Riitta Katila, Assistant Professor, Department of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford
Effects of search timing on product innovation: The value of not being in sync (with Eric Chen)
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on how firms time their search for new products. In contrast with the traditional firm-centric view, we study how the timing of innovative firms depends on that of their competitors. Using 15 years of longitudinal data on 71 Japanese, European, and American industrial automation organizations, we find that innovative firms search early or late, but not in sync with competitors. Moreover, those that are the most innovative combine the two, and search early and late. Our findings also show that late movers are especially innovative when they wait to learn from competitors what not to do, yet move fast enough before all opportunities are exploited. Early movers are innovative when their competitors are slow to catch up. The results also show that the effects of timing vary with organizational form: focused firms are successful when they search early, and diversified firms when they search late. Our findings have implications for theories of search, resources, and
inter-organizational learning. 
Liisa Valikangas, Managing Director, Woodside Institute;Visiting Associate Professor, London Business School
The Adventures of Inventive Experimentation Inside Companies - The Case of Best Buy
ABSTRACT
This is a call for management scholars to participate in the invention and experimentation of (new) management practice. The call is founded on the premises that such inventive experimentation would bring scholars and practitioners closer, into more mutually impactful collaboration. Inventive experimentation would add variety to management practice, fighting the industry tendency to copy "best" or standard practices without regard to their underlying assumptions, and perhaps in the process, contribute to addressing some of the emerging, major managerial challenges. I would support the serendipitous discovery of the new while allowing the (creative) application of existing knowledge. Much like engineering laboratories experiment with physical inventions, scholar-inventors, together with willing executives, could help revise the selection set of emergent and dominant management practices and potentially accelerate the pace at which management evolves. In this article, I begin to sketch methodological premises and institutional conditions for inventive experimentation as a management innovation laboratory and offer a work-in-progress example.
Stefan Jonsson, Jan Wallander Post Doctoral Fellow, Stockholm School of Economics and GEMS/Uppsala University; Visiting Scholar, Scancor
Profit as a Social Problem: Media Reframing of Product Evaluation Criteria in a Financial Market (with Helena Buhr)
ABSTRACT
Can an industry be too profitable for its own good? We argue that being perceived as too profitable in its social context can challenge the socio-political legitimacy of an industry, which in turn may have consequences for its market structure. We illustrate how this can happen
by tracking the development of a legitimacy challenge to the Swedish mutual fund industry. Drawing on the perspective of markets as institutions, we develop hypotheses that link media and aggregated consumer behavior to changes in the market. We test the hypotheses using longitudinal data on investment flows in the Swedish market for mutual funds. By showing an interaction effect between media framing of the industry and the aggregate consumer behavior, we illustrate a sub-regulatory manner in which institutional changes can take place in markets. We discuss implications for organization theory and strategic management theory.
Dick Scott, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Stanford
Changing Contours of Organizations and Organization Theory
ABSTRACT
The kinds of changes that organizations have undergone over the years suggest the need to consider the ways in which organizational theories are challenged by changes in the nature of the object we study. Our discussion of these forces in this chapter is governed by two overriding assumptions: (1) we embrace a “post-positivist” view of science; and (2) we recognize the power of the past to shape and inform our own efforts. 
Kostas Karantininis, Research Professor, KVL, Copenhagen and Visiting Scholar, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
The Network Form of the Cooperative Organization: An illustration with the Danish Pork Industry
ABSTRACT
Cooperative organizations may develop networks, in order to reduce transaction costs, to facilitate knowledge transfer and exchange of resources, and be competitive. The pork industry in Denmark evolved along a path of cooperation and networking. The evolution is path-dependent with roots in the Grundtvig and the folkehojskole movement in the late 1800's. Today, the Danish pork industry is characterized by three levels of networks, beyond the family farm: the primary cooperative, the federated structure and the policy network. All four levels are interlinked via a nexus of director interlocks.
