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SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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A Dynamic Process Model of Private Politics: Activist Targeting and Corporate Receptivity to Social Challenges
This project explores whether and how corporations become more receptive to social activist challenges over time. Drawing from social movement theory, we suggest a dynamic process through which contentious interactions lead to increased…
Organizational Knowledge and Technological Change
It is known that organizations benefit from stability, but that they often are compelled to change by circumstances. We argue that the relationship between organizational stability and change hinges on a key…
Conflicting Social Codes and Organizations: Hygiene and Authenticity in Consumer Evaluations of Restaurants
Organization theory highlights the spread of norms of rationality in contemporary life. Yet rationality does not always spread without friction; individuals often act based on other beliefs and norms. We explore this problem in the context of…
Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future
Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploitto compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new…
Category Signaling and Reputation
We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality when low-quality producers face higher costs of gaining membership. The strength of membership as a collective signal increases with the distinctiveness, or…
The Economic Evaluation of Time: Organizational Causes and Individual Consequences
People acquire ways of thinking about time partly in and from work organizations, where the control and measurement of time use is a prominent feature of modern management an inevitable consequence of employees selling their time for money. In…
The Effect of Income on the Importance of Money: Survey and Experimental Evidence
The authors investigate how both the amount and source of income affects the importance placed on money using a longitudinal analysis of the British Household Panel Survey and evidence from two laboratory experiments. Larger amounts of money…
Toward an Ecology of Market Categories
This paper proposes that social categorization is driven by an ecological dynamic that operates in two planes: feature space and category space. It develops a theoretical model that links positions in feature space to label assignments in…
Women in the Boardroom: Symbols or Substance?
The central argument for increasing the number of women on corporate boards of directors has been the so-called business case for diversity which proposes that women and minorities add valuable new perspectives that result in enhanced corporate…
Bridging History and Reductionism: A Key Role for Longitudinal Qualitative Research
Longitudinal qualitative research combining grounded theorizing and insights from modern historical methods can generate novel conceptual frameworks that establish theoretical bridges between historical narratives and reductionist quantitative…
Category Spanning, Distance, and Appeal
A general finding in economic and organizational sociology states that producers and products that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that to assess the consequences of category spanning researchers need to take account…
Drifting Tastes, Inertia, and Organizational Viability
Why do organizations generally lose their competitive edge as they get older? Recent theory and research on the dynamics of audiences and categories in markets sheds some new light on issues of organizational obsolescence.
Evidence-Based Management for Entrepreneurial Environments: Faster and Better Decisions with Less Risk
Entrepreneurship is risky. Most new technologies and new businesses fail. Shane (2008) reported that 25% of new businesses failed in the first year and that by the fifth year, fewer than half had survived. In the United Kingdom, Stark (2001)…
On the Dynamics of Organizational Mortality: Age-Dependence Revisited
This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to model the dynamics of organizational mortality. The main theoretical contribution is a clarification of the relations between organizational fitness, endowment, organizational capital and…
Time Is Tight: How Higher Economic Value of Time Increases Feelings of Time Pressure
The common heuristic association between scarcity and value implies that more valuable things appear scarcer (King, Hicks, & Abdelkhalik, 2009), an effect we show applies to time. In a series of studies we find that both income and wealth,…
Toward Electric Cars and Clean Coal: A Comparative Analysis of Strategies and Strategy-Making in the U.S. and China
The Bass seminars at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business offer faculty and small groups of students the opportunity to interact in highly focused and intense ways on research topics of common interest. Our S373 Bass seminar…
Leadership Development in Business Schools: An Agenda For Change
There is surprisingly little evaluation of business school or, for that matter, company leadership development efforts. What evidence exists suggests that business schools have not been particularly effective, overall, in their leadership…
Modal Constructions in Sociological Arguments
This paper introduces modal logics to a sociological audience. We first provide an overview of the formal properties of this family of models and outline key differences with classical first-order logic. We then build a model to represent…
Prigogine‘s Theory of the Dynamics of Far-From-Equilibrium Systems Informs the Role of Strategy-Making in Organizational Evolution
This paper offers a perspective on how Ilya Prigogine‘s theoretical ideas rooted in the physical sciences can inform and inspire organization theory and strategic management scholars. To that end, the next section of this paper provides a brief…
The Drive Toward the Electric Mile - A Proposal for a Minimum Winning Game
The paper reports the research done in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business 2008 Bass Seminar Strategic Thinking in Action - In Business and Beyond: The United States Quest for Energy Resilience, taught by Professors Robert A.…