Showing papers in "Administrative Science Quarterly in 2010"

Socioemotional Wealth and Corporate Responses to Institutional Pressures: Do Family-Controlled Firms Pollute Less?:

Abstract: This paper compares the environmental performance of family and nonfamily public corporations between 1998 and 2002, using a sample of 194 U.S. firms required to report their emissions. We found that family-controlled public firms protect their socioemotional wealth by having a better environmental performance than their nonfamily counterparts, particularly at the local level, and that for the nonfamily firms, stock ownership by the chief executive officer (CEO) has a negative environmental impact. We also found that the positive effect of family ownership on environmental performance persists independently of whether the CEO is a family member or serves both as CEO and board chair.

Institutional Work in the Transformation of an Organizational Field: The Interplay of Boundary Work and Practice Work

Abstract: We draw on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry to understand the role of institutional work in the transformation of organizational fields. We examine the work of actors to create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within a field (practice work) and the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups (boundary work), and the interplay of these two forms of institutional work in effecting change. We find that actors' boundary work and practice work operate in recursive configurations that underpin cycles of institutional innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. We also find that transitions between these cycles are triggered by combinations of three conditions: (1) the state of the boundaries, (2) the state of practices, and (3) the existence of actors with the capacity to undertake the boundary and practice work of a different institutional process. The...

How New Market Categories Emerge: Temporal Dynamics of Legitimacy, Identity, and Entrepreneurship in Satellite Radio, 1990–2005

Abstract: We theorize how new market categories emerge and are legitimated through a confluence of factors internal to the category (entrepreneurial ventures) and external to the category (interested audiences). Using qualitative and quantitative analyses and multiple data sources overtime, we study the evolution of the U.S. satellite radio market over its initial sixteen years. We offer convergent evidence to show that the legitimation of a new market category precipitates shifts in the focus of market actors' attention from the category as a whole to the differentiation of firms within. This effect was demonstrated for entrepreneurial identity claims, linguistic frames, and announcements of interorganizational affiliations and endorsements, as well as in the focal attention of media and financial audiences. We synthesize these findings to offer an integrated theoretical framework on new market category emergence and legitimation.

Institutional Logics and Institutional Pluralism: The Contestation of Care and Science Logics in Medical Education, 1967–2005:

Abstract: Although most studies underscore institutional change as replacement of one dominant logic for another and assume that professions are guided by a single logic, professions that operate in multiple...

Forging an Identity: An Insider-outsider Study of Processes Involved in the Formation of Organizational Identity

Abstract: We investigated the processes involved in forming an organizational identity, which we studied during the founding of a distinctive new college by using an interpretive, insider-outsider research a...

The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations

Abstract: In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization ma...

Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects:

Abstract: This study examined how brokers on creative projects integrate the ideas of others. We use the term “nexus work” to refer to brokerage requiring synthesis or integration, rather than just communication or transference of ideas. With an ethnographic investigation of 23 independent music producers in the Nashville country music industry, we examined how producers in the brokerage role fostered the integration of others' contributions throughout four phases of the creative process. We discovered that ambiguity was an inherent part of the collective creative process and identified three types: (1) an ambiguous quality metric (What makes a hit or constitutes success?); (2) ambiguous occupational jurisdictions (Whose claim of expertise entitles them to control the process?); and (3) an ambiguous transformation process (How should the work be done?). We show when each type of ambiguity became acute in the creative process and identify the practices producers used to leverage their brokerage role depending on the...

Transitional Identity as a Facilitator of Organizational Identity Change during a Merger

Abstract: We adopted an interpretive, grounded theory approach to study the processes by which organizational identities changed during the initial phases of a merger between two formerly rival healthcare organizations. Our investigation of two top management teams attempting to instigate this major change effort and lead their organizations toward completion of the merger revealed that the emergence of a transitional identity—an interim sense held by members about what their organizations were becoming—was critical to moving the change process forward. The transitional identity allowed executives in the two organizations to suspend their preexisting organizational identities and work toward creating a shared, new identity. The transitional identity appears to have been effective because it was ambiguous enough to allow multiple interpretations of what the merged organization would become to eventually coalesce into a common understanding, but not so ambiguous as to be threateningly unfamiliar. Overall, we present ...