Hokyu Hwang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Social Innovation, Graduate School of Business, Stanford
Professionalization of Nonprofit Management
ABSTRACT
Professionalization exists in many guises. In the nonprofit sector, in which both volunteer and paid staffs are engaged in service delivery, the most fundamental aspect of professionalization is the presence of paid personnel and management. As in other sectors, nonprofits rely on credentialed professionals in substantive areas and, increasingly, in management to achieve their missions. Nonprofits also attempt to develop necessary skills in both substantive and managerial areas to improve their work and organizations. Using a random sample of 200 501(c)(3) organizations drawn from the population of a regional nonprofit sector representing the whole spectrum of activities and mission, I analyze how these different dimensions of professionalization are associated with formal, rationalized organizational practices: strategic planning, independent financial audit, and quantitative program evaluation. The results show that the presence of paid personnel and management is consistently and strongly associated with the three practices. Strategic planning seems to be driven primarily by external linkages as the credentialism and professional development variables show no significant effects. Nonprofits managed by organizational or substantive professionals are more likely to have independent financial audit and quantitative programs evaluation although the presence of organizational professionals had a stronger and more robust effect. Professional development in substantive areas is not significantly associated with formal organizational practices. On the other hand, management training has a significant effect on independent financial audit, but not on quantitative program evaluation. 
Peter Walgenbach, Professsor, Organization Theory and Management, Faculty of Economics, Law, and the Social Sciences, University of Erfurt
There’s Life in the Old Dog yet! Persistence of De-legitimated Behavior: Hierarchical Structures of Communication in a Network Organization
ABSTRACT
According to the rhetoric found in the popular management literature, the 1990s were characterized by the demise of bureaucracy, and the emergence of the network organization. A new organizational form – based on anti-bureaucratic principles and on the extensive use of new information technologies – in which hierarchical relationships and traditional office channels were going to be avoided, was under intense discussion as a viable alternative to the traditional bureaucratic organization. However, to de-legitimate an institutionalized organizational form and to actually realize a new one is often easier said than done, since the realization of fundamentally innovative organizational forms has to overcome cultural-cognitive and taken-for-granted beliefs of traditional formal organizations.
In our study, we analyze the intranet communication behavior of the members of a company within the New Economy – a company which was deeply committed to the principles of the network and post-bureaucratic organization. We observe an astonishing split between the symbolic activities for creating a network organization and the actual intranet communication behavior of the members of the organization. In their daily communication, they persistently reproduced hierarchy and office channels, which are elements typically associated with bureaucratic organizations. Thus, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, our findings of the communication behavior show that this particular organization, to all extent and purposes, displayed similar characteristics to those of a traditional bureaucratic organization.
Key words: (Post-)Bureaucratic Organization; Institutional Theory; Social Network Analysis; Information Technology
Claus Rerup, Assistant Professor, Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario
Exploring the gray zone between mindful and less-mindful organizing: Variations in organizational mindfulness and the FDA-quality crisis at Novo Nordisk
ABSTRACT
Using a longitudinal, inductive logic, I explore variations in organizational mindfulness before, during, and after a crisis at Novo Nordisk, a world leader in diabetes care. I examine the factors behind variations in organizational mindfullness across time and how Novo Nordisk responded. My emergent theory sheds light on a 'gray zone' in which organizations are neither completely mindless nor completely mindful. To operationalize the gray zone, I develop six configurations of mindfulness and identify events, processes, and practices that shift Novo Nordisk from one configuration to another by either unraveling or updating the organization's infrastructure of mindfulness. My finds reveal that decreasing levels of mindfulness trigger efforts to restore increasing levels of mindfulness and that sequential shifts among the six configurations create cycles of mindfulness that influence organizational reliability. 
Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Assistant Professor of Sociology, SUNY-Stony Brook; Visiting Professor of Sociology, Stanford
Between the State and Civil Society: Corporate Citizenship and the UN Global Compact (with Alwyn Lim)
ABSTRACT
While many studies have examined the impact of global human rights and environmental activities on government behavior, few researchers have studied the impact on businesses. Corporations are portrayed almost exclusively as violators of human rights and environmental norms in the literature, while their potential as protectors of these norms has often been overlooked. In recent years, many corporations have pledged their commitment to human rights and environmental protection by signing up for the UN initiative called the Global Compact (GC). The rise of the GC and other global initiatives for responsible corporate behavior signals a new era in which corporations become promoters of progressive causes. How does this transformation of rent-seeking economic actors into political good-doers rake place? We seek to understand the national and international factors that push corporations to commit to human rights, environmentalism and corporate responsibility, and present cross-national quantitative data analyses on participation in the GC. The results of zero-inflated negative binomial analyses show strong impact of international pressures and reveal slightly different dynamics involved in soft and hard commitment to principles of the GC. 
Christine Beckman, Assistant Professor, Organization and Strategy, The Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine
Email as an escape to reality in the Navy: Information Technology and the Nature of Total Institutions (with Taryn Stanko)
ABSTRACT
The popular press suggests organizational structures are being dramatically shaped by information technology (IT), yet previous research has not fully addressed the relationship between IT and the organization as a whole. In this paper we examine how an organization and its members use IT in ways that either alter or reinforce key elements of organizational form. We study the relationship between IT and organizational form using interview data from the United States Navy, a total institution (Goffman, 1961). Using a grounded theory approach, we find a combination of organizational and individual responses to email and the internet shape the total institution. Through these responses, the most critical elements of this total institution are revealed: social distance between supervisors and subordinates and clear organizational goals. Other elements that have been seen as critical, such as social isolation, are reduced through IT use yet the total institution remains strong. Overall, Navy policies reinforce the current organizational form. Individual members in turn respond by finding "gray areas" within the organization prescribed framework to meet their own personal and work needs. We suggest that how the organization and its members enact technology will shape organizational form.
Frank Barrett, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey
Honor as a Moral Category: A historico-linguistic analysis (with Theodore Sarbin)
ABSTRACT
Inherited from Medieval practices, the virtue of honor was seen as core to establishing individual identity. We have retained vestiges of the concept in a few titles (such as the judicial hierarchy) and institutional practices (such as honor codes and honor systems). Within this context, honor ties identity to institutional status, often expressed through symbols of power, wealth, prowess, and titles. In this essay, we trace the transformations of meanings of “honor” in different cultures through history, how moral categories and notions of self identity are related and how they have evolved. We propose that “honor” was initially an exclusively extrinsic conception equivalent to reputation and social status and later emerged as a moral category independent of external reference. We posit historical events that may have facilitated the shift in meaning from reputation and status to that of a moral compass. We focus on honor as used in Western cultures and offer two illustrations of uses of “honor” as a moral construct.
John Meyer, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, Stanford University
World Society and the Proliferation of Formal Organization
ABSTRACT
The paper is a "theory" chapter from a forthcoming collection on Globalization and Organizations, edited by Gili Drori, John Meyer, and Hokyu Hwang. The focus is on explaining the general expansion of "organization" in the world in the post-War period. The argument is that political, social, and economic globalization during the period, in a context of world statelessness, weakened the sovereign authority of the nation state and created a good deal of disciplining global culture: massive scientization, all sorts of social rationalization, and a great deal of stress on the capacities and rights of individuals seen as "actors." A main outcome has been the enormous expansion of organization -- seen also as actorhood -- in every social sector and context. The properties of the conventional models of modern organization follow, and contrast rather sharply with such traditional organizational forms as bureaucracy, the family firm, the old government agency or professional organization, and so on. 
Linda Wedlin, Assistant Professor, Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University and Visiting Scholar, Scancor
The Role of Rankings in Forming a Business School Template: Classifications, Diffusion and Mediated Isomorphism in Organizational Fields
ABSTRACT
International business school rankings have proliferated in recent years. Most attention has been paid to what rankings do for individual organizations, how they drive reputation and influence organizational change. But how and why have rankings developed and proliferated, and what are the implications of rankings for the field of management education. In this paper I study the development of international business school rankings, and analyze the role and influence that the rankings have on the field of management education. Specifically, I propose that rankings are classification mechanisms forming an organizational template that serves as a basis for comparison among organizations in this field, and which is used to form identities and identification within the field. Drawing on interview data, documents and a survey of European business school deans, I discuss how this template is formed, what it contains, and how members of the business school field use it to create identities and positions within the field. Contrary to the common assumption that rankings drive isomorphism in fields, my study suggest that the implications of the template created by the rankings are both similarity and variation within the field, as the template is shown to mediate isomorphic pressures among organizations in the field. 
