Working Papers

This paper examines whether protest associated with the “long protest wave” of the 1960s and 1970s positively influenced private-sector union support. Past research has found no such influence. We use measures designed to more closely represent…

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry surplus in one division generates large spillovers on managerial payoffs in other divisions of the same firm. These spillovers arise only within…

This paper discusses the phenomenon of “built to become:” an open-ended ongoing process for which there is no grand ex ante plan possible and which unfolds through a series of transformations in the course of the strategic evolution of…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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)…

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…

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,…

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…

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…