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"ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCES"
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Ties That Last: Tie Formation and Persistence in Research Collaborations over Time
Using a longitudinal dataset of research collaborations over 15 years at Stanford University, we build a theory of intraorganizational task relationships that distinguishes the different factors associated with the formation and persistence of network ties. We highlight six factors: shared organizational foci, shared traits and interests, tie advantages from popularity, tie reinforcement from third parties, tie strength and multiplexity, and the instrumental returns from the products of ties. Findings suggest that ties form when unfamiliar people identify desirable and matching traits in potential partners. By contrast, ties persist when familiar people reflect on the quality of their relationship and shared experiences. The former calls for shallow, short-term strategies for assessing a broad array of potential ties; the latter calls for long-term strategies and substantive assessments of a relationship's worth so as to draw extended rewards from the association. This suggests that organizational activities geared toward sustaining persistent intraorganizational task relationships need to be different from activities aimed at forging new ones.
Journal Article
Socioemotional Wealth and Business Risks in Family-Controlled Firms: Evidence from Spanish Olive Oil Mills
This paper challenges the prevalent notion that family-owned firms are more risk averse than publicly owned firms. Using behavioral theory, we argue that for family firms, the primary reference point is the loss of their socioemotional wealth, and to avoid those losses, family firms are willing to accept a significant risk to their performance; yet at the same time, they avoid risky business decisions that might aggravate that risk. Thus, we propose that the predictions of behavioral theory differ depending on family ownership. We confirm our hypotheses using a population of 1,237 family-owned olive oil mills in Southern Spain who faced the choice during a 54-year period of becoming a member of a cooperative, a decision associated with loss of family control but lower business risk, or remaining independent, which preserves the family's socioemotional wealth but greatly increases its performance hazard. As shown in this study, family firms may be risk willing and risk averse at the same time.
Journal Article
Two Sides of the Same Coin: How Ambiguous Classification Affects Multiple Audiences' Evaluations
This paper questions findings indicating that when organizations are hard to classify they will suffer in terms of external evaluations. Here, I suggest this depends on the audience evaluating the organization. Audiences that are \"market-takers\" consume or evaluate goods and use market labels to find and assess organizations; for them, ambiguous labels make organizations unclear and therefore less appealing. \"Market-makers\" are interested in redefining the market structure, and as a result, this type of audience sees the same ambiguity as flexible and therefore more appealing. I tested these ideas in a longitudinal analysis of U.S. software organizations between 1990 and 2002. As predicted, organizations that claim ambiguous labels are less appealing to consumers, an audience of market-takers, but more appealing to venture capitalists, who are market-makers. Further, when labels are ambiguous, aversion to or preference for ambiguity arises from the label itself. Identifying with multiple ambiguous labels does not make an organization even less appealing to a consumer or more appealing to a venture capitalist. Finally, all types of venture capitalists are not alike in how they react to a label's ambiguity. Independent venture capitalists act as market-makers and prefer organizations with ambiguous labels, while corporate venture capitalists act as market-takers and avoid them.
Journal Article
The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-Edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work
A qualitative examination of work meaning in the zookeeping profession pointed to the centrality of the notion of work as a personal calling. The view of calling expressed by zookeepers, however, was closer in basic structure to the classical conceptualization of the Protestant reformers than it was to more recent formulations. We used qualitative data from interviews with U.S. zookeepers to develop hypotheses about the implications of this neoclassical conceptualization of calling for the relationship between individuals and their work. We found that a neoclassical calling is both binding and ennobling. On one hand, zookeepers with a sense of calling strongly identified with and found broader meaning and significance in their work and occupation. On the other hand, they were more likely to see their work as a moral duty, to sacrifice pay, personal time, and comfort for their work, and to hold their zoo to a higher standard. Results of a survey of zookeepers from 157 different zoos in the U.S. and Canada supported the hypotheses from our emergent theory. These results reveal the ways in which deeply meaningful work can become a double-edged sword.
