Schriftwechsel zwischen Prof. Dr. Ernst Abbe und Dr. Otto Schott betreffend Glasschmelzversuche usw. Mai 1879-Mai 1881.
02241	Brief von Snell an Abbe vom 30.5.1878 reported on index card to Arch. Nr. 30273.
2677	Rede des Herrn Dr. Czapski, gehalten in der allgemeinen Versammlung der Geschäftsangehörigen im grossen Saale des Volkshauses am Mittwoch, den 25. November 1903.
8104	Organisation (Niederschriften über Sitzungen des Organisationsausschusses mit Stellenbesetzungsplan, Zeiss-Strukturplan Stand Februar 1951), Strukturplan WHL und EHL, Harting.
9916	Biographie Dr. h.c. Max Fischer von Friedrich Stier, Dezember 1954.
13476	Gedanken über die Ziele und den Zweck der Neuorganisation von Konstruktion und Entwicklung, Manfred Bischoff, 8. Mai 1945.
15041	Biographie ‘Diplom-Ing. August Kotthaus’ verfaßt von Friedrich Stier. Februar 1956.
15225	Biographie Walter Bauersfeld, von Friedrich Stier, 1956.
16632	Kurzchronik von Karl Wachtelborn der Optikbetriebsleitung (OBL) von 1846–1953 ('107 Jahre Optikfertigung der Zeisswerke in Jena'), 1953/1960.
17678a	Über die Art der Entstehung und Entwicklung von Neukonstruktionen bei der Firma Carl Zeiss, Manfred Bischoff, 20. April 1946.
17678b	Erfindungen im Zeisswerk, Hans Harting, 7. September 1945.
18809	Erinnerungen des Zeiss-Pensionärs Otto Köhler geb. 24. März 1873.
18829	Meine Erlebnisse und Erinnerungen in 52 1/2-jähriger Tätigkeit in den Zeisswerken, Jena, Kurt Heerdegen, 1957.
20596	Gedenkreden und Ansprachen gehalten bei der Trauerfeier für Ernst Abbe, 17. Januar 1905.
23138	Geschichte Mikro-Labor.
27997	Geschäftsbericht des Stiftungskommissars der Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung, 1902/03 und 1903/04.
VA 06570	Eingaben der Belegschaft an die Geschäftsleitung auf Weiterbestehen der Zeiss-Stiftung und ihrer Betriebe in alter Form.
WB 843/844/845	Vosahlo, Hans: Zeiss-Qualitätssicherung im Sondergerätebau.

Throughout the data collection process, I repeatedly consulted the company historian to get a solid overview of the archival material and to understand which types of documents contained which information. Two research assistants, historians by training, helped collect further data between my visits to the archives.

Data Analysis

Given the open-ended nature of the research question, I followed established methods for theory-building through inductive research (Siggelkow, 2007; Miles, Huberman, and Saldana, 2014). In analyzing the data, I engaged in an iterative process (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014; Miles, Huberman, and Saldana, 2014) and worked recursively between data and theory (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2009), employing analytical moves suggested by Grodal, Anteby, and Holm (2021). The fact that the Zeiss firm had features that persisted for a very long time despite strong discontinuities was puzzling and focused my attention on data that appeared “most surprising or salient” in this regard (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021: 597). I analyzed the data in four stages.

In stage 1, I familiarized myself with the context, the Zeiss firm, its products, organization, how work was accomplished at Zeiss, and how these aspects developed over time. I wrote notes and summaries about documents I had consulted, copied, or excerpted during each visit to the archives. Two research assistants developed synthesizing documents on microscope development and the organization of microscope development at Zeiss over time.

In stage 2, using open coding (inductive coding) (Strauss and Corbin, 1990), I identified how Carl Zeiss described what he considered important for his firm and what he did in organizing and managing it. Two points stood out very clearly as potential sources of persistent characteristics of the Zeiss firm: Carl Zeiss strongly insisted on high precision in manufacturing and on designing microscopes by applying scientific principles rather than by trial and error. (So did Abbe once he joined the firm.) After several iterations, I concluded that developing microscopes by applying scientific principles and insisting on high precision for the manufacture of microscopes fit well with the construct of blueprints. As a construct employed in organizational imprinting theory (Baron, Burton, and Hannan, 1999; Baron, Hannan, and Burton, 1999; Baron and Hannan, 2002), this notion is also suitable for anchoring the findings in that theory and contributing to it. Because the most salient blueprints indicated behavior for accomplishing tasks central to the firm (product development, manufacturing), I coded them as blueprints for how to do tasks.

