Knowledge that Transforms

Drawing on a 2.5-year ethnography of first-time founders in a coworking facility, I shed light on the process by which founders ascribe self-referential meaning to entrepreneurship—that is, how they develop an entrepreneurial identity in situ. I discovered that founders’ use of the coworking space occasioned distinct interaction patterns. Over time, varying interactions played a central role in whether the workspace became a community or remained a mere office space to these founders. Such emergent spatial meanings were coupled with whether founders themselves developed as entrepreneurs or not within their workspace. Founders’ perceptions of the workspace as a community were generally associated with their identifying more as entrepreneurs, while their perceptions of the workspace as an office were usually linked with their identifying less, and even disidentifying, as entrepreneurs. In explaining these dynamics, I contribute to research on identity and space, research on entrepreneurial identity, and broader scholarship on space and interactions in organizations. For first-time founders, the meanings associated with being an entrepreneur can be equivocal, and where they work helps to shape their answers to the questions “What is entrepreneurship to me?” and “Who am I?”

Decentralization as an organizing principle has drawn growing interest from scholars and practitioners because of its perceived suitability for contemporary market conditions and alignment with employees’ evolving work expectations. However, efforts to decentralize authority face significant obstacles and often end in failure. I propose that existing research on decentralization has struggled to generate insight into how such barriers can be overcome because it has treated decentralization as a static outcome imposed by organizational designers. In contrast, this article treats decentralization as a dynamic and situated achievement that must be continually enacted, and it leverages ethnographic data from a decentralization effort in order to build theory on the organizational practices that support enactments of decentralized authority. I find that successful enactments of decentralized authority were supported by practices that established clear boundaries of authority and focused collective attention on these boundaries, as well as by practices that depersonalized collective attributions of the source of authority. At the same time, the practices were difficult to sustain because they were cognitively, emotionally, and temporally demanding. Through this study, I show that decentralization is not merely a one-time structural change but an ongoing collective process that requires navigating and neutralizing the structural and psychological forces pulling organizations back toward hierarchy.

This research explores how a new relation of production—the shift from human managers to algorithmic managers on digital platforms—manufactures workplace consent. While most research has argued that the task standardization and surveillance that accompany algorithmic management will give rise to the quintessential “bad job” (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson, 2000; Kalleberg, 2011), I find that, surprisingly, many workers report liking and finding choice while working under algorithmic management. Drawing on a seven-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human–algorithm interactions and how this configuration of the work process allows for more-frequent and narrow choice. I find that workers use two sets of tactics. In engagement tactics, individuals generally follow the algorithmic nudges and do not try to get around the system; in deviance tactics, individuals manipulate their input into the algorithmic management system. While the behaviors associated with these tactics are practical opposites, they both elicit consent, or active, enthusiastic participation by workers to align their efforts with managerial interests, and both contribute to workers seeing themselves as skillful agents. However, this choice-based consent can mask the more-structurally problematic elements of the work, contributing to the growing popularity of what I call the “good bad” job.

Management scholars have long examined gender disparities in leaders’ communication and followers’ reactions. There is, however, a paucity of research that takes an intersectional perspective. This article takes that step, using an intersectional lens to examine women leaders’ use of dominant language and how others receive it. Leveraging advances in natural-language processing, I analyzed the stereotype content of more than 250,000 Congressional remarks (Study 1) and almost one million tweets (Study 2) by leaders. Women leaders referenced dominance more than men did (using more words like “powerful”), violating stereotypes that depict women as submissive. However, as theory on racialized gender stereotypes suggests, this effect was unique to White leaders. Two additional studies revealed backlash to women leaders’ use of dominant language. Analyzing almost 18,000 editorials revealed the more that women leaders referenced dominance, the more they were portrayed as dominant but also cold. Effects were strongest for Black and Latina women (Study 3). Finally, an experiment using simulated social media profiles found the more that Black women (but not men) leaders referenced dominance, the more voters rated them as less likeable, a result that was unique to Black leaders (Study 4). The article demonstrates the critical importance of intersectionality for understanding gender inequality in leaders’ communication and its reception by the media and the public.

Brokerage in intra-organizational networks is critical to performance, but women exhibit less brokerage in their social networks and receive lower performance returns to the brokerage they exhibit than men do. We uncover a condition under which the gender gaps in network advantage are entirely negated: mobility. When women move between units of the organization, they increase their brokerage more than mobile men do. Further, such mobility eliminates the gender gap in returns to brokerage. Using a rich dataset including the personnel records, monthly performance, and email communications of thousands of employees in a large financial institution, we find support for our arguments by comparing the networks and objective performance of those who changed jobs with matched non-movers prior to and following each job change. In probing why this might be the case, we find that women movers are more likely to maintain communication ties to colleagues from their previous roles and that these persistent ties give them a discernible and gender-role-congruent explanation for connecting otherwise disconnected units and benefiting from network brokerage. Our results illuminate important mechanisms by which social network dynamics and mobility affect gender inequality and performance in organizations.

Through an ethnographic study of decision making in a rape crisis center, I explore how institutional logics come to be through interactions. Zooming in on storytelling interactions and slowing down to follow their evolution, I find that collective cognitive, political, and emotional elements mediated the narration of logics into effect. While the interactions unfolded within a space of possibilities determined by logics, co-narrators still put much cognitive effort into negotiating which logic was relevant and how it implicated specific ways of understanding and responding to events. Narrators’ subject positions and their perceived interests and emotions also mediated the work of logics on the ground. Decisions were determined by degrees of coherence across these cognitive, political, and emotional elements. When there was high or moderate coherence, the decision followed the resolution implied by the narration. When coherence was low, decision makers rejected the decision implied by the narration. Coherence, then, constrained people’s agency to invoke institutional logic. These results offer compelling new theory about how institutional logics work: logics are neither deterministic nor freely manipulated but instantiated through collective and situated dynamics that set limits on their strategic use.