Pub Date : 2023-01-16DOI: 10.1177/00018392221148725
Alexandra Rheinhardt, F. Briscoe, Aparna Joshi
Social activists sometimes engage in a form of workplace activism that involves using their employer organization as an unofficial platform to communicate social issue messages to external stakeholders. This type of activism follows a different logic from that of more-familiar citizen activism, in which citizens directly target society and its institutions, and that of organizational-change activism, in which employees aim to influence their employer organization. This article develops and tests theory to understand this phenomenon of organization-as-platform activism, using the National Football League “Take a Knee” employee athlete protests as an empirical context. Drawing on past research on social movements and employee activism, we offer a theoretical comparison of these three forms of activism—citizen, organizational-change, and organization-as-platform—to conceptually distinguish them and to theorize factors that uniquely predict the occurrence of platform activism. We find evidence of predictors associated with the attributes of the organizational platform and those of the intended stakeholder audience. Organization-as-platform activism is associated with the accessibility and openness of the organizational platform for messaging use, the visibility of the organizational platform for message transmission, and the receptivity of the targeted stakeholder audience. As employees increasingly bring their non-work identities and beliefs into the workplace, our findings invite new research on the outcomes of platform activism for organizations, the implications of such activism for organizational stakeholder strategy, and the relation between platform activism and employee prosocial voice.
{"title":"Organization-as-Platform Activism: Theory and Evidence from the National Football League “Take a Knee” Movement","authors":"Alexandra Rheinhardt, F. Briscoe, Aparna Joshi","doi":"10.1177/00018392221148725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221148725","url":null,"abstract":"Social activists sometimes engage in a form of workplace activism that involves using their employer organization as an unofficial platform to communicate social issue messages to external stakeholders. This type of activism follows a different logic from that of more-familiar citizen activism, in which citizens directly target society and its institutions, and that of organizational-change activism, in which employees aim to influence their employer organization. This article develops and tests theory to understand this phenomenon of organization-as-platform activism, using the National Football League “Take a Knee” employee athlete protests as an empirical context. Drawing on past research on social movements and employee activism, we offer a theoretical comparison of these three forms of activism—citizen, organizational-change, and organization-as-platform—to conceptually distinguish them and to theorize factors that uniquely predict the occurrence of platform activism. We find evidence of predictors associated with the attributes of the organizational platform and those of the intended stakeholder audience. Organization-as-platform activism is associated with the accessibility and openness of the organizational platform for messaging use, the visibility of the organizational platform for message transmission, and the receptivity of the targeted stakeholder audience. As employees increasingly bring their non-work identities and beliefs into the workplace, our findings invite new research on the outcomes of platform activism for organizations, the implications of such activism for organizational stakeholder strategy, and the relation between platform activism and employee prosocial voice.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41329793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-11DOI: 10.1177/00018392221145965
Wei Xia, H. Steensma, Xiaoou Bai
We explore the interplay between homophilic preferences, reciprocity, and societal values in the formation of venture capital investment syndicates in China. Both Chinese and U.S. syndicate lead firms generally prefer including their fellow compatriot firms over comparable non-compatriots in the investment syndicates that they assemble. When a Chinese firm initiates a collaborative first move by including a U.S. firm in an investment syndicate, however, the U.S. firm no longer prefers comparably familiar U.S. firms over the Chinese firm when it subsequently chooses among prospective syndicate partner firms to include in its investment syndicates. In such cases, familiarity triggers impartiality; the experiential trust that was garnered from the collaborative first-move engagement initiated by the Chinese firm diminishes the nationality-based homophilic preferences of the U.S. firm. We do not find similar dynamics when the tables are turned. When a U.S. firm initiates a collaborative first move by including a Chinese firm in an investment syndicate, the Chinese firm subsequently remains partial to fellow compatriot firms that are otherwise comparable to the U.S. firm. The homophilic preferences and identity-based trust between Chinese firms grounded in shared nationality are resilient to any goodwill created by U.S. firms when they initiate collaborative first moves.