In stage 3, I used open coding to identify features of the organization that appeared important for characterizing the Zeiss firm and that persisted over time (“imprints,”Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013: 206; Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015: 292). Salient features that persisted for a long time despite strong discontinuities include the following: The Zeiss firm specialized in high-precision manufacturing and science-based product development. It had job roles and organization units focused on tasks central to this type of product development, e.g., calculation and technical drawing. It had a substantial number of employees in those job roles, and they had a particular way of doing their tasks as they insisted on this high precision and a science-based approach to product development. The Zeiss firm manufactured products characterized by high precision and science-based product development (Hellmuth and Mühlfriedel, 1996; Mütze, 2004). I coded these as different types of imprints in different organizational dimensions. For instance, I grouped together data on job roles in calculation and making drawings and categorized them as “specialist job role imprints.” I then merged categories into overarching categories by “identifying similarities between subordinate categories” (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021: 594). For example, I merged the categories “specialist job role imprints,”“managerial job role imprints,”“organization unit imprints,” and “imprints on workforce composition” into the overarching category “structural imprints” because they all relate to features of organization structure (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021: 593) that are relevant from an organization perspective (e.g., Penrose, 1959; Puranam, 2018; Burton et al., 2019: 249). I grouped together different persistent practices through which Zeiss employees had accomplished tasks (e.g., developed products by applying scientific principles), and I categorized them as “behavioral imprints.” Similarly, I coded the imprints relating to the products that Zeiss manufactured (product scope) as “product imprints” because product scope captures an important dimension of the products a firm offers. All three types of imprints were salient in their persistence across the discontinuity of World War II and its aftermath (e.g., Köhler, 1983; Kogut and Zander, 2000; Mütze, 2004). I complemented this round of open coding with a round of top-down (deductive) coding (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006), employing the canonical dimensions of organization structure (specialization, formalization, and centralization; Miller and Dröge, 1986). For example, I coded the statutes of the Zeiss Foundation as formalized rules.

In stage 4, in line with my focus on imprinting as an “agent-driven process” (Johnson, 2007: 117), I used open coding to analyze what Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe had done to implement the two blueprints, to identify the mechanisms by which they translated their individual blueprints to persistent features of the Zeiss organization. The puzzle of how the Zeiss firm came to have features that persisted for a long time despite strong discontinuities focused my attention on data that appeared most salient for this question, which also helped me to generate initial categories (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021: 597). For example, the fact that Zeiss and Abbe taught employees a particular way of doing product development and manufacturing appeared to be a salient mechanism that led to persistent practices among Zeiss employees. I categorized this mechanism as “teaching” because it captures an essential mechanism through which Zeiss and Abbe instilled particular practices in their employees (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021: 600). Another example is that, as the Zeiss firm grew, Abbe had employees specialize in manufacturing and product development, leading to the emergence of specialist job roles, for example in calculation and making drawings. I categorized this as “decisions about specialist job roles” because the data grouped in this category relate to the emergence of specialist job roles resulting from decisions about a process of dividing labor. I also dropped some categories I had identified earlier in the analysis process when they turned out to be “only peripherally related to the overarching theoretical story” (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021: 599).

I then identified relationships between these categories (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021). Sequential relationships were the most salient. For example, the two blueprints guided Zeiss’s and Abbe’s decisions and shaped core features of the organization in persistent ways, leaving structural imprints such as job role or organization unit imprints. Setting concepts in a sequential relationship—along with creating figures and iterating repeatedly between those and the data—helped me to tease out the mechanisms (Grodal, Anteby, and Holm, 2021) that translated individual blueprints to persistent features of the Zeiss organization. In this way, I developed a conceptual framework by identifying variables and relationships that extend and elaborate theory (Yin, 2009).

Because the primary data in this article come from historical sources, I also employed measures recommended for historical organization studies (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014). To gauge the validity and credibility of the sources, I took into account their temporal and geographical proximity to the events they covered, and I attempted to view each document from the perspective of decision makers within their historical context (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014). On several occasions I did so with input from the company historian and the two research assistants, who are historians. I employed triangulation (Miles, Huberman, and Saldana, 2014) among different actors and among different sources, e.g., internal memoranda and external communication, private letters and public speeches, or documents written by Zeiss employees and outsiders (Bhardwaj, Camillus, and Hounshell, 2006; Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014; Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2014). The company historian also provided feedback on an earlier version of this article, as did a group of business historians at a conference dedicated to Zeiss’s history. For an historical study of an organization that reaches far back in time, a “member check” (Lincoln and Guba, 1985: 314) in the strictest sense is impossible. However, I subjected a prior version of this article to the closest substitute, presenting to historians with deep knowledge of the history of the Zeiss firm.

Two Blueprints of the Founder and His Business Partner

The two blueprints of Zeiss and, subsequently, Abbe were manufacturing with high precision and using scientific principles to develop new products.

Blueprints Translated into Organizational Imprints Through Early Decisions

Decisions about specialist job roles

From its founding in 1846 until the beginning of the 1870s, the Zeiss firm was organized according to the crafts system (Auerbach, 1925; von Rohr, 1930; Schomerus, 1952) whereby each person produced a complete instrument, without specialization. Between 1872, when Abbe enabled the scientific design of microscopes, and 1889, the Zeiss firm transitioned to science-based mass manufacturing (Auerbach, 1925; von Rohr, 1930; Schomerus, 1952; Willam, 1967; Cahan, 1997). The firm grew from fewer than 40 employees to more than 350, developed different product lines of microscope technology, and became a large manufacturing enterprise with an increasing degree of specialization.

In shifting away from the craft system, Zeiss and Abbe needed to decide along which dimensions to divide tasks that had previously been carried out by one person. In keeping with their two blueprints, when they involved others in tasks they initially had done themselves, they emphasized the distinction between product development and manufacturing (Abbe, 1896c). When they divided labor along those lines, they created specialization of manufacturing and product development sub-tasks, leading to the emergence of specialist job roles in these areas, such as draftsman (Auerbach, 1925; Mütze, 2004).

