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There is broad scholarly agreement that history and founding conditions matter in the design of institutions and organizations (Marquis, 2003). Yet study of institutional and organizational development rarely includes more than ceremonial references to specific country or regional settings, policy embeddedness, and cultural contingency (e.g., individual versus collectivist cultures). The analytical focus is typically on modern organizations and institutional development trajectories, which leaves us with the question of how history matters. To what extent do modern organizations and institutions reflect historic development trajectories, and how? That we know so little about the ways today's institutions and organizations are affected by the past is not reflecting lack of interest, but instead being constrained by data availability. Yet with increasing progress of digitalization of archival records, "new" historical data becomes available at an astonishing speed. What remains are concerns about data quality and validity. What can we actually learn from historic data about organizations and institutions, then and now? With this symposium, we show there is much to learn. With a regional focus on China and a wide variety of empirical evidence documenting local development over several thousands of years, this symposium brings together a set of four studies, which gather and apply historical data creatively, and contribute to a better understanding of institutional origins, organizational and institutional change, and their impact on contemporary development. The focus on China is not only interesting for its obvious importance in today's global economy and politics. The analysis of historic organizations and institutions (mainly bureaucracy) and their association with modern-day development also help identify causal processes of how and when institutions matter throughout time. China offers an ideal context. China displays vast within-country variation in its socioeconomic conditions, whereas provinces can serve as broad proxies of regional units. Furthermore, China is ethnically highly homogenous, with more than 90% of Chinese belonging to the Han group and has experienced only limited and well-documented internal migration flows over the last two millennia, which limits the influence of exogenous shocks introduced by broad- sweeping cultural shifts. Finally, the country has been characterized by a high degree of political and territorial unity for more than 2,000 years and has escaped substantial colonial influence, leaving historic development pathways less affected. The four empirical studies address two broader questions: 1) What are the antecedents and mechanisms that explain the emergence of institutions and organizations developed in and inherited from the past? and 2) how does history shape the opportunity structures for modern trajectories of institutional change? In other words, does institutional change today hinge on experience accumulated in the past -- either in a positive or negative way? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that Chinese authoritarian system-autocracy, lack of political competition, and during the imperial period, inheritability of the ruling position-has had a long and almost continuous history. The Chinese imperial system lasted from 221 BCE to 1911, with only about 30% of the time during this long period when China was ruled by multiple political entities. Our paper takes an organizational approach and unpacks the mechanisms of the Chinese system to explain this level of political longevity. Our research shows that this system has very sophisticated organizational mechanisms of eliciting output from wealth-creating economic agents while preserving power of political agents loyal to the emperor. One such an organizational mechanism is civil service examination (CSE) system. We use the CSE data from Ming and Qing dynasties to show the two simultaneous functions of the CSE: 1) It works as an incentive system to afford the equivalent of some property right protection to economic agents and 2) It allocates key decision making positions to the political agents at the expense of economic agents. The longevity of the Chinese absolutism, in short, is organizationally enabled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]