Chiqui Ramirez, Professor, School of Education, Stanford
World Society and Human Rights: An Event History Analysis of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women
ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes cross-national data between 1979 and 1999 to ascertain what factors increase the likelihood that a country will ratify the convention to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women (CEDAW). Event history models are estimated to test hypotheses informed by the world society perspective, net of societal level influences. The main findings indicate that ratification (and ratification without reservations) is strongly influenced by women’s rights promoting international conferences and by world and regional densities and moderately affected by the propensity to ratify human rights treaties and by greater international non-governmental links. These findings are in line with the world society perspective. But we also show that some societal characteristics are important influences: Islamic countries are much less likely to ratify while ratification is more likely in both the liberal and the socialist left polities. Lastly, ratification is more likely where the constitutional form facilitates treaty ratification in general. 
Nils Brunsson, Professor, Stockholm School of Economics; Visiting Scholar, Scancor
Mechanisms of hope: Maintaining the dream of the rational organization
ABSTRACT
Organizations have traditionally been seen as relatively closed, hierarchical and highly rational systems. For the last fifty years students of organization have provided various kinds of criticism of this conception. They have argued that organizational practice routinely deviates from this hierarchical-rational model, and that such deviations are not necessarily harmful.
This criticism has had little practical impact. Managers present their organizations according to the hierarchical-rational model. They present their intentions in the same way. There are many to help them: the hierarchical-rational model is a standard one in normative management literature, and there are hordes of consultants ready to help them reform their oganizations to better reflect the rational model. Not surprisingly, such reforms have a tendency to fail.
I try to explain this persistent hope for the rational model even when it is confronted with practice such as is the case in reforms; how great hopes can be kept in spite of discouraging experience; why managers and reformers do not learn from practical experience but continue to believe in unrealistic ideas; how the dream of hierarchy and rationality lives on in a practical world that does not tolerate much of each.
Deborah Meyerson, Associate Professor, School of Education and Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Reconstructing Gender: Learning Practices as a Mechanism for Disrupting Masculinity in Male Dominated Workplaces (with Robin J. Ely)
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present a case from a study of offshore oil platforms-a dangerous workplace traditionally known for encouraging masculine displays of prowess and interactions centered on proving masculinity - in which such displays and interactions were markedly absent. We use this case to develop theory about how organizational conditions can disrupt conventional masculine identity construction processes by enforcing a set of key work practices - practices that encouraged men to express their vulnerability and attend to the well-being of others. In this case, these practices, intended to increase safety and reliability, had the effect of reconstructing how men enact masculinity on the job. Our findings question the immutability of masculine identity as a social status achievement-which is how previous literature depicts it-and points to how organizations can disrupt such tendencies. The work also contributes to literatures on high reliability organizations and organizational learning by revealing the ways in which identity construction process figure into processes previously linked to learning and safety.
Christina Garsten, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stockholm University and Stockholm Center for Organizational Research (SCORE)
The UN - soft and hard: Regulating social accountability for global business
ABSTRACT
There are now large numbers of organizations – NGOs, IGOs, consultancies, and state agencies – that provide voluntary rules for the social accountability of transnational business corporations. A large number of standards, policies, and codes of conduct are available for corporate leaders to choose from and to act upon. Oftentimes, these may work in a complementary fashion, but they may also come into conflict or competition with each other. And despite the abundance of voluntary rules, there is a regulatory gap at global level.
