Knowledge that Transforms

This issue of the Journal of Management includes a series of three articles on reputation. “Reconsidering the Reputation–Performance Relationship: A Resource-Based View” was written by Brian Boyd, Donald Bergh, and David Ketchen (2010). Boyd et al. reanalyzed the data from 107 business schools in the United States (used in a study by Rindova, Williamson, Petkova, & Sever, 2005) to develop and test a resource-based view of reputation and performance. Violina Rindova, Ian Williamson, and Antoaneta Petkova became aware of this in press article and submitted a proposal to follow up Boyd et al.’s article with their article “Reputation as an Intangible Asset: Reflections on Theory and Methods in Two Empirical Studies of Business School Reputations.” In the spirit of completing the discussion, I asked Boyd et al. to write a response (Bergh, Ketchen, Boyd, & Bergh, 2010), which resulted in the three articles appearing in this issue. These three articles led me to reflect on the wide range of reputation research published in the Journal of Management. What follows is a summary of reputation research spanning 27 years and looking forward into 2011.

When evaluating organizational outcomes, strong experimental designs are often not practical. As a result, assessments of change may be confounded by a number of threats to their validity. Therefore, attempts have been made to detect or control for many of these artifacts. This article explores a method for detecting response artifacts, using measurement and relational equivalence techniques. The large drop in the reported levels of sexual harassment in the U.S. military between 1995 and 2002 provides the context for testing this method. The results suggest that at least part of the reported decrease in harassment was artifactual. The implications for evaluations of organizational change are discussed.

This study proposes a new theoretical frame to explain intermarket differences in the follow-up firm’s market entry that determines the pioneer’s monopoly period (i.e., pioneer leadtime). The authors note that firms’ new market entry is reflective of their entry capabilities as well as entry motivations. More specifically, they argue that industry incumbency of both the pioneer and follow-up firms and product newness of the market may influence the follow-up firms’ entry capabilities and motivations, creating variance in pioneer leadtime. Their empirical findings generally support the theoretical frame and complement the conventional entry-barrier perspective. For example, for really new products, pioneer leadtime is shorter when the follow-up entrant has experiences from similar industries than when it does not. For incrementally new products, pioneer leadtime is longer when the pioneer has experiences from similar industries than when it does not.

An effective bridge for spanning the macro—micro divide in management studies requires strong disciplinary foundations on each side of the chasm, along with the versatility to address a range of management issues. This will likely involve simultaneous multilevel, multiparty action—response research. The authors argue that judgment policy studies are especially suited to developing the interactive multilevel context theories that are necessary to narrow the divide across multiple areas of management research. Literally millions of organization members go through judgment processes every day, on many topics, and their choices critically affect individual, group, and organizational success. The authors provide examples—using the literatures on trust, diversity climate, workplace romance, and strategy implementation—to demonstrate how judgment policy analysis methods can help narrow the macro—micro divide in each area. The authors also briefly discuss available techniques for analyzing individuals’ judgment policies and suggest other high-potential areas for future macro—micro bridge building in management, via judgment policy studies, including business ethics, entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and international management.

This article argues that resource-based logic can be extended by conceptualizing the firm in resource-investment terms. It establishes that investing in resources is essentially a bilateral process involving managers and the owners of capital and that all resource-investments are necessarily made within an institutional superstructure. As a result, the capital invested into the firm is necessarily highly structured. These ideas are developed in this article from a payments perspective because this perspective allows scholars to explore the ex ante investment decisions that allow firms to grow, and to focus on firms’ resource payments, which can be considered a proxy for firms’ ex post resource-investments. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these ideas, including the implications for performance, theory of the firm, and endogenous growth research.

A firm may readily subscribe to a new technology but then fail to use it. This article advances existing technology diffusion theory by bringing in a new construct that can explain the likelihood of technology use after adoption. The authors define contiguous user bandwagon and show how this information diffusion mechanism can help in explaining the time to technology use. They test their hypotheses using data on the adoption and use of e-procurement technology (N = 3,158) in the early phase of its diffusion. The authors find support for the hypothesis that contiguous user bandwagon is a strong antecedent of time to technology use.

Prior studies of strategic consensus and firm performance have yielded inconsistent results. The authors synthesize and account for these divergent findings using a mediated moderation model. Results based on a sample of manufacturing companies in Spain suggest a pattern of mediated moderation such that the relationship between competitive method consensus (i.e., means) and organizational performance, which is moderated by environmental dynamism, is mediated by consensus on objectives (i.e., goals or ends). These results provide an alternative explanation for prior inconsistencies in research results regarding the consensus–performance relationship and point to the need for a more complex conceptualization of the relationship among competitive method consensus, consensus on objectives, organizational performance, and the organization’s surrounding environment.

This study addresses a phenomenon observed in past research on career success and attainment in which White male managers and executives seemingly gain more from external labor market mobility than do their female and minority male counterparts. Focusing on the executive search industry, the authors found that executive search firm representatives are more likely to contact White males than females and minority males, that the compensation advantage resulting from an external labor market strategy is strongest among White male managers and executives, and that search firm—initiated contacts moderate the relationship between compensation and mobility in an external labor market. Implications for management research, theory, and practice are discussed.