Journal Article
Networks, Propinquity, and Innovation in Knowledge-Intensive Industries
Industrial districts and regional clusters depend on the networks that arise from reciprocal linkages among co-located organizations, while physical proximity among firms can alter the nature of information and resource flows through networks. We consider the joint effects of geographic propinquity and network position on organizational innovation using negative binomial count models of patenting activity for U.S.-based life science firms in industrial districts and regional clusters across a 12-year time period, 1988–1999. We find evidence that regional agglomeration and network centrality exert complementary, but contingent, influences on organizational innovation. Results show that in the high-velocity, research-intensive field of biotechnology, geographic and network positions have both independent and contingent effects on organizational innovation. The influence of centrality in local, physically co-located partner networks depends on the extent to which firms are also embedded in a global network comprising physically distant partners. Such global centrality, however, alters how proximity to two important classes of organization—other biotechnology firms and public sector research organizations, such as universities, research institutes, and teaching hospitals—influences innovation. Regional agglomeration shapes the character of information and resource flows through networks, while much of what makes industrial clusters region-like involves the structure of their internal networks. We conclude that network effects persist both independently and interdependently with geographic variables, and regional characteristics influence the degree to which centrality enhances innovation.
Journal Article
Globalizing Public Administration: Today's Research and Tomorrow's Agenda
What is the rehtionship between public administration scholarship and the study of developing countries? This article answers this question by presenting the intellectual history of administrative studies of the global South and by examining recent empirical studies of developing country administration. The results suggest that administrative research on the developing world published in leading international publications has become a small-scale, disparate, descriptive, qualitative, and noncomparative subfield dominated by researchers from the global North. This empirical finding provides a platform to end a false North-South administrative dichotomy and advance a vision for public administration as a global social science.
Journal Article
Creating Something from Nothing: Resource Construction through Entrepreneurial Bricolage
A field study of 29 resource-constrained firms that varied dramatically in their responses to similar objective environments is used to examine the process by which entrepreneurs in resource-poor environments were able to render unique services by recombining elements at hand for new purposes that challenged institutional definitions and limits. We found that Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage-making do with what is at hand-explained many of the behaviors we observed in small firms that were able to create something from nothing by exploiting physical, social, or institutional inputs that other firms rejected or ignored. We demonstrate the socially constructed nature of resource environments and the role of bricolage in this construction. Using our field data and the existing literature on bricolage, we advance a formal definition of entrepreneurial bricolage and induce the beginnings of a process model of bricolage and firm growth. Central to our contribution is the notion that companies engaging in bricolage refuse to enact the limitations imposed by dominant definitions of resource environments, suggesting that, for understanding entrepreneurial behavior, a constructivist approach to resource environments is more fruitful than objectivist views.
Journal Article
How Entrepreneurs Use Symbolic Management to Acquire Resources
Results of a two-year inductive field study of British ventures show that entrepreneurs are more likely to acquire resources for new ventures if they perform symbolic actions--actions in which the actor displays or tries to draw other people's attention to the meaning of an object or action that goes beyond the object's or action's intrinsic content or functional use. We identify four symbolic action categories that facilitate resource acquisition: conveying the entrepreneur's personal credibility, professional organizing, organizational achievement, and the quality of stakeholder relationships. Our data show that entrepreneurs who perform a variety of symbolic actions from these categories skillfully and frequently obtain more resources than those who do not. Our data also suggest three factors--structural similarity, intrinsic quality, and uncertainty--that moderate the relationship between symbolic management and resource acquisition. We theorize how the various symbolic action categories shape different forms of legitimacy that help entrepreneurs acquire resources.
Journal Article
The Network Structure of Exploration and Exploitation
Whether as team members brainstorming or cultures experimenting with new technologies, problem solvers communicate and share ideas. This paper examines how the structure of communication networks among actors can affect system-level performance. We present an agent-based computer simulation model of information sharing in which the less successful emulate the more successful. Results suggest that when agents are dealing with a complex problem, the more efficient the network at disseminating information, the better the short-run but the lower the long-run performance of the system. The dynamic underlying this result is that an inefficient network maintains diversity in the system and is thus better for exploration than an efficient network, supporting a more thorough search for solutions in the long run. For intermediate time frames, there is an inverted-U relationship between connectedness and performance, in which both poorly and well-connected systems perform badly, and moderately connected systems perform best. This curvilinear relationship between connectivity and group performance can be seen in several diverse instances of organizational and social behavior.
Journal Article