Knowledge that Transforms

Deliberative democracy is a prominent political approach that is increasingly attracting the interest of management scholars. While many deliberative democracy scholars acknowledge that expertise improves the epistemic quality of deliberation, some have recognized that experts can become “problematic participants” in deliberations. Through an analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s ([1882] 2007) play An Enemy of the People, I discuss four difficulties of including expertise in public deliberation: manipulations in the deliberative setting, exploitation of the vulnerability of experts, disregard for the limitations of expertise, and inability to translate and enroll. I also argue that the play’s ending leads readers to question the practicality of expert withdrawal. Furthermore, characters in the play suggest two other possibilities for overcoming the obstacles associated with expertise: “epistocracy,” and finding new ways to increase deliberation and participation. To advance this latter option, I call for a bidirectional view of translation, following scholars in both deliberative democracy and science and technology studies, and underscore the complexities of building trust when boundary crossing between expertise and non-expertise. These insights enrich the stream of management studies using deliberative democracy, and reinforce recent claims that management scholars should be more involved in the public sphere.

We develop a process model of how and why entrepreneurial framing can lead to deception and result in the loss of legitimacy in new ventures. We draw on the literature on framing and temporal construal theory to theorize how the emergence of a gap between expectations set during start-up and the realities that entrepreneurs encounter during implementation can trigger entrepreneurial deception when audiences seek concrete details in exchange for their continued support. Entrepreneurs may engage in further deception and moral disengagement to the extent that the gap remains as they pursue harder-to-accomplish stretch goals to maintain support. We also theorize what happens when entrepreneurial deception is publicly called out, resulting in a potentially catastrophic loss of legitimacy. Overall, we offer a cautionary note on entrepreneurship by exploring one aspect of its dark side.

Resilience research has extensively addressed how organizations cope with disruptive events and their immediate impact. The focus of this research has been on how organizations “bounce back” to a pre-disruption state. However, organizations are also challenged to “bounce forward” toward unprecedented and uncertain futures in the wake of disruptive events without losing sight of their pasts. In this article, we develop a trajectory model of organizational resilience that focuses on how actors project temporal trajectories of responses toward disruptive events, reconstitute the trajectories in immediate response to the event, and reconfigure the trajectories toward the ensuing future. The model addresses the need to distinguish combinations of probability and the impact of disruptive events in organizational resilience research. We develop a typology of disruptive events from ecological research representing a distinct combination of probability and impact, labeled stochastic events, probabilistic transformations, and tipping points. We examine critical transitions in the trajectory model at which organizational resilience may or may not materialize. We conclude by considering the implications for theorizing organizational resilience between organizational levels and between different disruptive events, and for temporal organizational theorizing.

In recent years, organizations, policy-makers, and researchers have started to promote bystander intervention as an important tool for combating the problem of interpersonal workplace aggression. How effective these interventions are, however, remains largely unknown, as research on what happens after a bystander intervenes and how perpetrators react to such intervention is virtually nonexistent. Understanding perpetrator reactions is critical because these reactions may shape the ultimate outcome of bystander intervention effectiveness. Accordingly, we present a theoretical model that delineates perpetrators’ reactions to bystander intervention in incidents of interpersonal workplace aggression. Building on theories of identity, we theorize the perpetrator’s sensemaking process and its contingencies that shape their diverse reactions to the bystander and the target. This paper has vital implications both for researchers trying to understand bystander–perpetrator interpersonal dynamics and for practitioners aiming to develop safe and effective bystander intervention strategies. Correspondence concerning this article should be directed to Ivana Vranjes ([email protected]).

In this paper, we conceptualize the “institutional parasite” and examine its role in institutional change and maintenance. Institutional parasites are a widespread group of illegitimate actors that undermine the institution their livelihood depends on. Through their illegitimate activities, they may alert “institutional functionaries”: elite institutional actors capable of maintaining and changing the institution. Depending on the functionaries’ reactions, we show there are three potential outcomes: institutional drift, layering, or reform. Through our theorization of the institutional parasite, we point to the role of deviant actors in maintaining institutional arrangements, driving unintended institutional change, and we highlight the ambiguous relationship between institutional change and maintenance: sometimes, maintaining an institution requires changing it.

Enhancing cooperation among strangers is challenging. Strangers, who lack previous interactions and trust, cannot rely on human reciprocity as they engage in social and economic exchange. They have a tendency to defect for maximizing individual interests rather than to cooperate for benefiting each party in the exchange. Blockchain-based smart contracts come with the promise of solving this dilemma of cooperation. In this paper, we trace this promise to a new mechanism of cooperation, programmed reciprocity, defined as coded instructions for automatically returning good for good (positive reciprocity) and ill for ill (negative reciprocity). Programmed reciprocity is rooted in the algorithmic enforcement capability of blockchain networks, defined as the ability to guarantee the execution of the rules of an exchange agreement without a central authority and the possibility of human interference by either of the involved parties. We propose that algorithmic enforcement capability positively affects the viability of cooperation among strangers on the blockchain through programmed reciprocity. This is contingent on the level of contract complexity and blockchain confidence. Our proposed framework extends the nascent literature on blockchain governance with a novel explanation of how programmed reciprocity can enhance cooperation among strangers. In doing this, it also addresses a significant yet unresolved problem in the literature on cooperation in social and economic exchanges.

Non peer reviewed

Trust represents a key social mechanism facilitating collaboration in interorganizational relationships. Yet, the concept of interorganizational trust is surrounded by substantial ambiguity, especially as it pertains to the levels of analysis at which it is located. Some scholars maintain that trust is an inherently individual-level phenomenon, whereas others insist that organizations constitute the central sources and referents of trust in interorganizational relationships. Our article addresses this controversy, aiming to reduce conceptual ambiguity and foster cumulative progress. Using a micro-sociological approach, we advance knowledge of the meaning and context-specific relevance of individual- versus organizational-level trust. Specifically, we apply the notion of organizational actorhood to both the trustor and the trustee in an interorganizational relationship. We then build on micro-institutional and entitativity theory to offer a model of the antecedents of organizational actorhood that identifies a set of contextual conditions explaining the degree to which an organization rather than individuals within it constitutes the focal origin and target of trust. The contingent account we propose here helps bridge disparate traditions of scholarship on interorganizational trust by highlighting that trust can, but need not always, reside to a substantial extent at a supraindividual level of analysis.

In management research, theory is commonly viewed as a set of propositional statements backed up by theoretical assumptions. This view is embraced across conceptual and empirical research and effectively binds a particular style of reasoning, as a common grammar, to a specific form that theoretical explanations, as a structured set of propositions, should take. In this paper, I analyze characteristics of the propositional grammar and highlight several significant problems, including its high incidence rate of false positives in empirical research (false hypotheses that are accepted as true) and how it generally limits our explanation of phenomena by casting them as effects to be predicted. Informed by this analysis, I make the case for theoretical triangulation and offer a prescriptive model whereby researchers can strengthen their explanations of phenomena by iterating across multiple theoretical grammars rather than steadfastly using a single grammar. Using examples from prior research, I show how such theoretical triangulation helps mitigate the specific inferential biases and threats to validity of any grammar and leads to better explanations overall. Finally, I spell out the implications of this argument and offer a set of practical recommendations for implementing the practice of theoretical triangulation in the field of management research.