{"title":"When Do Collaborative First Moves Diminish Nationality-Based Homophilic Preferences? An Examination of Chinese Venture Capital Investment Syndicates","authors":"Wei Xia, H. Steensma, Xiaoou Bai","doi":"10.1177/00018392221145965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221145965","url":null,"abstract":"We explore the interplay between homophilic preferences, reciprocity, and societal values in the formation of venture capital investment syndicates in China. Both Chinese and U.S. syndicate lead firms generally prefer including their fellow compatriot firms over comparable non-compatriots in the investment syndicates that they assemble. When a Chinese firm initiates a collaborative first move by including a U.S. firm in an investment syndicate, however, the U.S. firm no longer prefers comparably familiar U.S. firms over the Chinese firm when it subsequently chooses among prospective syndicate partner firms to include in its investment syndicates. In such cases, familiarity triggers impartiality; the experiential trust that was garnered from the collaborative first-move engagement initiated by the Chinese firm diminishes the nationality-based homophilic preferences of the U.S. firm. We do not find similar dynamics when the tables are turned. When a U.S. firm initiates a collaborative first move by including a Chinese firm in an investment syndicate, the Chinese firm subsequently remains partial to fellow compatriot firms that are otherwise comparable to the U.S. firm. The homophilic preferences and identity-based trust between Chinese firms grounded in shared nationality are resilient to any goodwill created by U.S. firms when they initiate collaborative first moves.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41660748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-11DOI: 10.1177/00018392221143762
Heejung Byun, Joseph Raffiee
Existing theories offer conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between career specialization and labor market outcomes. While some scholars argue it is better for workers to specialize and focus on one area, others argue it is advantageous for workers to diversify and compile experience across multiple work domains. We attempt to reconcile these competing perspectives by developing a theory highlighting the voluntary versus involuntary nature of worker–firm separations as a theoretical contingency that alters the relative advantages and disadvantages associated with specialized versus generalized careers. Our theory is rooted in the notion that the characteristics of involuntary worker–firm separations (i.e., job displacement) simultaneously amplify the disadvantages associated with specialized careers and the advantages associated with generalized careers, thereby giving displaced generalists a relative advantage over displaced specialists. We find support for our theory in the context of U.S. congressional staffing, using administrative employment records and a regression discontinuity identification strategy that exploits quasi-random staffer displacement resulting from narrowly decided congressional reelection bids. Our theoretical contingency is further supported in supplemental regressions where correlational evidence suggests that while specialists tend to be relatively penalized in the labor market after involuntary separations, specialists appear to be relatively privileged when separations are plausibly voluntary.
{"title":"Career Specialization, Involuntary Worker–Firm Separations, and Employment Outcomes: Why Generalists Outperform Specialists When Their Jobs Are Displaced","authors":"Heejung Byun, Joseph Raffiee","doi":"10.1177/00018392221143762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221143762","url":null,"abstract":"Existing theories offer conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between career specialization and labor market outcomes. While some scholars argue it is better for workers to specialize and focus on one area, others argue it is advantageous for workers to diversify and compile experience across multiple work domains. We attempt to reconcile these competing perspectives by developing a theory highlighting the voluntary versus involuntary nature of worker–firm separations as a theoretical contingency that alters the relative advantages and disadvantages associated with specialized versus generalized careers. Our theory is rooted in the notion that the characteristics of involuntary worker–firm separations (i.e., job displacement) simultaneously amplify the disadvantages associated with specialized careers and the advantages associated with generalized careers, thereby giving displaced generalists a relative advantage over displaced specialists. We find support for our theory in the context of U.S. congressional staffing, using administrative employment records and a regression discontinuity identification strategy that exploits quasi-random staffer displacement resulting from narrowly decided congressional reelection bids. Our theoretical contingency is further supported in supplemental regressions where correlational evidence suggests that while specialists tend to be relatively penalized in the labor market after involuntary separations, specialists appear to be relatively privileged when separations are plausibly voluntary.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49329268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-14DOI: 10.1177/00018392221143779
Yuan Shi
This article examines whether intermediaries and consumers exert similar influence on producers’ boundary-spanning efforts. I propose that boundary spanning is primarily constrained by intermediaries specialized in the market, not by consumers. Consequently, producers are more likely to obscure boundaries when intermediaries’ power weakens. To test these ideas, I exploit a natural experiment that shifted the hitmaking power of genre-specific radio stations to general consumers and thus partially democratized the market mediation structure of the U.S. commercial music industry. The results indicate that after democratization occurred in 2012, record labels were more likely to introduce crossover offerings that incorporated features from other popular genres. Through mechanism triangulation efforts, I found that strategic reorientation, or producers’ attempt to appeal to a broader spectrum of consumers across genre lines, plausibly explains the crossover effect. This study highlights democratizing changes that dilute intermediaries’ influence as a novel explanation of why constraints on producers’ boundary decisions have weakened in some markets. The findings suggest that intermediaries’ and consumers’ expectations may diverge, acting as conflicting forces that organizations must carefully manage. Many organizations closely monitor intermediaries that are deemed influential, but their influence should not be taken for granted as marketplaces empower consumers and become more democratized.