The paper addresses the United Nations (UN) as ‘a site for normativity’, involved in the regulation of corporate social accountability at a global level. More specifically, it looks into the two different approaches – soft and hard – in which the UN is engaged, i. e. the Global Compact, and the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights respectively, and the organizational challenges under way. The UN thus works on two alternative or complementary regulatory approaches simultaneously, involving different normative claims. One of these signals binding rules, monitoring and enforcement, and the other voluntarism, dialogue and partnership.
The paper attempts to outline the trajectories of rule-making and the character of arguments used by actors involved to gain legitimacy for their claims. It is suggested that, for the trajectories of the different regulatory approaches, organization matters. That is, the organizational origins of the initiative within the UN, the organizational processes involved, as well as the organizational language used, all have an impact on the trajectories of the rules. Also, the development of the rules reflects the importance of a ‘pragmatic universalism’, which relies on communicability rather than on shared assumptions and values. The two regulatory approaches differ in their degrees of communicability. 
Klaus Weber, Assistant Professor in Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and Hayagreeva Rao, Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
From streets to suites: The impact of the anti-biotech movement on German pharmaceutical firms (with L.G.Thomas)
ABSTRACT
Social movement scholars have consistently lamented the relative inattention to the study of movement consequences, particular to understanding the cultural effects of movements. We examine how social movements may shape material culture by affecting the fates of new technologies. In particular, we focus on how organizations, which play a crucial role in commercializing and distributing new technologies, are influenced by movement activism opposed to a technology. The context is anti-biotechnology activism in Germany during the 1980s and 1990s and its effect on the ability of German pharmaceutical firms to commercialize this technology. Using detailed analyses of six German companies as an "extreme case" for building understanding of processes and mechanisms, we find that variable movement pressure interacted with internal organizational processes and structures. Rather than simply acting as an external force, the movement was able to penetrate core organizational structures and processes.
Bill Barnett, Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Elizabeth Pontikes, PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
The Red Queen, Success Bias, and Organizational Inertia
ABSTRACT
Why do successful organizations often move in new directions and then fail? We propose that micro- and macro-level processes combine to produce this pattern, and that both processes stem from the same source: surviving a history of competition. At the organization-level, surviving a history of competition adapts organizations to their environments, through so-called "Red Queen" competition, but being well-adapted for one market makes moving into new markets more hazardous. Meanwhile, managers in such organizations infer from their history of competitive success a biased assessment of their organization's capabilities. Consequently, although surviving competition makes organizational change especially hazardous, managers in surviving organizations are especially inclined to such initiatives. We develop these ideas in an empirically testable model, and find supportive evidence in estimates of the model using data from the history of the U.S. computer industry.
Magali Delmas, Assistant Professor of Management, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara
Environmental agreements between firms and regulatory agencies: symbolic or substantive cooperation ?
ABSTRACT
Using the case of Environmental Agreements between firms and regulatory agencies, this paper investigates cooperative behavior for the provision of public good. Environmental Agreements are cooperative agreements in which firms voluntary commit to actions that improve the environment. Environmental Agreements are designed to associate private benefits with the voluntary provision of public goods. Although Environmental Agreements have emerged as the future in some policy circles, there are doubts about their effectiveness. In particular, there are concerns that firms may enter these agreements and cooperate only symbolically rather than undertake substantive actions to reduce their impact on the environment. Because most of these agreements lack explicit measures to sanction firms that pursue only symbolic cooperative strategies or sometimes even to identify such firms, why would firms within such agreement pursue substantive cooperation?
We analyze the conditions that explain the type of cooperative strategy a firm will adopt within a voluntary agreement. We build on institutional theory literature that argues that early and late adopters of technological and administrative innovations face differing levels of institutional pressure. We demonstrate that these different levels of pressure can trigger differing levels of cooperative behavior among early and late adopters.
Our analysis is based on the case of the Climate Challenge program established in 1995 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the representatives of the national electric utilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We compare the cooperative behavior of early joiners to late joiners and to non-participants. We find that substantive cooperative strategies are more likely to be pursued by firms that entered the program at its initiation while symbolic cooperation is more likely to be adopted by late joiners. This can be explained by differing pressures and incentives that early and late joiners face. Early joiners are subject to a higher level of coercive pressure from regulatory agencies than late joiners. Early joiners are also more visible and have more resources to devote to the cooperation. We also find that firms that entered the program at a later date can jeopardize the program’s overall effectiveness.
