Knowledge that Transforms

Theory indicates that inclusive regulatory co-creation between firms and their governments activates a procedural justice mechanism that improves firms’ views of state legitimacy and leads to rules that better fit the full spectrum of real-world operating conditions. Emerging economies, however, face what we argue is a legitimacy–co-creation paradox: Widely held baseline views of government as corrupt and captured by elite interests lead many firms to balk at engaging with the state, thereby impeding opportunities for mutually beneficial co-creation. To address this challenge, we pilot and test the impact of a third-party intervention that we name the RegRoom, wherein an expert helps firms refine their comments on draft regulation before submitting them and, in so doing, increases the firms’ understanding of the regulation’s public purpose. We hypothesize and find evidence through a field experiment in Thailand that this institutional intermediation improves firms’ perceptions of state legitimacy and observable engagement in regulatory co-creation. Further exploration of our data leads us to theorize a sequence by which institutional intermediaries overcome the legitimacy–co-creation paradox; specifically, legitimacy deficits need to be addressed before capability enhancement can occur. Our study shows how institutional intermediaries can contribute to the expansion of fairer and more-sustainable markets.

Workers face a cold start when entering new work contexts in which their reputations do not precede them. Cold starts are a particularly challenging problem for late-career workers who leave decades-long careers in formal organizations to pursue freelancing through online labor platforms. Unlike early- and mid-career freelancers, who are typically motivated by long-term career advancement, late-career workers are motivated to make work less central to their lives, although many still want and need to engage in paid labor in retirement. However, the question of how late-career workers navigate the cold-start problem is not well understood. In our study, we examine how late-career workers (55+ years old, 30+ years of work experience) manage the transition to platform-based freelancing. We find that for these workers, the cold-start problem is especially challenging as it is underpinned by reputation system misalignment, a clash between fundamentally different regimes for evaluating, recognizing, and assigning workers’ value. Although late-career workers expected their credentials to confer credibility in platform work, overcoming the cold-start problem required recalibrating their motivations and sense of professional worth. Our findings advance theoretical conversations on algorithmic management and visibility, career transitions to platform work, and retirement.

Digitization has enabled modern firms to expand at unprecedented rates, but there are downsides to rapid expansion. Prior research has highlighted how digital platforms facilitate mass-market expansions by resolving frictions associated with market entry. Accordingly, various studies have emphasized the positive impact of market-friction reduction on aggregate market size and efficiency. In this article, we argue that the extreme resolution of frictions may also have a downside: It can nudge platform participants to overlook the heterogeneous nature of different markets and, consequently, to engage in large-scale, potentially myopic market expansions. These expansions, in turn, may engender lower customer satisfaction and firm performance. We test our arguments in the context of Apple’s App Store. We find that apps that undergo rapid, large-scale market expansions, relative to apps that do not expand or that expand more gradually, see a short-run increase in client base but longer-run declines in ratings, downloads, financial performance, and innovation. By addressing the underexplored negative side of resolving market frictions on platforms, the study advances knowledge of digital strategy and scaling.

Workers in many industrial settings remain in jobs that expose them to life-threatening harm, occupying a dual position as insiders within the firm and victims of its consequences. We examine how workers make sense of organizational wrongdoing from this dual position, through an inductive study of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto, Italy, where public scandal revealed chronic toxic emissions. We find that workers’ sensemaking cannot be explained by insider or victim status alone but, instead, emerges at their intersection. While external actors interpret as complicity workers’ continued participation in the firm following the exposure of wrongdoing, workers frame remaining as a survival-oriented response to life-threatening harm, condemning the organization as the source of injury while depending on it for survival. At the same time, as workers fail to secure recognition as victims beyond the firm, they come to view institutional inaction in the face of their suffering as evidence of systemic abandonment and injustice. We theorize that these processes—survival-based resignation to continue working and perceived institutional abandonment—reinforce each other, creating a double-failure trap in which workers endure life-threatening harm not because they fail to recognize its dangers but because they no longer believe protection or escape is possible.

Research has consistently found that organizational evaluations produce gendered outcomes. We advance understanding of this inequality by examining how multistage evaluations—a common organizational design feature—shape gendered evaluative disparities. We integrate and extend research on evaluations, status, and inequality to theorize how gendered outcomes can vary between stages within a single, unified evaluation process—what we term “stakes-driven gender inequality.” Our theoretical framework centers on a ubiquitous feature of organizational multistage evaluation processes that is missing from prior theoretical accounts: escalating stakes across stages via increasingly binding commitments and rising cost of wrong selections. We conceptualize two stylized stages within the same evaluation process: a shortlisting stage (a preliminary selection of candidates for further consideration) and a winners stage (in which final, binding selections are made). Using data from a large multistage startup competition, we test our theory and find that female-led startups are 18.7 percent more likely than male-led startups to be selected in the shortlisting stage but 30.7 percent less likely to be selected in the winners stage. Mechanism tests in the shortlisting stage are most consistent with female-led startups being assessed as higher quality, whereas in the winners stage, we find evidence consistent with gendered performance expectations and evaluators’ risk aversion.

In this article, we show that remote work is associated with higher skill and qualification requirements in hiring. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we identify several mechanisms through which remote work raises hiring standards. By reducing face-to-face interaction and real-time communication, remote work makes training and employee support more challenging, expands the pool of applicants, and leads employers to rely more on quantifiable metrics. We tested these ideas by analyzing over 50 million job postings from 28 European countries between 2018 and 2021 and found that the shift to remote work is associated with a higher number of required skills and greater work experience for a job. These findings indicate that remote work contributes to skill upgrading in the labor market.

This comprehensive historical treatment of international business (IB) as a discipline charts its intellectual development, pedagogical institutionalization, and organizational infrastructure across seven decades. Nachum and Yaprak organize their inquiry around three interdependent dimensions—thought, teaching, and institutions—arguing that only by weaving these strands together can we fully comprehend how IB emerged from economics and management to achieve recognition as a distinct scholarly domain. The result is a compelling disciplinary biography resonating beyond field specialists and offering organizational scholars a compelling case study of how academic fields evolve, consolidate, and become legitimate.

Catastrophic innovation failure derails firms’ innovation process and threatens their legitimacy. Prior research has analyzed internal and external responses to failure separately, focusing either on intra-firm learning and failure remediation or on efforts to sustain stakeholder support. Research on these responses’ co-evolution has been notably absent. We examine how a firm jointly recalibrated internal design choices and external strategic framing following catastrophic innovation failure, through a study of Virgin Galactic’s 2014 test flight crash. We introduce and develop the concept of the “promise–risk balance”: a state in which the uncertainty inherent to innovation and the framing communicated to stakeholders stand in generative tension and jointly support the innovation process. Catastrophic innovation failure disrupts this balance. We map Virgin Galactic’s recalibration of risk via internal design choices and recalibration of promise via external framing as interdependent levers to restore balance. We show that design choices aimed at de-risking technology can have adverse effects on a firm’s capabilities, externally dampening promise. Following failure, strategic reframing must bring the firm’s external message in line with actual capabilities and inspire stakeholder support. Recognizing and managing interdependencies between design choices and strategic framing is crucial to the continuity of the innovation process and firm survival.