{"title":"A Change of Tune: The Democratization of Market Mediation and Crossover Production in the U.S. Commercial Music Industry","authors":"Yuan Shi","doi":"10.1177/00018392221143779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221143779","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines whether intermediaries and consumers exert similar influence on producers’ boundary-spanning efforts. I propose that boundary spanning is primarily constrained by intermediaries specialized in the market, not by consumers. Consequently, producers are more likely to obscure boundaries when intermediaries’ power weakens. To test these ideas, I exploit a natural experiment that shifted the hitmaking power of genre-specific radio stations to general consumers and thus partially democratized the market mediation structure of the U.S. commercial music industry. The results indicate that after democratization occurred in 2012, record labels were more likely to introduce crossover offerings that incorporated features from other popular genres. Through mechanism triangulation efforts, I found that strategic reorientation, or producers’ attempt to appeal to a broader spectrum of consumers across genre lines, plausibly explains the crossover effect. This study highlights democratizing changes that dilute intermediaries’ influence as a novel explanation of why constraints on producers’ boundary decisions have weakened in some markets. The findings suggest that intermediaries’ and consumers’ expectations may diverge, acting as conflicting forces that organizations must carefully manage. Many organizations closely monitor intermediaries that are deemed influential, but their influence should not be taken for granted as marketplaces empower consumers and become more democratized.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48230540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-10DOI: 10.1177/00018392221139296
Olga M. Khessina
{"title":"Giacomo Negro and Michael T. Hannan with Susan Olzak. Wine Markets: Genres and Identities","authors":"Olga M. Khessina","doi":"10.1177/00018392221139296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221139296","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41925573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-10DOI: 10.1177/00018392221139289
Devika Narayan
{"title":"Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen. Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It","authors":"Devika Narayan","doi":"10.1177/00018392221139289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221139289","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41982134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-10DOI: 10.1177/00018392221140174
Mark J. Zbaracki
More than 20 years ago, David Stark (2000: 2; see also Stark, 2009) identified what he called ‘‘Parsons’s Pact,’’ a tacit agreement that Talcott Parsons had made with economists: ‘‘you, economists, study value; we, the sociologists, will study values. You will have claim on the economy, we will stake our claim on the social relations in which economies are embedded.’’ That implicit division of labor preserved Parsons’s imperial ambitions for sociology by bracketing the hegemony of economics. But, Stark argued, it also increasingly constrained economic sociologists to examining embedded social relations, whereas they should treat the economy as a social phenomenon. Only by dropping Parsons’s Pact could economic sociology realize its potential. These two edited volumes are a measure of how far the discipline has come in escaping that pact. Both claim value and competition—two concepts at the heart of economics—as sociological phenomena. In Competition: What It Is and Why It Happens, Arora-Jonsson, Brunsson, and Hasse stake a firm claim in Chapter 1: ‘‘Rather than seeing competition as being within the purview of economics, we argue that it should be considered along with such other master trends as individualization and rationalization’’ (p. 5). The Performance Complex takes a more expansive approach with its claim, examining what Stark calls ‘‘a performance society: a society saturated with performances of many and various kinds, with a wide range of attendant capacities, techniques, and creativities—but also anxieties’’ (p. 1). Stark’s edited volume shows how value is performed through competitions and contests, rankings and ratings, and measurements and metrics. Meanwhile, Competition offers a program for research, parsing competition into four elements: actors, relationships, desire, and scarcity (p. 6). That structure is valuable; it provides a framework for exploring how competition originates in and brings meaning to different sectors of society. While the two volumes take different routes through their explorations of competition, together they take us directly into the study of value that economic sociologists had so long avoided.