Heather Haveman, Professor of Management, Columbia University School of Business; Hayagreeva Rao, Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
The Winds of Change: The Progressive Movement and the Evolution of the Early California Thrift Industry
ABSTRACT
We study how one aspect of political culture – social movements – propels the evolution of non-movement organizations. Our research site is the early thrift industry in California. In less than 20 years, the original club-like form of thrift was displaced and a new bureaucratic form came to dominate the industry – even though the bureaucratic form contravened the founding ideals of thrifts, voluntary saving and co-operation among friends. We draw on social-movement theory and institutionalist organizational theory to argue that bureaucratic thrifts were able to thrive only after the modernizing temper of Progressivism made them culturally appropriate. The Progressive movement had three effects on thrifts: foundings of bureaucratic thrifts rose, existing thrifts converted to the new bureaucratic form, and failures of bureaucratic thrifts declined. Our statistical analyses employ two indicators of the strength of Progressivism: the number of newspapers espousing Progressive ideals and the extent to which Progressive ideals were embodied in the platforms of political parties weighted by the number of votes received by the parties espousing those ideals. We find that Progressivism influenced both selection (foundings and failures) and adaptation (conversions) in this industry. Our study shows how the values championed by society-wide social movements can alter the demography of non-movement organizational populations. It also demonstrates that “market” forms of organization can be the unintended outcomes of shifts in political culture.
Henning Hillmann, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Stanford University
A License to Loot: Privateering and Property Rights as Private Goods (with Christina Gathmann)
ABSTRACT
Why do governments actively promote criminal behavior? History up to the present day provides many examples where states have not suppressed but rather supported activities like extortion, production of illegal commodities, smuggling or outright terrorism. Yet evidence strongly suggests that the costs involved are dramatic: countries have lower economic growth and a high potential for political conflict. This study uses new quantitative evidence on eighteenth-century British and French privateering state-licensed piracy and commerce raiding by private ships to identify the conditions under which states promote criminal and semi-legal activities, and how these activities influence economic and political performance. Findings from this research will provide significant contributions to the sociological understanding of institutional change, economic performance and state-building. The central theoretical argument is that privateering should be studied as a problem of selective property rights. Privateering is an institutional arrangement that enforces property rights of domestic merchants but denies foreign merchants the same rights. Despite their importance, interest in property rights outside of Economics has been limited, and the few existing studies tend to recognize them only as a public good. In contrast, this study develops a theoretical model of such selective institutions and demonstrates its application to the empirical analysis of the strategic relationship between merchants and the state. Substantively, the selective property rights model is used to demonstrate how legalizing illegal piracy as privateering was also a domestic political instrument that worked much like patron-client networks in binding elites to the interests of state-building princes. For merchants, privateering was a means to compensate for trade losses during war. For state-building rulers, it provided a supplement to the navy at no cost and, in true mercantilist fashion, undermined the trade of rival states. The findings from this study will have clear implications for social science research and policy decisions concerning contemporary forms of state-sponsored violence. The findings will also offer new and consequential insights for institution-building and state-making in developing and transition countries, especially how the selective enforcement of property rights thwarts economic growth and political stability.
