Knowledge that Transforms

External accountability initiatives, which combine public disclosure of internal information with enforcement, are widely regarded as useful instruments to effect organizational compliance with external demands. Yet, even though such compliance may be fruitful only if it persists, its durability has been assumed rather than directly tested. We report on such direct tests, using the Police Data Initiative (PDI). Launched across the United States in 2015 to “decrease inappropriate uses of force,” especially against Black citizens, the PDI mandated the release of traffic stop data and increased oversight of participating local police departments. A difference‐in‐differences analysis across 36 police departments shows that PDI adoption initially reduced stops, especially in neighborhoods with more Black residents. Over time, however, these treated departments reversed course and ultimately increased stops, particularly in said neighborhoods. This backsliding was more pronounced in departments with higher pre-PDI stop rates and larger racial disparities. Our findings show limited durability of compliance under external accountability and identify conditions under which external accountability reinforces entrenched patterns over time. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18975 .

Survival of new ventures has been shown to exhibit considerable heterogeneity both across and within industries. Some of the explanations for these differences have been attributed to firm size, organizational structure, and management practices. We add to this literature by showing how differences in employees’ abilities and their knowledge domain relate to survival. More precisely, we focus on the role of employees who in the past started and managed firms, referred to as an organization’s entrepreneurial human capital (EHC). Theoretically, we adopt an eclectic approach, while the empirical analysis is based on longitudinal register data for Sweden from 1997 to 2016. This allows us to identify EHC for all new ventures over the past 20 years. After controlling for a large number of confounders, our baseline results strongly suggest that a higher share of employees with entrepreneurial backgrounds is associated with an increased probability of new venture survival. We identify the following mechanisms through which former entrepreneurs contribute to survival: an enlarged resource base, magnified by learning from longer spells in entrepreneurship; an organizational fit conducive to absorbing and utilizing EHC; and a human capital fit in which entrepreneurial competencies align with the competence requirements of new ventures. We argue that our findings have both theoretical and practical implications for recruiters and managers and provide valuable insights for policymakers.

Economic value capture is crucial for entrepreneurial start-ups as it conditions the commercial viability of the technological opportunities underlying their founding. Start-ups vary in whether they capture value and, if so, whether through markets for product or technology. This study posits that value capture hinges on founders’ knowledge accumulated in their prior employment context, separating founders as academic scientists and former employees of industry firms. Academic founders bring scientific knowledge from universities, and within-industry employee founders carry industry-specific knowledge from their former employer. These differences provide the theoretical basis that the study empirically explores in U.S. medical device start-ups. Academic start-ups tend to capture value in markets for technology, whereas within-industry employee start-ups tend to capture value in markets for product. Further, variations in founders’ history and employment context can bridge scientific and commercial dimensions in knowledge profiles within academic and employee start-ups, shifting the resulting value capture pathway toward pioneering products. Funding: This work was supported by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18121 .

Discrimination against women remains common in male-dominated professions, yet people tend not to acknowledge its impacts for career inequality. Analyzing interviews with 125 journalists, we develop novel theory on how people disappear discrimination in their accounts of their own career progress. Most participants (102/125) regarded gender discrimination to be problematic in the profession. Yet, people were inconsistent in how they explained discrimination’s personal career impacts. Discrimination and advantage slipped in and out of people’s career accounts: some women and men disappeared discrimination by compartmentalizing it from their careers and relying solely on merit to explain their own progress, some men substituted luck for gender advantage as an explanation for progress that could not be explained by merit, and some women centered discrimination-countering practices in their accounts, which simultaneously subverted and disappeared discrimination. Discrimination’s inconsistent presence contrasted with the consistent presence of merit across career accounts. We theorize these contradictions as evidence of an individual-level process of disappearance of gender discrimination, and specify how contextual embeddedness (i.e., close personal relationships and employment structure) shapes people’s accounts. This individual level theory of disappearance of gender discrimination advances scholarship on the disappearance of gender inequality, and also contributes to the growing literature on the intersection of merit and discrimination.

Why were incumbents able to pioneer and dominate the nascent bionic prosthetic industry, even though entrants represented the majority of the firms investing in this radical technology? To answer this question, our abductive study builds on the novel base principles definition and uses a historical approach to investigate the incubation and early commercialization periods (1974–2018) of bionic prosthetics. We use comprehensive quantitative data on all technological entrants and historical analysis of significant firms to reveal that organizational prehistory affects both the knowledge and intent of technological entrants. Start-ups, incumbents in conventional prosthetics, and established firms in other industries created and integrated subtechnologies into a radical system. Although all firms invested in component technologies, incumbents played a key role as system integrators. Incumbents dominated product commercialization; start-ups captured value through alliances or by being acquired, and established firms in other industries leveraged their knowledge in adjacent value chains as a function of their prior histories and intents. In comparing the virtues of our explanation—the creating radical systems effects—with widely accepted alternative explanations, we develop a more generalized framework of interorganizational dynamics in nascent industries as an endogenous, coevolutionary process that goes beyond explanations that privilege competitive dynamics to also include collaborative dynamics in value creation (and capture). Funding: This paper was funded by the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Strategic Research Foundation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16915 .