{"title":"The Beauty of Competition?","authors":"Mark J. Zbaracki","doi":"10.1177/00018392221140174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221140174","url":null,"abstract":"More than 20 years ago, David Stark (2000: 2; see also Stark, 2009) identified what he called ‘‘Parsons’s Pact,’’ a tacit agreement that Talcott Parsons had made with economists: ‘‘you, economists, study value; we, the sociologists, will study values. You will have claim on the economy, we will stake our claim on the social relations in which economies are embedded.’’ That implicit division of labor preserved Parsons’s imperial ambitions for sociology by bracketing the hegemony of economics. But, Stark argued, it also increasingly constrained economic sociologists to examining embedded social relations, whereas they should treat the economy as a social phenomenon. Only by dropping Parsons’s Pact could economic sociology realize its potential. These two edited volumes are a measure of how far the discipline has come in escaping that pact. Both claim value and competition—two concepts at the heart of economics—as sociological phenomena. In Competition: What It Is and Why It Happens, Arora-Jonsson, Brunsson, and Hasse stake a firm claim in Chapter 1: ‘‘Rather than seeing competition as being within the purview of economics, we argue that it should be considered along with such other master trends as individualization and rationalization’’ (p. 5). The Performance Complex takes a more expansive approach with its claim, examining what Stark calls ‘‘a performance society: a society saturated with performances of many and various kinds, with a wide range of attendant capacities, techniques, and creativities—but also anxieties’’ (p. 1). Stark’s edited volume shows how value is performed through competitions and contests, rankings and ratings, and measurements and metrics. Meanwhile, Competition offers a program for research, parsing competition into four elements: actors, relationships, desire, and scarcity (p. 6). That structure is valuable; it provides a framework for exploring how competition originates in and brings meaning to different sectors of society. While the two volumes take different routes through their explorations of competition, together they take us directly into the study of value that economic sociologists had so long avoided.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44065217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1177/00018392221137681
V. Zhang, Aharon Mohliver, M. King
The misuse of prescription drugs is a pressing public health crisis in the United States that is fueled by high-risk prescribing. We show that high-risk prescribing comprises two distinct practices: (1) routinely overprescribing to patients whose prescription-fill patterns are consistent with misuse or abuse, which conforms to the definition of deviance in sociology, and (2) routinely overprescribing to patients whose prescription-fill patterns are within possible bounds of medical use, which does not. We call the second practice “liminal prescribing,” a term that indicates it is legally and morally ambiguous. Using 213.9 million prescriptions to construct a four-year panel of the patient-sharing networks of 500,472 physicians, we find that deviant and liminal prescribers have starkly different social network structures and social influence processes; larger and more cohesive networks among prescribers are associated with more deviance but less liminality. Physicians’ ties to liminal prescribers increase liminal prescribing but do not increase deviance. Our results suggest that liminal prescribing is distinct from deviant prescribing and is not a milder form of deviant prescribing. Liminal prescribing is far more prevalent than deviance and accounts for most of the oversupplied benzodiazepines in our dataset (55.8 versus 8.7 percent, respectively). Our study highlights that the social structures supporting liminal practices differ from those that support either rule-abiding practices or deviance.
{"title":"Where Is All the Deviance? Liminal Prescribing and the Social Networks Underlying the Prescription Drug Crisis","authors":"V. Zhang, Aharon Mohliver, M. King","doi":"10.1177/00018392221137681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221137681","url":null,"abstract":"The misuse of prescription drugs is a pressing public health crisis in the United States that is fueled by high-risk prescribing. We show that high-risk prescribing comprises two distinct practices: (1) routinely overprescribing to patients whose prescription-fill patterns are consistent with misuse or abuse, which conforms to the definition of deviance in sociology, and (2) routinely overprescribing to patients whose prescription-fill patterns are within possible bounds of medical use, which does not. We call the second practice “liminal prescribing,” a term that indicates it is legally and morally ambiguous. Using 213.9 million prescriptions to construct a four-year panel of the patient-sharing networks of 500,472 physicians, we find that deviant and liminal prescribers have starkly different social network structures and social influence processes; larger and more cohesive networks among prescribers are associated with more deviance but less liminality. Physicians’ ties to liminal prescribers increase liminal prescribing but do not increase deviance. Our results suggest that liminal prescribing is distinct from deviant prescribing and is not a milder form of deviant prescribing. Liminal prescribing is far more prevalent than deviance and accounts for most of the oversupplied benzodiazepines in our dataset (55.8 versus 8.7 percent, respectively). Our study highlights that the social structures supporting liminal practices differ from those that support either rule-abiding practices or deviance.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43315887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-28DOI: 10.1177/00018392221136267
J. Clement
I develop and test a theory that explains why organizations may struggle to adapt in the face of change even when their members are aware of change, are motivated to adapt, and have the resources to do so. I build on complex-systems theory, which posits that organizations face a hierarchy of interdependent problems: they must choose how to fulfill different specialized tasks and choose processes to integrate the outputs of these tasks. Because these choices are interdependent, environmental change that directly affects only a few tasks in isolation can indirectly affect the viability of major organizational processes. Recognizing these ripple effects is difficult, however: understanding complex interdependencies is challenging for decision makers, and the division of labor within organizations can create an illusion of separability between tasks. As a result, organizations may respond to such change by engaging in “modular search” for new ways to fulfill specialized tasks, but they may fail to engage in “systemic search” for new processes integrating the outputs of specialized tasks unless they can rely on information-processing structures that help decision makers better understand interdependencies among choices. I test my theory by applying sequence analysis methods to micro-level behavioral data on competitive video gaming (esports) teams. Qualitative fieldwork and an online experiment provide additional evidence of my proposed mechanisms.
