Knowledge that Transforms

Many actors claim to be experts of specialized knowledge, but for this expertise to be perceived as legitimate, other actors in the field must recognize them as authorities. Using an automated topic-model analysis of historical texts associated with the U.S. amateur radio operator movement between 1899 and 1927, we propose a process model for lay-expertise legitimation as an alternative to professionalization. While the professionalization account depends on specialized work, credentialing, and restrictive jurisdictional control by powerful field actors, our model emphasizes four mechanisms leading to lay-expert recognition: building an advanced collective competence, operating in an unrestricted public space, providing transformational social contributions, and expanding an original collective role identity. Our analysis shows how field expertise can be achieved outside of professional spaces by non-professionalized actors who master activities as a labor of love. Our work also reveals that lay-expertise recognition depends on the interplay between collective identities and collective competence among non-professional actors, and it addresses the shifting power dynamics when professional and non-professional actors coexist and strive for expertise recognition.

Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of 55 managers engaged in mobile careers across organizations, industries, and countries, and pursuing a one-year international master’s of business administration (MBA), we build a process model of the crafting of portable selves in temporary identity workspaces. Our findings reveal that contemporary careers in general, and temporary membership in an institution, fuel people’s efforts to craft portable selves: selves endowed with definitions, motives, and abilities that can be deployed across roles and organizations over time. Two pathways for crafting a portable self—one adaptive, the other exploratory—emerged from the interaction of individuals’ aims and concerns with institutional resources and demands. Each pathway involved developing a coherent understanding of the self in relation to others and to the institution that anchored participants to their current organization while preparing them for future ones. The study shows how institutions that host members temporarily can help them craft selves that afford a sense of agentic direction and enduring connection, tempering anxieties and bolstering hopes associated with mobile working lives. It also suggests that institutions serving as identity workspaces for portable selves may remain attractive and extend their cultural influence in an age of workforce mobility.

Despite lab-based evidence supporting the argument that double standards—by which one group is unfairly held to stricter standards than another—explain observed gender differences in evaluations, it remains unclear whether double standards also affect evaluations in organization and market contexts, where competitive pressures create a disincentive to discriminate. Using data from a field study of investment professionals sharing recommendations on an online platform, and drawing on status theory, we identify the conditions under which double standards in multistage evaluations contribute to unequal outcomes for men and women. We find that double standards disadvantaging women are most likely when evaluators face heightened search costs related to the number of candidates being compared or higher levels of uncertainty stemming from variation in the amount of pertinent information available. We rule out that systematic gender differences in the actions or characteristics of the investment professionals being evaluated are driving these results. By more carefully isolating the role of this status-based mechanism of discrimination for perpetuating gender inequality, this study identifies not only whether but also the conditions under which gender-based double standards lead to a female disadvantage, even when relevant and objective information about performance is readily available.

To examine how organizational routines serve as a source for balancing conflicting organizational goals, we use an inductive study of Alessi, an Italian design company, to trace how organizational members simultaneously achieved the conflicting organizational goals of design and efficiency in the new product development routine. Our analysis identified three types of regulatory actions (splicing, activating, and repressing) that participants took to flexibly enact these conflicting organizational goals through the same routine. We observed that the three regulatory actions facilitated new connections between new product development participants, allowing them to create a dynamic truce and accomplish the two conflicting goals in a new product’s origination, evaluation, and development phases. Routine regulation shifts our focus away from the routine as a stable truce to the truce as process, highlighting the role of actions performed by individuals throughout the organizational hierarchy, and moves the conversation away from eliminating goal conflict to elaborating the ongoing actions that people take to manage conflicting organizational goals. Our findings and theoretical insights produce a deeper conceptualization of routines as generative systems by demonstrating how action taken to enact a routine also has the capacity to regulate conflicting organizational goals.

This article examines how local organizations respond to the global norm of corporate social responsibility (CSR), focusing on the case of workplace gender diversity in Japan. Though many global institutional investors have declared their commitment to CSR principles, whether and how their investments actually improve local practices has yet to be examined. We hypothesize that changes implemented by local firms in response to pressure from global institutional investors are shaped by political dynamics among competing professional groups in organizations. Through interviews with CSR managers and consultants in Japan, we find that CSR managers push for gender diversity only in the upper ranks of their organizations. This helps managers limit resistance from human resources managers, who want to maintain the traditional employment system, while still gaining support from investor relations managers, who support changes that are visible to investors. Our findings from panel data analysis further document this change above the glass ceiling. Analyzing more than 800 Japanese firms between 2001 and 2009, we show that both foreign investment and the within-firm influence of CSR and investor relations managers significantly increased the number of women on boards and in managerial positions but did not improve the lot of those in non-managerial or entry-level positions. Our study contributes to research on diffusion and organizational change by illuminating interprofessional politics in the local implementation of global norms.