Research on market entry shows that firms tend to grow by entering adjacent markets based on their prior experience. Much of this work implicitly treats knowledge embedded in the firm as uniformly available for strategic action. We argue instead that, in divisionalized firms, the effect of experience depends on where it resides across organizational units, which in turn shapes whether it becomes behaviorally relevant in evaluating entry opportunities. We posit that divisionalization, defined as a structural configuration in which a firm partitions activities into multiple operating units under a corporate umbrella, is associated with broader exposure to opportunities but weaker use of accumulated experience. Consequently, at the firm-level, divisionalization is associated with higher entry rates but a weaker relationship between firm-wide experience and entry. At the unit-level, entry is more strongly associated with experience located in the focal organizational unit than with experience residing in sister units. We further identify organizational conduits associated with the use of distributed experience, including recurring lateral interaction and integrative attention at the corporate center. We test our predictions using U.S. defense procurement following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Our findings show that within-firm organizational boundaries shape whether firms act on what they already know, shifting the study of market entry from experience accumulation to experience use.

Through an observational field study involving quantitative and qualitative components, we explore the role of gender diversity in shaping the effectiveness of mentorship for founder teams seeking investors. Data on 984 teams of founders assigned to teams of mentors at Techstars-run accelerator programs around the world demonstrate the interteam benefits of aligned gender diversity thresholds: Founder teams characterized by the presence (absence) of gender diversity engage more investors when matched with mentor teams also characterized by the presence (absence) of gender diversity. Neither the presence of gender diversity in the founder team nor the presence of gender diversity in the mentor team exerts a positive influence on investor counts as a standalone factor, but the aligned presence of intrateam gender diversity helps ventures maximize participating investors. We find that the number of participating investors has a positive downstream impact, increasing the amount of funding that the venture raises. Results are robust to the inclusion of controls for venture, founder, and mentor characteristics, with clustering at the Techstars cohort level. Qualitative insights from 20 semistructured interviews reveal how interteam gender alignment facilitates interpersonal attraction, whereas intrateam gender diversity enables resource acquisition. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this phenomenon for internal-external team interactions in venture funding and beyond. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2025.20141 .

Organizations frequently use behavioral interventions—including incentives, messaging campaigns, and modifications to choice architecture—to influence people’s behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that such interventions often have inconsistent effects across implementations. To understand this variability, we start from the premise that interventions are not simply levers for changing behavior; they also signal information to decision-makers. For example, when an option is set as the default, people may infer that it is recommended by the organization—an inference that can increase the likelihood they stick with that option. But when defaults appear self-serving, people may reject them. Here, we propose a framework to better understand the effects of behavioral interventions by identifying the inferences people draw when encountering them. In developing this framework, we first characterize the defining features of behavioral interventions that determine how they are psychologically experienced. These features implicate five fundamental needs, which guide decision-makers’ information-seeking processes. From these needs we derive a principled typology of inferences drawn by decision-makers in response to behavioral interventions, bringing together scattered evidence for these inferences from across the behavioral sciences. The resulting framework entails predictions about when specific inferences will arise and how these inferences influence the overall effects of behavioral interventions. Utilizing the framework, we provide a tool for enhancing intervention design. Together, the current research offers an integrative framework for advancing theory on behavioral interventions while also outlining actionable insights for organizations hoping to promote behavior change at scale.

As the AI Task Force for Organization Science, we provide an early account of artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on both submissions and reviews at a major academic journal. Submission volume has risen 42% since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT, while writing quality has declined. The rise in AI-generated writing accounts for nearly all of these trends. AI-generated writing in reviews has also increased, and is characterized by lower writing quality and less topical diversity than human-generated writing. We are, to our knowledge, the first journal to report these early impacts of AI in the review process. Conversations with editors across scientific disciplines, however, suggest that what we observe is not limited to our journal or to the social sciences. At this early stage of AI adoption, we cannot make a normative assessment about appropriate or ideal levels of AI usage. We can, however, conclude that the current state of AI tools, amplified by existing publish-or-perish incentives, appears to be pushing the system toward an equilibrium of more rather than better research. Reaching an equilibrium in which AI serves as a critical engine of innovation will require that our institutions and the incentive structures they create adapt. Funding: S. Hasan used research funding from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. C. Gartenberg used research funding from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2026.ed.v37.n3 .

As the prevalence and allowance of remote and hybrid work evolves, research has shown consistently mixed findings about how work location is related to worker energy and perceptions of daily performance. We aim to resolve this ambiguity by integrating Affective Events Theory with ideas about emotion dynamics to develop new theorizing explaining why energy variability, rather than mean energy level, is an important predictor of daily goal progress. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 219 employees from one organization allowing remote and hybrid work, capturing individual hourly energy levels for five consecutive workdays (4,812 hourly observations). Our results show that on days when employees work from home (vs. onsite), they have lower energy variability, which enables them to make more progress towards their goals and achieve their goals at a faster rate than expected that day. Moreover, we show that this effect is stronger when employees have higher remote work intensity (i.e., work from home more often). Our findings are robust to a number of controls (e.g., children at home, work location choice, industry). Practically, workers experience about 33% less energy variability on days working from home compared to onsite, and a one-point reduction in energy variability yields 26% higher goal progress and 31% higher goal progress velocity. Overall, this study advances theory on the relationship between daily work location, human energy, and goal progress, and has immediate practical implications for employees, teams, and organizations as they continue to navigate the remote and hybrid era of work.