Knowledge that Transforms

This paper begins with a story told by a corporation president to illustrate what his organization was doing to “help” women employees balance the demands of work and home. The paper deconstructs and reconstructs this story text from a feminist perspective, examining what it says, what it does not say, and what it might have said. This analysis reveals how organizational efforts to “help women” have suppressed gender conflict and reified false dichotomies between public and private realms of endeavor, suggesting why it has proven so difficult to eradicate gender discrimination in organizations. Implications of a feminist perspective for organizational theory are discussed.

This paper describes the methods being used by the Minnesota Innovation Research Program to develop and test a process theory of innovation which explains how and why innovations develop over time and what developmental paths may lead to success and failure for different kinds of innovations. After a background description of the longitudinal field research, this paper focuses on the methods being used to examine processes of innovation development. These methods pertain to the selection of cases and concepts, observing change, coding and analyzing event data to identify process patterns, and developing theories to explain observed innovation processes. We believe these methods are applicable to other studies that examine a range of temporal processes, including organizational startup, growth, decline, and adaptation.

Melanesian Bigmanship (a meritocratic, enacted career of political-economic leadership) is recounted as an anthropological metaphor for entrepreneurship. This “library tale” has two purposes. The first is a demonstration of conceptual uses of ethnographies for developing grounded theory. Propositions are generated on entrepreneurial orientations and opportunity structures. Opportunities are seen to arise in the creation of linkages between spheres of exchange, or fields in which an object exchanges at different values. Entrepreneurial tactics, such as converting between spheres, call for skills in informal planning, astute use of timing, and networking. These “tactical” skills coexist with “moral” skills, in persuasiveness, the manipulation of norms, and recognition of culturally specific opportunities. The entrepreneur's acts thus create a dialectic of moral (normatively approved) and tactical (instrumentally enacted) changes. The second purpose is a demonstration of methodological implications of ethnographies. Library tales are helpful in the process of “constant comparison” (Glaser and Strauss 1967), by augmenting available, within-site observations with other sources of insight, and of potential disconfirmation of emerging ideas. However, there are limits to the “translation” of library tales. There thus arises a need for observations tailored to specific comparative questions. Multiple site case replication research is suggested for tailoring observations to synchronic, comparative uses. Processual, continuous contextual analysis is suggested for diachronic, intensive followups to such questions as the relationships amongst constraints and individual agency.

Formulation of dynamic theories and process hypotheses is a crucial component in longitudinal research. This paper describes a framework for developing dynamic theory and hypotheses. The procedure require the theorist to address six dimensions of process in each variable: continuity, magnitude of change, rate of change, trend, periodicity and duration. Further, theorists are encouraged to explore the dynamic relations between sets of variables, including rate of change, magnitude of change, lag, and permanence. Consideration is given to the problem of feedback loops. A typology of analytical alternatives for studying dynamic processes and longitudinal research data is provided.

This paper considers how computer-based communication technology, specifically electronic group mail, might affect group behavior in organizations. It proposes a framework for analyzing groups formed by electronic distribution lists. It describes the scope and nature of electronic group mail in one organization, illustrates how members of electronic distribution lists can exhibit fundamental group processes, and compares behavior in different kinds of electronic groups. It suggests that the electronic group at work is a new social phenomenon that may contribute importantly to organizational behavior.

This paper considers the technical problem of analyzing sequences of social events. Examples of such sequences from organizational behavior include organizational life cycles, patterns of innovation development, and career tracks of individuals. The methods considered here enable the analyst to find characteristic patterns in such sequences. Forces shaping those patterns can then be found by more conventional methods. After a brief definitional section, the paper begins by discussing three types of sequence questions: (1) questions about whether a typical sequence or sequences exist, (2) questions about why such patterns might exist, and (3) questions about the consequences of such patterns. The theoretical foundations of the first type of question, which is in fact the most important, are then considered. Having established the legitimacy of the approach here taken, the paper then introduces two exemplary datasets with which to focus discussion. These raise the issue of conceptualization and measurement of sequence data. Illustrative cases are presented to show the importance of extreme care in conceiving a sequence to measure and then choosing indicators for it. The paper then turns to methods proper, considering them in several categories. It first briefly mentions methods not employing “distance measures” between events: permutational techniques, stochastic (e.g., Markov) models, and durational methods. Most of these do not directly address sequence questions but can be used to do so if necessary. Turning to the methods based on event distance, the paper first considers the problem of measuring distance between events (1) in terms of elapsed time, (2) in terms of categories of events, and (3) in terms of observed successions. It then considers methods for unique event sequences (sequences in which no events repeat), proposing the use of multidimensional scaling and illustrating it with an analysis of data on medical organizations. For the separate case of repeating event sequences, the paper discusses optimal matching methods, which count the number of individual transformations required to change one sequence into another. These methods are illustrated by an analysis of data on musicians' careers. The paper then briefly considers the problem of finding subsequences common to several longer sequences (or repeated in one longer sequence). It closes with a discussion of assumptions made and caveats required when these types of methods are used.

Individual attainment within organizational careers, or career mobility, has been explained by individual attributes and by demographic processes. These seemingly unrelated views can be reconciled by suggesting that employees develop a shared perception of their organizations's career hierarchy, and that this shared perception produces systematic managerial selection preferences that influence individual attainment. A study that examines the first part of this process is presented. The results, based on questionnaire data from an electric utility, suggest that managers do develop a shared perception of their organization's career hierarchy. However, managers' perceptions are not unanimous, and the analysis examines two explanations for perceptual variation. The implications of the proposed connection for further development of a multiple-level explanation of individual attainment are discussed.