Dan McFarland, Assistant Professor, School of Education, Stanford University
The Social Dynamics of Organizational Role-Frames
ABSTRACT
This paper concerns the formation and reproduction of network domains, or the routinization of role frames (i.e., stable patterns of relations and sociolinguistic forms in focused encounters) within organizational settings. The social dynamics of role frames constitute the technological core of organizations. When enacted, role frames entail a sequence of different (and recurring) coordinated activities, each of which calls for certain sociolinguistic cues and interpersonal relations. How and why a semblance of order arises in these shared endeavors is not just made up by actors, nor is it simply the result of external prescriptions. Role frames are formed, broken down, and transformed by a variety of exogenous and endogenous factors. On the one hand, the patterning of social action is influenced by the structural properties of the setting and its location in the wider stream of organizational life. Hence, focused encounters of role-activity are associated with certain subject matters, have particular actor compositions, and take place at different times of the day – all of which establish certain preconditions, energy levels, and expectations for ensuing social action. On the other hand, there are a variety of factors endogenous to the encounter and ensuing interactions. Actors can cue a variety of activities and attempt to disrupt and repair coordinated endeavors. In addition, through ensuing interactions, actors mutually adapt and learn by “hitting their stride,” falling into competency traps, and developing interpersonal experience that emboldens them to modify recurring routines. In effect, we describe and explain how the routines of a social system arise from an ecology of micro-processes that are simultaneously locally generated and constrained within the structure of an organizational setting. We use observation records on nearly one million turns of streaming interactions in over 150 high school classrooms to depict this ecological process. We depict the distributed process of routinization and breakdown using dynamic network visualizations, and we identify the ecology of micro-processes generating these social orders through multi-level growth curve models. When these visualizations and statistical models are used in tandem, we believe they offer one of the first systematic and direct empirical demonstrations of how network domains like the teacher-student role frame are dynamically formed, broken down, and reproduced.
Antti Ainamo, Department of Organization and Management, Helsinki School of Economics, Finland and Risto Tainio, Professor, Organizations and Management, Helsinki School of Economics
Global R & D Projects: How to Manage Cultural Diversity?
ABSTRACT
Despite the wide recognition of the spread of decentralized, global R&D projects, the ways in which they are managed are not well understood. The previous findings on managing cultural diversity, and related internal dynamics, of global projects appear ambiguous, even contradictory. The debate about the internal dynamics of global R & D projects tends to circle around the concept of ‘ethnocentrism’, the tendency of towards subgroup salience and a consequent ‘us-versus-others’ distinctions in subgroup relations. The avoidance of ethnocentrism, and related conflicts and tensions, is commonly argued to be the best way to deal with cultural diversity. The paper questions that argument by exploring in depth Nokia’s global R&D project called Calypso: a five-year, multi-million, multi-site, 16-country, 500 people project to develop the first GSM imaging phone. Based on that evidence the paper argues that there is a variety of ways to make a global project a success, a deliberate ethnocentrism one of them.
Georg Krücken, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Germany
Turning the University into an Organizational Actor (with Frank Meier)
ABSTRACT
In very different countries universities are currently being transformed into organizational actors. The "organizational turn" in higher education is by no means a trivial process as universities traditionally were not conceived as important decision-making entities in their own rights. Caught between the academic profession and/or the state, there was only little legitimate space for strong institutional management. In our paper we discuss the trend towards transforming universities into organizational actors against the backdrop of distinct and worldwide influential national traditions (Germany, France, Great Britain, United States) and scholarly reflections on the uniqueness of university organizations as loosely coupled systems. These hitherto unquestioned boundaries between national systems and types of organizations are becoming blurred. Based on contemporary higher education research and discourse, we identify the emergence of a new, globalizing model of organizational actorhood, in which organizational
accountability, explicit goal definition, elaborate formal structures, and the transformation of university management into a profession become more and more important.
Anita Engels, Assistant Professor of Sociology, School of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany
How Firms Become Carbon Entrepreneurs
ABSTRACT
The paper gives a brief outline of a heuristic framework
developed to analyze firm behavior in a newly created market for CO2 emission rights. It is the core concept ofa research proposal which will be submitted to the German
Research Council later this year. The suggested project
starts from the empirical observation of huge variations of firm behavior in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme which was launched in January 2005. Some companies interprete the new market as a competitive environment in which business opportunities emerge that can be realized through managerial choices. Others, however, are unable to develop strategies for this new and complex market and seek for other sources
of orientation. These types of behavior can be interpreted as choice versus rule-following behavior. First empirical evidence suggests that these differences in firm behavior vary cross-nationally. The project seeks to establish a link between the varieties of capitalism-approach and a more firm-centered framework to understand what companies do in new and complex environments.
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