In manufacturing, this process involved specialization of shop floor workers into manufacturing mechanical parts or optical parts (Schomerus, 1952: 33; Hellmuth and Mühlfriedel, 1996: 66–67) and, for example, metal-working labor into drilling, milling, lathing, or stamping (Schomerus, 1952: 74; BACZ 16632: 9). Moreover, Zeiss and Abbe had some employees specialize in tasks essential for implementing the high-precision manufacturing blueprint, such as measuring thicknesses or apertures (BACZ 16632; Auerbach, 1925; Bauer, 2010).

When Abbe started to implement his blueprint for science-based product development, he was initially the only person capable of performing the required calculations, so he performed this task on his own (Mütze, 2004). Over time, he increasingly involved other calculation experts in the task, including Paul Riedel in 1879, Siegfried Czapski in 1884, Paul Rudolph in 1886, Albert König in 1894, Moritz von Rohr in 1895, and Rudolph Straubel in 1901 (von Rohr, 1930: 79; Schomerus, 1952; Hellmuth and Mühlfriedel, 1996; Mütze, 2004; Wimmer, 2017). Between 1886 and 1896, Rudolph, Czapski, and König took over from Abbe responsibility for calculations in the microscope, photo, measurement, telescope, and astronomy departments (Mütze, 2004: 324). Similarly, Abbe at first made all the technical drawings himself (Mütze, 2004: 70; BACZ 577a), but starting in the 1880s he involved others in making the drawings (BACZ 577a; BACZ 577b; BACZ 578).

By 1889, Abbe had implemented specialization in product development in two main tasks for science-based development, calculation and technical drawing, and created specialist job roles (Auerbach, 1925). The specialist tasks in calculation and drawing led to the emergence of specialist job roles, specifically calculation experts and draftsmen, which were henceforth found at the Zeiss firm (Auerbach, 1925; von Rohr, 1930; Schomerus, 1952; Hellmuth and Mühlfriedel, 1996; Mütze, 2004; BACZ 577a, BACZ 577b).

My findings also suggest that this early decision on the principle to use in dividing the overall task and the resulting emerging specialist job roles imprinted the organization in the long term by influencing subsequent decisions about further specialization and specialist job roles as the firm grew. Even after Abbe’s time, Zeiss managers decided to further specialize drawing work, for instance, into sub-tasks, which led to the emergence of related specialist job roles (BACZ 17678b; Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, 1945; Wimmer, 2009). When the head of development at Jena, appointed after World War II (Bischoff), designed the post-war development organization, for instance, he included auxiliary staff who were in charge of things such as registration and reproduction of drawings (BACZ 17678a). The two blueprints for how to do tasks were thus translated into specialist job role imprints—a type of structural imprint—through early decisions about the lines along which to specialize and the emerging specialist job roles resulting from these decisions. Table 3 provides an overview and further evidence.

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Table 3.

Additional Evidence of How Blueprints for How to Do Tasks Translated into Organizational Imprints Through Early Decisions, Teaching, Role Modeling, and Formalized Rules

Mechanism	Representative Data	Type of Imprint	Representative Data
Blueprints for how to do tasks were translated through early decisions into organizational imprints
Decisions about specialist job roles	“[Zeiss and Abbe’s] program . . . they innovated … also by introducing a division of labor in microscope production. . . . It was this new organization of work, as much as its mathematico-scientific basis, that was so distinctive about the Zeiss Werke.” (Cahan, 1997: 72–73)	Specialist job role imprints (structural imprints)	“All production at Zeiss is . . . prepared not just theoretically . . . by the physicist and calculated . . . by the mathematician and calculation specialist, but just as diligently by . . . the draftsman on his drawing board” (Schomerus, 1952: 150)
Decisions about managerial job roles	“Abbe . . . not only . . . provided the construction of the different optical systems, but also pervaded the complete manufacturing process of lenses . . . inventing or improving manufacturing equipment . . . and methods and devices for precise control of materials and products” (Czapski in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 323)	Managerial job role imprints (structural imprints)	“The department heads . . . are not bound by strict guidelines from the board, . . . leading to occasional overlap in fields of activity.” (BACZ 17678b: 3)
Decisions about organization units	“The department for optical measurement instruments, founded by E. Abbe in 1890.” (Auerbach, 1925: 110)	Organization unit imprints (structural imprints)	“The ‘calculation office Nattheim,’ which opened on July 1, 1946, continued operations as calculation office at the Oberkochen facility.” (Mühlfriedel and Hellmuth, 2004: 73)
Hiring decisions	“I possessed the competences necessary to be active in an industry of this kind, which is so closely related to science.” (Letter from Schott to Abbe, 22 December 1880, BACZ 1535: 3)	Imprints on workforce composition (structural imprints)	“Many assistants with competences in drawing . . . were hired.” (BACZ 578: 4)
Product decisions	“From 1889 onwards, Ernst Abbe added new product lines to the original product line of microscopes . . . some new product lines did not make a profit for a long time . . . They did, however, play a role in extending technology that . . . established the core for the development of a number of applied sciences and industries.” (von Rohr, 1930: 85)	Imprints on product scope (product imprints)	“For the 1960s the production of three instruments were prioritized: . . . instruments for research with extremely high precision, maximal measuring range and universal applicability . . . They were to excel in high precision in measurement, safety, and low maintenance requirements.” (Kowalski, 1991: 68)
Blueprints for how to do tasks were translated through teaching into organizational imprints
Teaching	“From employment contracts for apprentices from the 1850s we . . . know that on Sundays, Carl Zeiss gave his apprentices a couple of hours of teaching in “linear drawing” (BACZ 577a: 5).”	Imprinted practices (behavioral imprints)	“Rudolph . . . The calculations of the anastigmat he found based on Abbe’s directives.” (Czapski in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 325)
	“Together with Abbe . . . I will . . . giv[e] a course on optical instruments to a small circle of some interested gentlemen.” (Czapski to Heidenhain, November 6, 1887, in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 189)
Blueprints for how to do tasks were translated through role modeling into organizational imprints
Role modeling	Max Fischer “admired [Abbe] as a role model.” (Schomerus, 1952: 110)	Managerial job role imprints (structural imprints)	Bauersfeld considered “the link between purely scientific work, work on technical and manufacturing matters, and organization his vocation, just like Abbe had done.” (BACZ 15225: 12)
Blueprints for how to do tasks were translated through formalized rules into organizational imprints
Rules about the composition of top management	“Only such persons are eligible for membership of the top management board who are experts either in scientific, technical, or management matters of interest to the firm.” (Statutes of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, §26; Abbe, 1896a)	Imprints on workforce composition (structural imprints)	Zeiss “has always had (except for the later years of the East German Zeiss firm) a scientist in its top-level management team.” (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 565)
Rules about practices	“Containing an astonishingly complete and internally consistent set of provisions for how to run innovative, science-based firms, the Zeiss Foundation statutes.” (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 569)	Imprinted practices (behavioral imprints)	“Top management and the works council . . . felt obliged to follow the provisions of the statutes and whenever the economic situation permitted at all, acted in the spirit of the founder.” (Hermann, 1989: 60–61)
Rules about product scope	“The commercial activity of the Carl-Zeiss-Foundation shall be limited to the areas the current firms [belonging to the foundation, including the Zeiss firm] are situated in.” (Abbe, 1896a: §35)	Imprints on product scope (product imprints)	“The analysis of patenting by broad IPC sections . . . reveals surprising similarities between the profiles of the two Zeiss companies operating in different economic systems.” (Kogut and Zander, 2000: 180)

