Knowledge that Transforms

Three theoretical perspectives summarize diversification antecedents and performance outcomes. The first perspective examines diversification under the assumption of relative market perfection where, within industries, firms and products are homogeneous. The second perspective discusses diversification where both market and firm imperfections are assumed to exist. The thirdperspective also assumes market andfirm imperfections, butfurther assumes imperfect governance structures such that managerial motivesfor diversification are influential. These perspectives provide different explanations of antecedent resources and incentives that encourage (or discourage) diversification. This article reviews evidence associated with each perspective concerning the relationship between diversification and firm performance and offers suggestions forfuture research based on comparisons among these alternative perspectives.

The present article chronicles the history of the field of organizational justice, identifies current themes, and recommends new directions for the future. A historical overview of the field focuses on research and theory in the distributive justice tradition (e.g., equity theory) as well as the burgeoning topic of procedural justice. This forms the foundation for the discussion offive popular themes in contemporary organizational justice research: (a) attempts to distinguish procedural justice and distributive justice empirically, (b) the development of new conceptual advances, (c) consideration of the interpersonal determinants of procedural justice judgments, (d) new directions in tests of equity theory, and (e) applications of justice-based explanations to many different organizational phenomena. In closing, a plea is made for future work that improves procedural justice research methodologically (with respect to scope, setting, and scaling), and that attempts to integrate and unify disparate concepts in the distributive and procedural justice traditions.

The Tenerife air disaster, in which a KLM 747 and a Pan Am 747 collided with a loss of 583 lives, is examined as a prototype of system vulnerability to crisis. It is concluded that the combination of interruption of important routines among interdependent systems, interdependencies that become tighter, a loss of cognitive efficiency due to autonomic arousal, and a loss of communication accuracy due to increased hierarchical distortion, created a configuration that encouraged the occurrence and rapid diffusion of multiple small errors. Implications of this prototype for future research and practice are explored.

This study examined the main effects of economic, behavioral, and strategic constructs and their interactions in explaining variations in levels of top management cash compensation. Based on a sample of 226 top-level executives in 90 firms, the study also examined interactions between these constructs and industry structure across three diverse industry groups. Multiple regression analyses revealed several significant main effects for constructs drawn from each of the categories, but offered little support for interaction effects between categories. Moderated regression analysis indicated that industry structure has significant effects on the relationships between antecedent variables and compensation, but these effects are not pervasive. Finally, the study found that "high" diversifiers compensated significantly more than "low" diversifiers in the total sample and in two out of the three industry groups.