Network churn: The effects of self-monitoring personality on brokerage dynamics

Abstract: The apparent stability of social network structures may mask considerable change and adjustment in the ties that make up the structures. In this study, we theorize and test—using longitudinal data on friendship relations from a radiology department located in the Netherlands—the idea that the characteristics of this “network churn” and the resultant brokerage dynamics are traceable to individual differences in self-monitoring personality. High self-monitors were more likely than low self-monitors to attract new friends and to occupy new bridging positions over time. In comparison to low self-monitors, the new friends that high self-monitors attracted tended to be relative strangers, in the sense that they were unconnected with previous friends, came from different functions, and more efficiently increased the number of structural holes in the resultant network. Our study suggests that dispositional forces help shape the dynamic structuring of networks: individuals help (re)create the social network struct...

Making Self-Regulation More Than Merely Symbolic: The Critical Role of the Legal Environment:

Abstract: Using data from a sample of U.S. industrial facilities subject to the federal Clean Air Act from 1993 to 2003, this article theorizes and tests the conditions under which organizations' symbolic commitments to self-regulate are particularly likely to result in improved compliance practices and outcomes. We argue that the legal environment, particularly as it is constructed by the enforcement activities of regulators, significantly influences the likelihood that organizations will effectively implement the self-regulatory commitments they symbolically adopt. We investigate how different enforcement tools can foster or undermine organizations' normative motivations to self-regulate. We find that organizations are more likely to follow through on their commitments to self-regulate when they (and their competitors) are subject to heavy regulatory surveillance and when they adopt self-regulation in the absence of an explicit threat of sanctions. We also find that historically poor compliers are significantly l...

Markets, Morals, and Practices of Trade: Jurisdictional Disputes in the U.S. Commerce in Cadavers:

Abstract: This study examines the U.S. commerce in human cadavers for medical education and research to explore variation in legitimacy in trades involving similar goods. It draws on archival, interview, and observational data mainly from NewYork State to analyze market participants' efforts to legitimize commerce and resolve a jurisdictional dispute. Building on literature on professions, the study shows that how goods are traded, not only what is traded, proves integral to constructing legitimacy, thus suggesting a practice-based view of moral markets. The professionals, including a group of “gatekeepers,” construct a narrative distinction between their own commerce and an implicitly less moral alternative and geographically insulate their trades from the broader commerce, creating in effect two circuits. Yet the professionals also promote specific practices of trade within their circuit to help them distinguish their own pursuit from an alternative course of action. The study's findings shed light on the micro-f...

Pursuit of Whose Happiness? Executive Leaders' Transformational Behaviors and Personal Values

Abstract: This paper theorizes and tests how chief executive officers' (CEOs') transformational leadership behaviors, which motivate followers to do more than expected and act for the good of the collective, influence followers' commitment. We theorize that CEOs' values may either enhance or attenuate the effect of transformational behaviors on followers, depending on followers' reactions to the congruence or incongruence between leaders' internal values and their outward transformational behaviors. Self-enhancement values—focusing on the leader's own happiness—would attenuate the effect, whereas self-transcendent values—focusing on others' happiness—would accentuate the effect of CEOs' transformational behaviors on followers' commitment. Using a sample of 45 managers in two companies in China, we validated a Q-sort method of measuring personal values. Results of a second study using cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys as well as interview data from a sample of Chinese CEOs, top managers, and middle managers s...

Engendering Change: Organizational Dynamics and Workplace Gender Desegregation, 1975-2005

Abstract: We examine workplace-level sources of gender inequality to explore the link between organizational change and levels of workplace gender integration over time. To do so, we analyze the gender division of labor and key structural aspects of U.S. private-sector work establishments, using longitudinal data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1975 to 2005. We find that women's presence in managerial positions is positively related to gender integration, as is both establishment size and growth. Additionally, the results show that trends toward gender integration are due to change within workplaces rather than new, relatively integrated workplaces entering the population overtime. Our results also provide compelling evidence that the effect of female managers varies dramatically across organizational contexts, with the strongest desegregating effects in larger and growing establishments. Finally, the effect of women's access to organizational power structures has sharply diminished overtime.

Stealthy Footsteps to the Boardroom: Executives' Backgrounds, Sophisticated Interpersonal Influence Behavior, and Board Appointments:

Abstract: Drawing from theory and research on interpersonal attraction, as well as interviews with 42 directors of large U.S. industrial and service firms, we identified a set of social influence tactics tha...

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Embeddedness Failure in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, U.S. pharmaceutical firms have partially outsourced the coordination of the clinical trials they sponsor to specialized firms called contract research organizations. Although...

