The founding of the Old Order Amish Steering Committee provides an unusual opportunity to identify environmental factors that may pressure collectivities to formally organize. Amish communities, despite a normative stance antithetical to central authority and hierarchy, felt compelled to create a national organization as the best means of effectively articulating their views to a proliferating array of government bureaucracies. The Amish's perceived need to create the Steering Committee makes clear that the legal environment may be coercive independent of the substantive character of particular laws. The mere pervasiveness of government standards, codes, regulations, and programs forces collectivities subject to them to adopt bureaucratic structures. The Steering Committee's evolution confirms the pervasiveness and decisiveness of the legal infrastructure, features only sporadically appreciated in the organizational literature.