Blueprints Translated into Organizational Imprints Through Teaching

Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe themselves enacted and implemented the two blueprints. They also taught employees how to carry out manufacturing and product development, thereby instilling in them a way of doing product development and manufacturing suited for implementing these blueprints. In doing so, they translated the blueprints into employee practices that turned out to be persistent.

Regarding manufacturing, Abbe attested that “Carl Zeiss . . . accustomed the others to an almost marvelous exactness and confidence in technical work” (Abbe, 1887: 62; BACZ 18829: 9) and “did everything to make a highly exact technique customary in his small workshop” (Abbe in Wittig, 1989: 98), including by “regular control of all individual work” (Carl Zeiss in Hellmuth and Mühlfriedel, 1996: 80). To achieve this, Zeiss personally taught his apprentices (BACZ 577a: 5), insisting on an “unrelentingly strict application of the law of quality work and precision” (Willam, 1967: 76). Abbe considered it “of significant importance for Zeiss’ progress” that August Löber, the first person he hired in 1847, shared Zeiss’s zeal for precision (Abbe, 1896c: 71; Willam 1967: 46). Moritz von Rohr, Abbe’s former assistant, wrote that strictly enforcing the precise execution of all components, as Carl Zeiss did, “became second nature to his [Zeiss’s] assistants. In this, Löber was Zeiss’s most highly esteemed ally” (von Rohr, 1930, App. IV: 9). Löber also developed the empirical procedures for manufacturing and testing the components of optical systems (Feffer, 1997: 27) and, in Abbe’s view, was “the immediate or indirect teacher of all our . . . optical workers” (Abbe, 1896c: 71; Auerbach, 1925: 9). Abbe fostered high precision by personally teaching manufacturing employees, too (BACZ 02241). After the division of labor was established between shop floor workers specialized in mechanical parts and in optical parts (Feffer, 1997; Paetrow and Wimmer, 2016: 90), “the exact precision work that Carl Zeiss had insisted on for the mechanical workers since the founding of the firm was now also instilled in the optical workers” (Schomerus, 1952: 33).

Abbe himself had developed the concrete blueprint for identifying through calculation the specifications of microscope objectives. He taught others whom he hired in the 1880s (e.g., Riedel and Rudolph) his calculation methods for developing new microscope objectives (von Rohr, 1930: 79; Czapski in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 325). Starting in 1890, he selected a circle of young scientists whom he taught, called the “Abbe school” (Czapski letter to Dohrn, 1906, in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 54; von Rohr, 1918). It included Rudolph, Czapski, Straubel, Pulfrich, Ambronn, von Rohr, Köhler, König, and Fischer (BACZ 218, Jenaer Volksblatt 5.10.1926; BACZ 228: 94). Abbe’s successor, Czapski, declared, “I am wholeheartedly his disciple and know everything I have come to know about optics since my university days from him, or have studied it on his suggestion” (Czapski in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 325).