Organizing the in-Between: The Population Dynamics of Network-Weaving Organizations in the Global Interstate Network

Abstract: This article examines the population dynamics and viability of network weavers, which are organizations that provide network relations for others. An analysis of the population dynamics of the intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that are the basis of the interstate networks that influenced global economic relations, peace, and democracy in the 1815–2000 period shows that IGO founding and failure depends on the ease and value of specific interstate relations. Results indicate that network-weaving organizations are easier to operate when they encompass proximate and similar actors, yet they also reap rewards for bringing together otherwise disconnected actors, in particular, actors with conflicts. Combined, these organizational processes can account for the high clustering and short-path distance between nodes that are characteristic of the endemic small-world network structure. Furthermore, the study shows that the concepts of legitimacy and competition can be applied to identify particular spaces in th...

Thomas B. Lawrence, Roy Suddaby, and Bernard Leca, eds.: Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations

Abstract: Institutions impose constraints on us all. In recent years the institution of the university press has constrained the publication of edited volumes, and the appearance of this particular volume might be seen as evidence against the notion that institutional constraints are real. But this is the exception that proves the rule that edited volumes cannot succeed. Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca have brought together a set of pathbreaking essays that speak authoritatively to a single issue. How do individuals build, sustain, and transform social institutions with an eye to their own, socially constructed interests?

Daniel Carpenter: Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA:

Abstract: How is it that in the United States, known as a nation of weak regulation, smaller government, and powerful business, a regulatory agency could exercise great infl uence over several sectors—including fi nancial markets and the industry of research and development—that it does not directly govern? How in the United States—a society characterized by distrust of government power—could a federal regulatory agency have an enviable public reputation that observers on both the left and right recognize? These are the central, intriguing, and important questions that Carpenter addresses in this impressive book.

Two Books on the Recent Financial Crisis: Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America: Gerald F. Davis; The Road to Financial Reformation: Warnings, Consequences, Reforms: Henry Kaufman.:

Abstract: The fi nancial crisis that began in 2007, and almost resulted in a meltdown of the world’s fi nancial system, has justifi ably generated at least 40 books. The fi rst wave of these books was written by journalists who recounted the dramatic events. Mixed in were books by people who worked on Wall Street and had a hand in the complex fi nancial tools that appeared to be at the heart of the crisis. Several interesting books on the history of fi nancial bubbles have appeared as well. Finally, economists have rushed to market with books that are heavy on analysis and weak on data. Robert Schiller has produced two books, one with George Akerlof, a NobelPrize-winning economist, that suggest that behavioral fi nance is the key to understanding the crisis. Akerlof and Shiller (2009) argue that people have a set of behavioral biases, overconfi dence, envy, imitative behavior, and myopia that, driven by “animal spirits,” cause them to produce both fi nancial bubbles and fi nancial panics. Paul Krugman (2009), another Nobel-Prizewinning economist, has weighed in with a similar argument but with a neat Keynesian twist. Given that fi nancial markets can’t be self-regulating because of the potential bad behavior of market participants, government regulation is necessary.

Ravi Ramamurti and Jitendra V. Singh, eds.: Emerging Multinationals in Emerging Markets.:

Abstract: The rapidly growing emerging economies are producing business giants of their own at a staggering rate. In 2008, emerging economies boasted 70 companies in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s biggest companies, up from 20 a decade ago. Alongside the increasing economic power of emerging markets, emerging market multinational enterprises (EM MNEs)—companies based in emerging markets with investments and operations in more than one country—are expanding at a speed and scale that make even the largest Western MNEs take notice. Although these businesses share the scale and ambition of their Western counterparts, their processes and patterns of growth, as well as dominant motivations, evolutionary trajectory, and strategic behaviors, are often dissimilar to those of their competitors in the developed world. International expansion is driven not only by their desire to leverage their competitive advantages (e.g., cost effective mass-production, suitable innovation for lowand medium-end markets, quick response to market changes, and experience in operating in institutionally diffi cult environments) but also by their motive to offset competitive disadvantages through acquiring strategic assets they lack (e.g., technology, brands, customer base, and distribution channels). And for some state-owned EM MNEs, outward investment may be a political mandate by which to acquire the scarce natural resources needed for economic and social development of their home countries.

Paul Osterman: The Truth about Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, and Why They Matter.