{"title":"Missing the Forest for the Trees: Modular Search and Systemic Inertia as a Response to Environmental Change","authors":"J. Clement","doi":"10.1177/00018392221136267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221136267","url":null,"abstract":"I develop and test a theory that explains why organizations may struggle to adapt in the face of change even when their members are aware of change, are motivated to adapt, and have the resources to do so. I build on complex-systems theory, which posits that organizations face a hierarchy of interdependent problems: they must choose how to fulfill different specialized tasks and choose processes to integrate the outputs of these tasks. Because these choices are interdependent, environmental change that directly affects only a few tasks in isolation can indirectly affect the viability of major organizational processes. Recognizing these ripple effects is difficult, however: understanding complex interdependencies is challenging for decision makers, and the division of labor within organizations can create an illusion of separability between tasks. As a result, organizations may respond to such change by engaging in “modular search” for new ways to fulfill specialized tasks, but they may fail to engage in “systemic search” for new processes integrating the outputs of specialized tasks unless they can rely on information-processing structures that help decision makers better understand interdependencies among choices. I test my theory by applying sequence analysis methods to micro-level behavioral data on competitive video gaming (esports) teams. Qualitative fieldwork and an online experiment provide additional evidence of my proposed mechanisms.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42795906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-23DOI: 10.1177/00018392221137289
Stoyan V. Sgourev, E. Aadland, Giovanni Formilan
Color is omnipresent, but organizational research features no systematic theory or established method for analyzing it. We develop a relational approach to color, conceptualizing it as a means of positioning relative to a reference group or style and validating it through a computational method for processing digital images. The research context is Norwegian black metal—a genre of extreme metal music that achieved notoriety in the early 1990s through band members’ criminal activity. Our analysis of 5,125 album covers between 1989 and 2019 confirms the alignment of aesthetic and music features and articulates the role of color in the construction of a relational identity based on forces of association and disassociation. Black metal bands associated with past color choices of non-black metal bands up to a point, after which they started to disassociate from them. The positioning is dynamic, pursuing adaptation to external events. Black metal bands reacted to their stigmatization in Norwegian society by increasing colorfulness and later returning to a darker aesthetic in defiance of the genre’s commercialization. Our analysis attests to color’s ability to organize producers’ exchange of information and attention, illustrating the interweaving of aesthetic features and relational processes in markets.
{"title":"Relations in Aesthetic Space: How Color Enables Market Positioning","authors":"Stoyan V. Sgourev, E. Aadland, Giovanni Formilan","doi":"10.1177/00018392221137289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221137289","url":null,"abstract":"Color is omnipresent, but organizational research features no systematic theory or established method for analyzing it. We develop a relational approach to color, conceptualizing it as a means of positioning relative to a reference group or style and validating it through a computational method for processing digital images. The research context is Norwegian black metal—a genre of extreme metal music that achieved notoriety in the early 1990s through band members’ criminal activity. Our analysis of 5,125 album covers between 1989 and 2019 confirms the alignment of aesthetic and music features and articulates the role of color in the construction of a relational identity based on forces of association and disassociation. Black metal bands associated with past color choices of non-black metal bands up to a point, after which they started to disassociate from them. The positioning is dynamic, pursuing adaptation to external events. Black metal bands reacted to their stigmatization in Norwegian society by increasing colorfulness and later returning to a darker aesthetic in defiance of the genre’s commercialization. Our analysis attests to color’s ability to organize producers’ exchange of information and attention, illustrating the interweaving of aesthetic features and relational processes in markets.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44203770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：