Several sources provide an in-depth view of how Abbe taught one member of the Abbe school, Max Fischer. They highlight the importance of Fischer working jointly with Abbe in the decade 1890–1900 (BACZ 218, Jenaer Volksblatt 31 January, 1915). Abbe’s former assistant, von Rohr, provided a detailed account of Abbe and Fischer’s interaction:

Ernst Abbe controlled each and every task, everything his new employee did, and even provided original hints himself. Every day for two years he subjected his employee to a two-hour interrogation regarding all kinds of business activities. He was happy about any idea that was proposed to him, but also criticized each and every task that was accomplished, even every individual correspondence with regard to its effect on the recipients, whose side he would take in the interrogation. . . . When he was convinced that business matters would be carried out in his sense by his employee, he abruptly broke off the interrogations. (von Rohr, 1930: 84–85)

Other sources point out that “Max Fischer had the privilege of working with and next to Abbe for 13 years . . . and thus to habituate himself to his ways of doing business . . . so that he could orient all his actions to it also after Abbe’s death. In new situations, he knew exactly which actions would have found Abbe’s approval, had he still been alive” (BACZ 9916: 7). Having “worked with Abbe himself,” Fischer “had adopted [his] spirit and intentions” (BACZ 218, Jenaer Volksblatt 5 October, 1926).

As a consequence of teaching by Zeiss and Abbe, when the firm’s employees accomplished the task of manufacturing a microscope, they did so by employing practices that enabled high precision. An account describing the Zeiss workshop in 1864 highlights that “the machines, tools, and facilities were quite primitive and it seems astonishing that precision work . . . such as optics often smaller than 1 mm in diameter, were manufactured with such equipment” (BACZ 16632: 3). This was also true after Abbe’s time. Discussing a gyroscope design in 1925, Albert Einstein (Broksch, 2005: 3) argued, “As the accuracy requirements are so high . . . the difficulties involved are so immense that Zeiss is currently the only firm that can achieve a feat of this magnitude.” When production of eyeglasses was resumed in the West German Zeiss firm, new employees were being educated to adhere to the most rigorous precision standards (Hermann, 1989: 35). Management of the West German Zeiss firm chose not to pursue the alternative—to relax the required level of precision—even in the difficult, immediate post-war situation. In the 1970s, both the East German and the West German Zeiss firms were leading suppliers of lithographic objectives for semiconductor manufacturing equipment (Zschäbitz, 1999: 57–58), which require “absolute precision” (Paetrow and Wimmer, 2016: 137). Zeiss still maintains its focus on precision in manufacturing, for instance by pushing the boundaries in lithographic equipment (Marx, 2019). Likewise, the firm accomplished product development by applying scientific principles also after Abbe’s time, as documents from 1935 show (BACZ 23138). After 1945, both the East and the West German Zeiss firms continued this practice (BACZ 17678a, BACZ 17678b, BACZ 13476; Schomerus, 1952; Mütze, 2004; Paetrow and Wimmer, 2016). The analysis thus suggests that the two blueprints for how to do tasks translated into imprinted practices among Zeiss employees, i.e., behavioral imprints, through Zeiss and Abbe having taught employees how to do product development and manufacturing.

Blueprints Translated into Organizational Imprints Through Role Modeling

The generation of top managers who succeeded Abbe, such as Czapski, Fischer, Straubel, and Bauersfeld, all saw Abbe as a role model. Bauersfeld did not just occupy himself with scientific, manufacturing, and organization tasks; he was also inspired by Abbe to do so. Bauersfeld considered “the link between purely scientific work, work on technical and manufacturing matters, and organization his vocation, just like Abbe had done” (BACZ 15225: 12). Likewise, when describing his engagement in many different functional issues, Straubel explicitly mentioned, “that is Abbe’s spirit” (Czapski in Hermann, 1989: 122). For the Zeiss company historian, the “enormous importance” of the CEOs for research and the central role and multi-functionality of the scientific department heads is “probably . . . a heritage of Abbe’s” (Wimmer, 2009: 97), possibly an effect of “the Abbe model of the inventor-entrepreneur” (Wimmer, 2009: 91). Czapski mentioned that Abbe “has an effect through his example” (Czapski letter of 1 October, 1887, in Flitner and Wittig, 2000: 187). Max Fischer “admired [Abbe] as a role model” (Schomerus, 1952: 110).

The data thus suggest that Zeiss managers who succeeded Abbe emulated him in the definition of their job role. How Abbe filled his job role, and thus his implied definition of his job role as the top manager, was highly visible. Therefore, the two blueprints for how to do tasks were translated into managerial job role imprints through managers having considered this way of defining managerial job roles, being inspired by it and emulating it, a mechanism known as role modeling (Gibson, 2004; Snihur and Zott, 2020).

