In our study of an interactive marketing organization, we examine how members of different communities perform boundary-spanning coordination work in conditions of high speed, uncertainty, and rapid change. We find that members engage in a number of cross-boundary coordination practices that make their work visible and legible to each other, and that enable ongoing revision and alignment. Drawing on the notion of a “trading zone,” we suggest that by engaging in these practices, members enact a coordination structure that affords cross-boundary coordination while facilitating adaptability, speed, and learning. We also find that these coordination practices do not eliminate jurisdictional conflicts, and often generate problematic consequences such as the privileging of speed over quality, suppression of difference, loss of comprehension, misinterpretation and ambiguity, rework, and temporal pressure. After discussing our empirical findings, we explore their implications for organizations attempting to operate in the uncertain and rapidly changing contexts of postbureaucratic work.

We integrate the upper-echelons perspective with the attention-based view of the firm by examining the role of attentional orientation of top management teams (TMTs). In the context of airline deregulation, we find that deregulation caused a shift in managerial attention, but that this shift in attention was the greatest for firms that changed the composition and compensation of their TMTs in ways that favored the deregulated regime. We also find that attention partially mediated the relationship between TMT changes and strategy changes. The results of this study shed light on the transformation of industry attention patterns following an environmental shift, and the role of TMT composition and incentive systems in that process.

Acquisition integration is a pivotal factor in determining whether the objectives of an acquisition are achieved. In this paper, we hypothesize that the productivity of corporate scientists of acquired companies is generally impaired by integration, but that some scientists experience more disruption than others. In particular, acquisition integration will be most disruptive, leading to the most severe productivity drops, for those inventors who have lost the most social status and centrality in the combined entity. Drawing from prior literatures on the knowledge-based view of the firm, and on mergers and acquisitions, we develop hypotheses about a concise set of conditions that will lead to substantial performance drops for acquired technical personnel. We test our hypotheses, using patent application data, on a sample of 3,933 inventors in pharmaceutical firms whose companies were acquired. Results are strongly in line with our theorized expectations.

We know that organizations of different but related kinds greatly influence each other’s evolution. Although empirical findings abound, the theories behind them are still being developed. We advance a model of ecological interdependence between emergent and established populations. Our model is based on three main ideas. First, we consider related populations to be those that overlap in identity and resource space and that simultaneously exhibit competitive and mutualistic relationships, the latter leading to legitimacy transfer. Second, we build on the idea that legitimated forms codify prescriptive sanctions for deviations from identity blueprints, and predict that when an emergent population overlaps with an established one in identity space, its early proliferation will manifest violations of established social identities and will trigger prescriptive sanctions. Third, we rely on the notion of a focused identity to argue that organization-level changes affect external perceptions of the population’s collective identity, and hamper legitimacy. Analysis of the survival rates of financial cooperatives in Singapore—a population overlapping the identity and resources of commercial banks—confirms our predictions.