Abstract: The Truth about Middle Managers describes how middle managers in U.S. companies perceive their work roles, top executives, and their organizations in general. According to Paul Osterman, the goal of his book is to understand what has happened to middle managers as fi rms have restructured. This restructuring—associated with process reengineering and greater use of ad hoc and project teams—shapes a context in which middle managers feel insecure about their jobs, are resigned to low upward mobility, and resent the perceived disproportionate benefi ts that top executives receive. As a result, although middle managers take craft pride in their work and feel loyal to their colleagues, they become alienated from their organizations and feel more removed from top management.

Ari Adut: On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art:

Abstract: 518/ASQ, September 2010 To most readers, it will come as no surprise that scandal as a social phenomenon is ubiquitous and has deep transformative power. Hardly a day goes by without a major national or international scandal playing itself out in the media. Most of these scandals fade away as new scandals take their place, but some can generate structural changes of unanticipated magnitude and consequences. Most of them affect the lives of those directly involved, but some have an impact far beyond that. U.S. foreign policy, as well as the strategy of U.S. military forces, for example, will surely look much different after the Abu Ghraib scandal in ways that would have been impossible for any of the participants to anticipate.

Matthew Gill: Accountants' Truth: Knowledge and Ethics in the Financial World.:

Abstract: Over the past few years, we have seen a proliferation of adjustments to the rules related to fi nancial reporting systems. One signifi cant change that many consider to be the key to improving the quality of fi nancial reporting is the adoption of the principles-based International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). To date, more than 100 countries have adopted IFRS. In 2011, the few remaining major countries—with the exception of the United States, which has delayed its implementation of IFRS—will go live. One of the major reasons for the American slowdown is the fear that a move toward principles-based standards will lead to greater abuse of the rules. Those who support the U.S. rule-based accounting standards argue that specifi c rules are needed, otherwise it becomes too easy to hide behind somewhat vague principles. In contrast, the IFRS proponents argue that rules-based standards encourage preparers to structure transactions that meet the specifi cs of the rule but not necessarily the principles behind the rule (Maines, 2007). A principles-based approach, with its focus on general principles and the business rationale of the transaction, is a much better guarantee of quality reporting.

Boris Groysberg: Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance:

Abstract: 530/ASQ, September 2010 In Chasing Stars , Boris Groysberg attempts to answer a critical question about labor markets: are employees’ talents and skills portable across fi rms so that employee performance will remain constant after a change of employers? In answering this question, Groysberg focuses exclusively on “star” knowledge workers who are highly sought after by managers attempting to boost their own fi rms’ performance. Thus this book provides an evidence-based examination of the underpinnings of a common managerial myth described by Pfeffer and Sutton (2006): star systems are associated with strong fi rm performance. The book does not directly explore the effect on fi rm performance of hiring stars. But it does examine an essential assumption that must be true if hiring stars has a positive effect on fi rm performance, namely, that the performance of star employees will remain unchanged after they change employers.

Suzana B. Rodrigues and John Child: Corporate Co-evolution: A Political Perspective.

Abstract: Don’t read this book if your interests in organizational scholarship are framed narrowly or if your ego isn’t reasonably well-protected against critiques of your own incremental, though rigorous research. You might want to think twice about reading it if you are on the tenure track at a North American institution that requires you to publish a number of articles in high-quality journals within a relatively short time frame. The entire experience may be too daunting for you to recover from quickly. If these conditions pose no threat for you, however, or if you simply enjoy delving into an outstanding study of rare depth, this book will offer rich returns on the not inconsiderable effort it takes to read it.

Milbrey McLaughlin, W. Richard Scott, Sarah Deschenes, Katherine Hopkins, and Anne Newman: Between Movement and Establishment: Organizations Advocating for Youth.McLaughlinMilbrey, ScottW. Richard, DeschenesSarah, HopkinsKatherine, NewmanAnne. Between Movement and Establishment: Organizations Advocating for Youth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 217 pp. $65.00, cloth; $21.95, paper.

Abstract: Between Movement and Establishment employs institutional theory to describe the interest groups that act on behalf of children and adolescents in the California Bay Area. A welcome contribution to organizational analysis, and fl uidly written, the book explains how youth advocacy organizations operate in the California political system. Much attention is given to structure and strategy. There are detailed descriptions of advocacy groups and how they are internally organized, as well as informative discussions of the different strategies employed by these groups. The book provides a much needed examination of organizations operating in nonprofi t settings and is recommended to scholars studying nonprofi ts, education, local and state governments, and youth advocacy groups.