Blueprints Translated into Organizational Imprints Through Formalized Rules

In 1891, Abbe set up the Carl Zeiss Foundation and transferred ownership of the firm to it. The foundation is governed by statutes that are legally binding for the firm’s management team. The statutes formalize the firm’s principles and rules of management, describing “a comprehensive and coherent system of running a science-based company” (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 544). The statutes reflect very detailed and systematic formalization, consisting of 122 paragraphs and running to almost 70 pages. They contain several provisions concerning the role of science for product development at Zeiss, as indicated by the science-based product development blueprint. For instance, the important role of science at Zeiss is written into the firm’s objectives: The Zeiss firm’s objective is not just to make a profit; rather, an additional objective is to contribute to scientific progress (Abbe, 1896a: §42). Three rules are of particular interest here. First, §26 codifies a rule about the composition of the top management board, whereby “at least one member has to be an expert in scientific matters of interest to the firm” (Abbe, 1896a: §26). Even after their appointment to the board, members of the management board must continue their regular activity in their field of expertise (Abbe, 1896a: §28; Abbe, 1896b: 339; Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 560). Second, the statutes contain “principles for running a science-based firm” (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 553), which include practices and routines (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 544) that enable the implementation of science-based product development. Abbe explicitly mentioned that he codified already existing practice: “the purpose is to fix for the future and to specify more precisely something that has already been taking place without formal rules” (Abbe, 1896b: 335). Third, the statutes contain a rule about product scope. Zeiss was only allowed to be “commercially active in such branches of optics, glass technology, the production of instruments and tools and related industries, which maintain the current close link between technology and science” (Abbe, 1896a: §35). Science-based product development, therefore, needed to play an important role in the areas in which the Zeiss firm was active (Abbe, 1896b; Cahan, 1997). The statutes even explicitly prohibited diversification into other industries: “entering commercial enterprises of a different kind and the active participation in such enterprises is permanently excluded, even just for investment purposes” (Abbe, 1896a: §35).

As he wrote the statutes, Abbe thus translated the science-based product development blueprint, which he had implemented, into formalized rules: Abbe wrote the statutes as well as a 58-page commentary to explain his motives behind them (Abbe, 1896b). Importantly, written in the 1890s, the rules in the statutes were formulated after Abbe had been practicing science-based product development for two decades, after he had instilled science-based product development in others, and after he had already used the fit of products with scientific results as the criterion for including new products in Zeiss’s product scope. The findings thus indicate that Abbe translated his science-based product development blueprint into formalized rules by codifying how he had regularly practiced this.

The statutes’ rules did not just remain dead letters; once established, they imprinted the organization by influencing Zeiss employees, including those beyond Abbe’s time. First, they influenced decisions about the composition of top management. Except for the last years of the East German Zeiss firm, in accordance with §26 of the statutes, there had always been a scientist on Zeiss’s top management team (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 565), a structural imprint relating to the composition of top management. Second, with regard to practices, an early observer noted that “[t]he uniqueness of the Stiftung [Foundation] lies . . . in the literalness with which these objectives are interpreted and the thoroughness of the method employed to attain them” (Young, 1934: 293). Later, a U.S. judge concluded that “the management [of the West German Zeiss firm] has dedicated itself conscientiously to operating in accordance with the spirit, terms and purposes of Abbe’s statute” (Hermann, 1989: 216). The formalized rules therefore shaped long-term practices at Zeiss, leaving a behavioral imprint. Third, the codified criterion persistently shaped the product scope in the East and the West German Zeiss firms, leaving a long-term imprint: Even four decades after the two firms had been split, they both continued patenting in the same technology classes at an astonishingly high correlation (.93) even though one firm had operated in a market economy and the other in a centrally planned economy (Kogut and Zander, 2000). In this way, the science-based product development blueprint was translated into organizational imprints—structural, behavioral, and product imprints—through formalized rules.

Why did the statutes’ rules guide the behavior of Zeiss employees so strongly? The foundation’s statutes were binding for Zeiss management and thus had legal force. The legal force of the statutes alone, however, cannot completely explain the strong correlation between areas of invention pursued by the West and the East German Zeiss firms after 1948; the statutes were suspended in East Germany in 1948 when Zeiss was socialized (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005; Steiner, 2014). My findings indicate that Zeiss employees felt an obligation to adhere to the rules that Abbe had codified. As Abbe’s successor, Czapski, argued in a speech to workers in 1903, “we have the obligation to act like Abbe put down on paper, and we need to fulfil this obligation independently of whether we like it or not” (BACZ 2677: 14). This sense of obligation and its strength became palpable when Zeiss employees went so far as to defend the Zeiss Foundation and its statutes when the foundation came under pressure. In 1933, the Nazi administration ordered Zeiss management to substitute the Zeiss Foundation representative with a Zeiss employee loyal to the Nazis and to change the statutes, conferring wide-ranging powers on the loyalist. Zeiss top management immediately submitted a formal complaint despite the fact that the leading local Nazi politician had “unambiguously threatened top management with concentration camp” (Hermann, 1989: 144). The Zeiss Foundation and its statutes remained intact, but parts of the statutes had to be changed. As soon as the Nazi regime had fallen, all changes made to the statutes during that period were immediately reversed (Buenstorf and Murmann, 2005: 564). In the German Democratic Republic, a first attempt was made to socialize the Zeiss firm in 1947. Zeiss employees spoke up and made petitions to Zeiss management “for continuation of the Carl Zeiss Foundation and its firms in their old form” (BACZ VA 06570). This first attempt was thereby blocked, even though Zeiss was socialized the following year (Steiner, 2014). The foundation and its statutes were reinstated when the East and West German Zeiss firms merged in 1990, and the statutes are still in effect today, albeit in an updated version from 2004 (Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung, 2010).

Blueprints for How to Do Tasks as Sources of Imprints

First, I draw attention to blueprints for how to do tasks as sources of imprints. The Zeiss case is an extreme case (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007; Siggelkow, 2007) and prime example of that: The founder and his business partner did not have specific blueprints or models for how to organize or how to structure the organization (such as employment models or organizational models as in, for example, Hannan, Burton, and Baron, 1996; Johnson, 2007). Yet, the blueprints for how to do tasks did not just shape how tasks were done, as one would expect; they also shaped some features of organization structure. Although “organizational models or blueprints” have featured prominently in prior research (Baron, Hannan, and Burton, 1999: 529; Baron, Burton, and Hannan, 1996; Hannan, Burton, and Baron, 1996), other types of blueprints that shape organization structure have not been examined.

