Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage

This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258788.pdf

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

To date, the phenomenon of entrepreneurship has lacked a conceptual framework. In this note we draw upon previous research conducted in the different social science disciplines and applied fields of business to create a conceptual framework for the field. With this framework we explain a set of empirical phenomena and predict a set of outcomes not explained or predicted by conceptual frameworks already in existence in other fields.

The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research

The primary purpose of this article is to clarify the nature of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct and to propose a contingency framework for investigating the relationship between EO and firm performance. We first explore and refine the dimensions of EO and discuss the usefulness of viewing a firm's EO as a multidimensional construct. Then, drawing on examples from the EO-related contingencies literature, we suggest alternative models (moderating effects, mediating effects, independent effects, interaction effects) for testing the EO-performance relationship.

Clarifying the Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct and Linking It To Performance

This paper differs from previous examinations of organizational learning in that it is broader in scope and more evaluative of the literatures. Four constructs related to organizational learning knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory are articulated, and the literatures related to each are described and critiqued.

The literature on knowledge acquisition is voluminous and multi-faceted, and so the knowledge acquisition construct is portrayed here as consisting of five subconstructs or subprocesses: 1 drawing on knowledge available at the organization's birth, 2 learning from experience, 3 learning by observing other organizations, 4 grafting on to itself components that possess knowledge needed but not possessed by the organization, and 5 noticing or searching for information about the organization's environment and performance. Examination of the related literatures indicates that much has been learned about learning from experience, but also that there is a lack of cumulative work and a lack of integration of work from different research groups. Similarly, much has been learned about organizational search, but there is a lack of conceptual work, and there is a lack of both cumulative work and syntheses with which to create a more mature literature. Congenital learning, vicarious learning, and grafting are information acquisition subprocesses about which relatively little has been learned.

The literature concerning information distribution is rich and mature, but an aspect of information distribution that is central to an organization's benefitting from its learning, namely how units that possess information and units that need this information can find each other quickly and with a high likelihood, is unexplored. Information interpretation, as an organizational process, rather than an individual process, requires empirical work for further advancement. Organizational memory is much in need of systematic investigation, particularly by those whose special concerns are improving organizational learning and decision making.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2634941.pdf

Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures

The general topic of this chapter is the relation of the society outside organizations to the internal life of organizations Part of the specific topics have to do with the effect of society on organizations, and part of them concern the effects of organizational variables on the surrounding social environment I intend to interpret the term “social structure” in the title in a very general sense, to include groups, institutions, laws, population characteristics, and sets of social relations that form the environment of the organization That is, I interpret “social structure” to mean any variables which are stable characteristics of the society outside the organization By an “organization” I mean a set of stable social relations deliberately created, with the explicit intention of continuously accomplishing some specific goals or purposes These goals or purposes are generally functions performed for some larger structure For example, armies have the goal of winning possible military engagements The fulfillment of this goal is a function performed for the larger political structure, which has functional requirements of defense and conquest I exclude from organizations many types of groups which have multiple purposes (or which perform multiple functions for larger systems, whether these are anyone's purposes or not), such as families, geographical communities, ethnic groups, or total societies 1 also exclude social arrangements built up on the spur of the moment to achieve some specific short-run purpose For instance, I will not consider a campaign committee for some political candidate as an “organization,” although a political party would definitely meet the criterion of continuous functioning and relatively specific purposes

Social structure and organizations

"Constructing Social Theories" presents to the reader a range of strategies for constructing theories, and in a clear, rigorous, and imaginative manner, illustrates how they can be applied. Arthur L. Stinchcombe argues that theories should not be invented in the abstract or applied "a priori" to a problem but should be dictated by the nature of the data to be explained. This work was awarded the Sorokin prize by the American Sociological Association as the book that made an outstanding contribution to the progress of sociology in 1970."

Constructing social theories

From the Publisher:
An ambitous new work by a well-respected sociologist, Information and Organizations offers a bold new perspective on the dynamics of organizations. Stinchcombe contends that the "information problem" and the concept of "uncertainty" provide the key to understanding how organizations function in a delightful mix of large theoretical insights and vivid anecdotal material.

Information and organizations

Administration in the construction industry depends upon a highly professionalized manual labor force. The thesis of this paper is that the professionalization of the labor force in the construction industry serves the same functions as bureaucratic administration in mass production industries and is more rational than bureaucratic administration in the face of economic and technical constraints on construction projects. Specifically we maintain that the main alternative to professional socialization of workers is communicating work decisions and standards through an administrative apparatus. But such an apparatus requires stable and finely adjusted communications channels. It is dependent on the continuous functioning of administrators in official statuses. Such continuous functioning is uneconomical in construction work because of the instability in the volume and product mix and of the geographical distribution of the work. Consequently the control of pace, manual skill, and effective operative decision (the essential components of industrial discipline) is more economical if left to professionally maintained occupational standards. After presenting evidence and argument for these assertions, we will try to show why work on large-scale tract construction of houses continues to be administered on a nonbureaucratic, craft basis. Tract housing turns out to be a major revision in the marketing of construction products, rather than a revision in the administration of work . Our method will be to reanalyze certain published demographic and economic data for their administrative implications. Since the data were collected for other purposes, they fit the requirements of our problem only roughly.

Arthur L. Stinchcombe

Papers

Social structure and organizations

Constructing social theories

Information and organizations

Bureaucratic and craft administration of production: a comparative study

Social Sources of the Value of Individuals@@@Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective.