Knowledge that Transforms

We examine how different occupational communities that are embedded in organizations exercise control processes to achieve emergent coordination as they create complex products together. We compare two types of organizations, equipment manufacturing and film production, and find that although occupational control was important for emergent coordination in both settings, this relationship varied according to two aspects of occupational embeddedness: organizational acknowledgment of occupational control and occupational interdependence. In the equipment manufacturing setting, occupational control was latent: the communities visibly conformed to organizational control processes while exercising occupational control behind the scenes to coordinate emergently. In the film setting, the organization granted the occupational community significant latitude over its tasks, which enabled members to coordinate emergently to solve problems the majority of the time. We propose that these two aspects of occupational embeddedness must be analyzed together with occupational control processes to explain how integration unfolds in knowledge-based settings in ways that organizational control processes are ill-equipped to manage.

This paper extends organizational research on distrust to explain the effects of organizational misconduct on continued market participation after a fraud. I argue that social relations between fraud victims and perpetrators insulate against the formation and diffusion of distrust. Variation in market participation after a fraud occurs because victims who belong to the perpetrator’s social group are more likely to attribute blame to the organization that committed the fraud, while victims from social out-groups are more likely to generalize blame to the perpetrator’s social group and subsequently avoid other organizations and institutions governed by its members. The empirical setting is Kenya’s ethnically diverse Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), from which the country’s largest stockbrokerage was expelled in 2008 after defrauding one-quarter of its 100,000 clients. Analysis of NSE data on trades for victimized and non-victimized investors, as well as surnames that identify investors’ ethnicities, shows that clients from the same ethnic group as leaders of the corrupt brokerage are more likely than clients from rival ethnic groups to continue to participate in the market after a fraud and more likely to choose another intermediary operated by members of their ethnic group. But results also show that some victims invest more after the fraud and use less-trustworthy intermediaries to do so. This suggests that integrity-based trust may be a less effective coordination device in arm’s-length market transactions than in interpersonal transactions. A key implication is that misconduct does not simply reduce average participation in a market; it changes the market’s composition by filtering out diverse social groups that are more likely to demand stronger governance standards.

Organizational life is rife with conflict between groups that pursue different goals, particularly when groups have strong commitments to professional identities developed outside the organization. I use data from a 30-month comparative ethnographic field study of four U.S. Army combat brigades to examine conflict between commanders who had a goal of fielding a mission-ready force and mental health providers who had a goal of providing rehabilitative mental health care to soldiers. All commanders and providers faced goal and identity conflict and had access to similar integrative mechanisms. Yet only those associated with two brigades addressed these conflicts in ways that accomplished the army’s superordinate goal of having both mission-ready and mentally healthy soldiers. Both successful brigades used what I call “anchored personalization” practices, which included developing personalized relations across groups, anchoring members in their home group identity, and co-constructing integrative solutions to conflict. These practices were supported by an organizational structure in which professionals were assigned to work with specific members of the other group, while remaining embedded within their home group. In contrast, an organizational structure promoting only anchoring in one’s home group identity led to failure when each group pursued its own goals at the expense of the other group’s goals. A structure promoting only personalization across groups without anchoring in one’s home group identity led to failure from cooptation by the dominant group. This study contributes to our understanding of how groups with strong professional identities can work together in service of their organization’s superordinate goals when traditional mechanisms fail.

In a study of artists who launched independent record labels in the music industry from 1990 to 2013, we focus on explaining the paradox generated when prospective entrepreneurs accumulate broad functional experience, which signals to resource providers mastery of different skills and access to various information and resources but may also undermine the legitimacy of their entrepreneurial claims because they are not seen as specialists. To resolve this paradox, we theorize that the potential legitimacy discount of categorical membership can be avoided when individuals are classified according to multiple categories simultaneously. We find that the transition to entrepreneurship is most likely to occur when an artist’s functional experience is broad but market experience is narrow: he or she has mastered a variety of skills but solicited few audiences. We also find that the paradox of breadth is attenuated—the potential penalty of functional breadth and the corresponding need to develop narrow market experience are reduced—when the entrepreneur has alternate methods of signaling legitimacy, including high status and more-typical prior work experience. Moreover, some audiences are more disposed than others to allow an entrepreneur to pursue greater novelty. Our findings suggest that mastering a variety of skills is not universally beneficial for aspiring entrepreneurs. In some circumstances, such mastery is best coupled with a narrow market focus.

To explore when and why workplace training facilitates the retention of first-time workers from historically underrepresented groups in formal employment, I combine ethnographic fieldwork at an Indian garment factory employing first-time women workers, personnel data over a two-year period, and survey data from a sample of new hires. I find that training is effective at preventing first-time women workers from dropping out soon after they are hired when it is conducted by trainers with many years of experience. Rather than focusing only on job-specific skills, training conducted by experienced trainers includes the basic work-readiness skills of self-presentation, interpersonal communication, work–life separation, and self-reliance needed to survive at work. I find that first-time women workers quasi-randomly assigned to experienced trainers had about a 20-percent greater probability of being retained after three months, and these workers reported that they felt more ready for work than those assigned to less-experienced trainers. My results imply that for the majority of workers from historically underrepresented groups who are entering the workplace for the first time, training is important to foster their retention, and organizations that focus on both the attributes of the people delivering that training and its content have a greater chance of keeping these workers for the long term.