The findings of my article complement this prior research. Extending De Cuyper and colleagues’ (2020: 1597) study of “blueprint[s] for actions and decisions,” my study highlights the importance of blueprints for how to do tasks, and their role in imprinting organization structure. Specifically, it suggests the need to extend the understanding of blueprints beyond “methods for controlling and coordinating work” or “ways to organize and to manage” (Burton, 2001: 13–14), to include blueprints for how to do core tasks of the organization, that is, tasks that are central for the production of the firm’s goods or services (e.g., product development, manufacturing). My analysis provides empirically grounded arguments for doing so and suggests a type of blueprint that matters for the imprinting of organizations by individuals—not just for imprinting practices but also structures, a second essential organization design element (Burton et al., 2019).

This study illustrates the power of blueprints for how to do tasks. Perhaps surprisingly, these blueprints—rather than blueprints for how to organize—can even be the most salient drivers of persistent features of organization structure. The impact of blueprints for how to do tasks on persistent features of organization structure is still under-investigated, however. This study shifts attention away from the most obvious explanations for persistence of organization structure, such as organizing models, to blueprints for how to do tasks as an alternative explanation. Thus, I contribute to organizational imprinting theory through my empirically grounded suggestion to integrate blueprints for how to do tasks into organizational imprinting theory and to further unpack how they persistently shape organization structure.

Relationships Between Sources of Imprints and Persistent Features of Multiple Organizational Dimensions

The findings clearly show that one source of imprints (the imprinter) can leave persistent marks in many different dimensions (see Figure 2), thereby suggesting a one-to-many relation between a source and the persistent marks (imprints) it leaves in several dimensions. This one-to-many relation differs from the findings of some early studies of organizational imprinting showing the persistence of one feature over time, thereby foregrounding one-to-one relations (e.g., position definitions of first incumbents and their successors or organizational models and organization forms; Burton and Beckman, 2007; Johnson, 2007; cf. Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013: 206). My finding of a one-to-many relation adds to the findings of a few recent process studies that show one imprinter leaving persistent marks in multiple dimensions (De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips, 2020; Snihur and Zott, 2020; Zuzul and Tripsas, 2020). My study suggests expanding the range of dimensions that can be imprinted. The dimensions studied to date include business model, technology, and ecosystem development (Zuzul and Tripsas, 2020); business model content, governance, and structure (Snihur and Zott, 2020); and type of organization, governance structure, and decision-making structure (De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips, 2020). My study builds on and extends these findings to include several features that are considered essential organization design elements, like organization structure (e.g., job roles, grouping into organization units) and practices (Burton et al., 2019: 246). While some of these elements have been investigated in individual imprinting studies (e.g., job roles, Burton and Beckman, 2007; functional specialization, Beckman and Burton, 2008; also see Baron, Hannan, and Burton, 1999), these elements are still under-explored in organizational imprinting theory both in terms of their coverage and of the influence of different sources of imprints on each element. My study therefore helps to elaborate organizational imprinting theory by suggesting that we expand the set of organizational dimensions on which imprinting can leave persistent marks, to encompass organization design elements such as organization structure, decision systems, and managerial practices (Burton et al., 2019: 246) and their underlying components (Puranam, 2018). The study also suggests that scholars explore the mechanisms by which these elements and their underlying components are imprinted.

These essential organization design elements are central to several topics in organization science, for instance organizational adaptation, organizational performance, and persistent performance differentials among organizations (Puranam, 2018; Burton et al., 2019). Individuals such as founders and entrepreneurs make decisions on how to implement, say, a blueprint. One-to-many effects of that decision mean that their decisions and actions can have consequences in many dimensions, going beyond consequences for the focal dimension. For instance, a decision on how to carry out a task can have consequences for organization structure. Systematically integrating one-to-many relations in organizational imprinting theory thus offers the potential for a more fine-grained and powerful theoretical apparatus for understanding and predicting how social structures, including organization designs, emerge (Burton and Beckman, 2007: 239) and how the social characteristics of individuals involved (Baron, Burton, and Hannan, 1999: 14) but also one-to-many mechanisms (such as the ones shown here) influence this emergence.

My study also complements a possibility mentioned by Marquis and Tilcsik (2013: 195–196), who highlighted the multidimensionality of the environment. This multidimensionality implies multiple (antecedents of) sources of imprints. In contrast, my study points to multiple consequences of one source of imprints in multiple dimensions. Multiple consequences of one source of imprints seem promising not just for questions such as why some features are more persistent than others but also for strengthening organizational imprinting explanations of organization design adaptations (including organization structure). They also seem to hold potential for advancing understanding of imprinting’s impact on organizational adaptation and its implications, both from an industry level and a managerial perspective (Hannan and Freeman, 1984; Levinthal, 1991, 2021).

Multiple Mechanisms of Imprinting

My study also revealed mechanisms of imprinting that translated blueprints to organization features or dimensions, i.e., early decisions, teaching, role modeling, and formalization. Revealing these mechanisms extends organizational imprinting theory in four ways.