This paper examines when and how a critical mass of social and political stakeholders mobilizes against a corporate organization and the impact of such mobilization on the organization’s market value. Our study employs a dataset of more than 51,000 media-reported events describing the interactions among almost 2,300 political, social, and economic stakeholders and 19 gold-mining firms trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange and operating mines in emerging markets around the world. We first examine the conditions and dynamics that explain whether an isolated, stakeholder-initiated negative statement or action—a “spark” or critical event—goes unnoticed or escalates into a cascade of stakeholder reactions targeting the firm. Second, we examine whether such sparks and the ensuing cascades of stakeholder reactions affect shareholders’ valuation of the firm. We argue and show empirically that both stakeholders’ and shareholders’ reactions following critical events are largely influenced by stakeholders’ prior beliefs about the target organization and by peer stakeholders’ reactions to the critical event. Stakeholders with positive beliefs about the firm before the critical event mobilize to defend it, and those with negative prior beliefs reinforce their opposition. Shareholders also take note of the other stakeholders’ prior beliefs and react negatively to critical events if the firm has a history of conflict with its stakeholders. Thus unconnected or loosely connected stakeholders who reveal their beliefs about a firm through public statements and actions influence each other’s reactions to critical events and shareholders’ assessments of the firm’s value.

Although much is known about how brokerage positions in social networks help individuals improve their own performance, we know little about the impact of brokers on those around them. Our study investigates brokerage as a public good. We focus on the positive and negative externalities of specific kinds of brokers: “hubs,” who act as the main interfaces between members of their own network community (“network neighbors”) and members of other communities. Because hubs access diverse knowledge and perspectives, they create positive externalities by providing novel ideas to their network neighbors. But hubs also generate negative externalities: extensive cross-community activity puts heavy demands on their attention and time, so that hubs may not provide strong commitment to their neighbors’ projects. Because of this, network neighbors experience different externalities from hubs depending on their own formal role in projects. We use insights from our fieldwork in the French television game show industry to illustrate the mechanisms at play, and we test our theory with archival data on this industry from 1995 to 2012. Results suggest that the positive externalities of hubs help their neighbors contribute to the success of projects when these neighbors hold creativity-focused roles; yet the negative externalities of hubs hinder their neighbors’ contributions when they hold efficiency-focused roles.

This study examines how extraversion, a personality trait that signifies more or less positive affect, assertive behavior, decisive thinking, and desires for social engagement, influences chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) decisions and the ensuing strategic behavior of firms. Using a novel linguistic technique to assess personality from unscripted text spoken by 2,381 CEOs of S&P 1500 firms over ten years, we show that CEOs’ extraversion influences the merger and acquisition (M&A) behavior of firms above and beyond other well-established personality traits. We find that extraverted CEOs are more likely to engage in acquisitions, and to conduct larger ones, than other CEOs and that these effects are partially explained by their higher representation on boards of other firms. Moreover, we find that the acquisitive nature of extraverted CEOs reveals itself particularly in so-called “weaker” situations, in which CEOs enjoy considerable discretion to behave in ways akin to their personality traits. Subsequent analyses show that extraverted CEOs are also more likely than other CEOs to succeed in M&As, as reflected by stronger abnormal returns following acquisition announcements.

In the last century and a half, U.S. industry has seen the emergence of several different management models. We propose a theory of this evolution based on three nested and interacting processes. First, we identify several successive waves of technological revolution, each of which prompted a corresponding wave of change in the dominant organizational paradigm. Second, nested within these waves, each of these organizational paradigms emerged through two successive cycles—a primary cycle that generated a new management model making the prior organizational paradigm obsolete, and a secondary cycle that generated another model that mitigated the dysfunctions of the primary cycle’s model. Third, nested within each cycle is a problem-solving process in which each model’s development passed through four main phases: (1) identification of a widespread organizational and management problem, (2) creation of innovative managerial concepts that offer various solutions to this problem, (3) emergence and theorization of a new model from among these concepts, and (4) dissemination and diffusion of this model. By linking new models’ emergence to specific technological revolutions, we can explain changes in their contents. By integrating a dialectical account of the paired cycles with an account of the waves of paradigm change, we can see how apparently competing models are better understood as complementary pairs in a common paradigm. And by unpacking each model’s phases of development, we can identify the roles played by various actors and management concepts in driving change in the models’ contents and see the agency behind these structural changes.

To understand how people cultivate and sustain authenticity in multiple, often shifting, work roles, we analyze qualitative data gathered over five years from a sample of 48 plural careerists—people who choose to simultaneously hold and identify with multiple jobs. We find that people with multiple work identities struggle with being, feeling, and seeming authentic both to their contextualized work roles and to their broader work selves. Further, practices developed to cope with these struggles change over time, suggesting a two-phase emergent process of authentication in which people first synchronize their individual work role identities and then progress toward harmonizing a more general work self. This study challenges the notion that consistency is the core of authenticity, demonstrating that for people with multiple valued identities, authenticity is not about being true to one identity across time and contexts, but instead involves creating and holding cognitive and social space for several true versions of oneself that may change over time. It suggests that authentication is the emergent, socially constructed process of both determining who one is and helping others see who one is.