Using survey data from CEOs and other top managers at large and mid-sized public companies in the U.S., as well as from journalists, we explore how ingratiation, a fundamental means of building and maintaining one’s social capital, may trigger behavior that damages the social capital of the person being ingratiated. Although ingratiation, such as flattery or opinion conformity, may elicit positive affect from its target, we suggest it can also elicit a specific form of negative affect toward the target, which in turn can trigger interpersonal harm-doing. Focusing on ingratiation by top managers toward the CEO, we find that ingratiating managers are likely to develop feelings of resentment toward the CEO and that ingratiation may be especially likely to elicit resentment among top managers when the CEO is a racial minority or a woman. We also find that negative affect from ingratiation can induce interpersonal behavior that has the potential to damage the social capital of the influence target, as feelings of resentment that result from ingratiatory behavior can trigger social undermining of the CEO in the manager’s communications with journalists.

Recent research highlights the benefits of internal hiring––filling a job by hiring a worker currently employed by the organization––and more than half of jobs are filled that way. Yet we know surprisingly little about the processes that facilitate the movement of workers across jobs within firms. I address this gap by first detailing the portfolio of internal hiring processes employed by large organizations, focusing on posting and slotting. Posting is a predominantly market-based process in which a manager posts an open job and invites interested candidates to apply, whereas slotting is a predominantly relational process in which a manager personally identifies a preferred candidate and “slots” him or her into an open job. I then examine how key differences between posting and slotting shape two outcomes of importance to firms and workers: quality of hire and compensation. My analysis of 8,107 internal hires at a large U.S. health-services firm reveals that outcomes for internal candidates depend, in part, on the nature of the process used to facilitate the movement from one job to the next; compared with slotted employees, workers who enter a job through posting have higher performance ratings, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to exit the firm. My findings suggest that the posting process improves the quality of hires by expanding the pool of potential candidates at the recruiting stage and by disciplining the information managers use to evaluate candidates at the selection stage. As well, internal candidates hired through posting are more likely to initiate salary negotiations and negotiate more competitively, resulting in higher initial salaries.

Using ethnographic, experimental, and survey data from a handicraft cluster in southern India, this paper reports on a study of when and why people who identify with their work might sacrifice financial rewards in their economic decisions. Based on findings from ethnographic fieldwork, I hypothesize that the monetary value that individuals who identify with their work seek for their output depends on their audience: when they encounter discerning audiences, who are knowledgeable about and appreciative of their work, they underemphasize financial gains; transactions with non-discerning audiences, however, result in a focus on monetary rewards. I propose that the mechanism underlying this behavior is product attachment: people who identify with their work develop affection for the output of their labor and prefer to transact with audiences who will take care of their products beyond the point of sale, even if doing so results in lower monetary rewards. I substantiate this theory with a field experiment by demonstrating that handicraft artisans in India who identify with their work sell their products at different prices to discerning and non-discerning groups of buyers. This paper contributes to our understanding of economic decision making in the context of meaningful work by highlighting the moderating role of audiences and uncovering the mechanism of product attachment.

We investigate the emergence and growth of “green chemistry”—an effort by chemists to encourage other chemists to reduce the health, safety, and environmental impacts of chemical products and processes—to explore how occupational members, absent external triggers for change, influence how their peers do their work. Using extensive interviews, archival data, and observations, we find that advocates simultaneously advanced different frames that specified the utility of making the change: (1) a normalizing frame, positioning green chemistry as consistent with mainstream chemistry innovation; (2) a moralizing frame, positioning it as an ethical imperative; and (3) a pragmatizing frame, positioning it as a tool that could help chemists tackle problems they encountered in their day-to-day work. Each frame resonated differently with chemists in their various occupational roles. Though this pluralistic approach generated broad acceptance of the change effort, it also exposed tensions, which threatened the coherence of the change. Advocates’ diverse responses to these tensions contribute to a persistent state of pluralism and dynamism in the change effort. We uncover a process through which occupational members generate and sustain change, show how occupational heterogeneity can enable and delimit change, and show how well-meaning efforts to “moralize” occupational work can heighten resistance, inhibiting the very changes that enable experts to address urgent societal problems.

This study examines how updating—the process of revising provisional sensemaking to incorporate new cues—occurs within teams during unexpected events. I compare how 19 teams of emergency department staff managed the same unexpected event (a broken piece of equipment) in a medical simulation scenario. Using a microethnographic approach to analyze video recordings of these teams, I conduct a fine-grained examination of how updating takes place and find considerable variation in its effectiveness across teams. I show that the effectiveness of updating depends not only on how teams remake sense but also on how they engage in trajectory management, balancing the work of updating with their ongoing work (in this case, patient care). Trajectory management practices related to monitoring cues and managing engaging tasks facilitated effective updating and allowed teams to detect and identify the problem caused by the broken piece of equipment and correct it before it led to serious consequences. More-effective teams monitor and rapidly interpret cues, confirming them with others and evaluating changes over time; they then investigate cues, develop plausible explanations, and quickly test them, monitoring cues for feedback. Less-effective teams fail to monitor and confirm cues with others, overlook or misinterpret cues, and delay investigating cues and developing plausible explanations; they also delay testing explanations, often being sidetracked by patient care tasks.