First, I explored types of decisions through which individuals shape organizations persistently. These decisions were all influenced by one source of imprints: blueprints for how to do tasks. The decisions concerned specialist job roles, managerial job roles, organization units, hiring, and products. Whereas decisions about job roles and organization units immediately shape some essential organization design elements (Burton et al., 2019), decisions about products to be offered influence which competences are needed, and hiring decisions shape the set of competencies available in the organization to be matched with job roles. These five decisions therefore concern central organization features that are interdependent. Because all five decisions were influenced by the same source of imprints, this source did not shape only individual organization design elements but also some of the interdependencies among them as well as other interdependencies (e.g., how specialist roles are defined influences whether coordination is required; Puranam, 2018). Interdependencies can play an important role for organizational performance and organizational adaptation (Levinthal, 1997). This finding therefore suggests that scholars investigate which other decisions also shape interdependencies and, thereby, the structure of interdependencies in an organization when they are influenced by a source of imprinting (Puranam, 2018).

Second, multiple imprinting mechanisms contributed to the persistence of Zeiss organizational features. As the model in Figure 2 illustrates, this fact suggests that scholars include multiple imprinting mechanisms as a useful step for elaborating “micro-level theories and explanations of imprinting” (Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015: 304). As noted, a relatively small number of empirical studies have identified mechanisms, and some of these have foregrounded one mechanism (e.g., Johnson, 2007), whereas my study corroborates recent process studies that found several types of imprinting mechanisms at work (e.g., De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips, 2020; Sinha et al., 2020; Snihur and Zott, 2020). Adding to these studies, I contribute to organizational imprinting theory by emphasizing multiple imprinting mechanisms as a useful direction and springboard for refining organizational imprinting theory.

Third, by elaborating the dimensions shaped by multiple imprinting mechanisms, I also extend process studies that found multiple imprinting mechanisms (De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips, 2020; Sinha et al., 2020; Snihur and Zott, 2020). I focused on key organization design elements that have been less studied. My study thus contributes to organizational imprinting theory by identifying bundles of mechanisms that shape organization designs and their essential elements (Puranam, 2018; Burton et al., 2019).

Finally, finding multiple imprinting mechanisms also raises the question of how they relate to one another in shaping persistence in organizational features. In this regard, I extend the two studies that have specified how multiple imprinting mechanisms relate. My findings provide additional support for the conclusions of De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips (2020) and Snihur and Zott (2020) that not just founders but also other organizational members play a key role in the persistence of organizational features. My findings also extend these two studies by highlighting a different, additional relation of the multiple mechanisms identified in each study. Both studies emphasize the sequential relation of the different mechanisms they identify: initial imprinting followed by imprint reinforcement and re-imprinting processes (De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips, 2020), specifically “two mutually reinforcing pathways” (Snihur and Zott, 2020: 578), one being founders’ direct impact on the organization and the other the impact on other organization members, who in turn influence the organization, respectively. Complementing this kind of mutual reinforcement between multiple mechanisms, my findings suggest the possibility of organizational complementarities that can arise through the impact of multiple mechanisms, even independent of potential mutually reinforcing effects over time. For instance, decisions about specialist job roles can create complementarities with decisions about organization units, hiring decisions, and decisions about which products to manufacture (e.g., hiring a person with a certain skill set can have higher value than another given one set of specialist job roles). My findings therefore help to advance organizational imprinting theory by suggesting that scholars consider different potential relationships of multiple imprinting mechanisms and further explore how such different relationships influence imprint persistence and decay (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013), the metamorphosis of imprints (Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015), and “how organizational imprints stick” (De Cuyper, Clarysse, and Phillips, 2020: 1597).

Limitations and Future Research Directions

This article has several limitations that suggest further opportunities for research. First, to trace the impact of blueprints on the organization and the processes and mechanisms of their impact, I focused on only one type of imprinter, relegating others to the background. This focus indicates the need to shed light on the interactions between the mechanisms through which different types of imprinters leave a persistent stamp on organizations, in further research on the dynamics among imprint persistence, decay, amplification, and transformation (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013; Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015). Along those lines, integrating the influence of sources of imprints indicating how to do tasks with that of other imprint sources established in prior theory is a further task for future research.

Second, data available in archives have limits, consisting only of codified documents (and images), which omit tacit elements. Moreover, documents in corporate archives were written and selected for conservation by employees, which might reflect some biases (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014). To overcome this limitation, combining studies drawing on corporate archives with (long-term) observations or more fine-grained data would be beneficial. With the increasing availability of digital trace data on individuals’ actions, such data may offer the potential to advance questions such as why some imprints are more persistent than others and theory on imprinting as a “multilevel, interrelated process that is initiated by founders and maintained through collective agency” (Snihur and Zott, 2020: 555).

Third, the insights of this research result from a case study of one individual organization over a specific period in a specific place and therefore are not necessarily fully generalizable to organizations in other industries or countries and to other points in time, although they potentially provide analytical generalizability (Yin, 2009) by identifying variables and relationships that add to and elaborate theory. For instance, while I found that blueprints for how to do tasks had a persistent impact on the organization through four mechanisms, there might be more mechanisms through which such blueprints imprint organizations. Further research is needed to systematically study other instances in which entrepreneurs imprint organizations, to investigate whether there are mechanisms in addition to those identified in this study, as well as their boundary conditions.