In this paper, we examine how field settlements are formed over time by zooming in on the actions and reactions of field incumbents as they seek to make sense of and collectively respond to external pressures for change in their field. We illustrate this process through an in-depth case study of the staff and members of an international industry association as they attempted to deal with pressures to change current industry practices relating to water and climate change. Specifically, we show how field settlements that change a field’s “rules of the game” are constituted by the sequential and cumulative layering of increasingly committing interim agreements between incumbents (which we refer to as microsettlements), themselves facilitated or impeded by practices that help calibrate tension levels between them. Our process model of microsettlement outcomes and trajectories contributes to extant research by theorizing how the inner workings of field-configuring organizations and the composition and structure of field settlements shape field (re)formation processes, thereby illuminating new pathways of action for organizations seeking to tackle societal grand challenges in creative, substantive, and meaningful ways.

While external search allows organizations to source diverse ideas from people outside the organization, it often generates a narrow set of nondiverse ideas. We theorize that this stems from an interplay between organizations' idea selection and the external generation of ideas: an organization selects ideas shared by external contributors, and the external contributors, who strive to see their ideas selected, use the prior selection to infer what kind of ideas the organization is looking for, and to respond. Contributors whose ideas are misaligned with the organization's selection tend to stop submitting ideas (i.e., self-selection) or adjust the ideas they submit so that they correspond (i.e., self-adjustment), resulting in a less diverse pool of ideas. Our central hypothesis is that the more consistent organizations are in their selection, the stronger the coevolutionary lock-in: organizations with greater selection consistency receive future ideas with lower content variety. We find support for these predictions by combining large-scale network analysis and natural language processing across a large number of organizations that use crowdsourcing. Our findings suggest a reconceptualization of external search as a two-way street: organizations are not simply passive receivers of ideas but send signals that shape the pool of ideas that externals share.

Despite the formidable consequences for firms of having their misconduct publicized—and thus scandalized—we still know very little about why only some instances of misconduct become scandals beyond the idea that high-status firms’ transgressions are scandalized more often. Focusing on the media’s essential role in scandalizing misconduct, we take a media routines perspective to theorize how the status of past transgressors inside and outside the focal transgressor’s industry creates different contexts that shape the likelihood of scandalization. We argue that the prevalence of past transgressions by high-status firms within the industry leads journalists to scrutinize the misconduct more, amplifying the effect of the focal firm’s status by highlighting its commonalities with past transgressors. In contrast, the prevalence of transgressions by high-status firms outside the industry attenuates the effect of firm status on scandalization by directing media attention outside the industry, thereby limiting the depth of information that can be inferred from the firm’s status. We find that past transgressors’ status and their categorical proximity to current transgressors serve as important boundary conditions for the scandalizing effect of status. Our contribution lies in elaborating on contextual factors that influence how status acts as an antecedent of scandals, and explaining how status and categories feed media routines that influence the likelihood a firm’s misconduct will be scandalized.

ENTC

Employee awards programs are prevalent in organizations. This research examines a group of employees who have received relatively less attention in the employee awards literature—those who are nominated for but fail to receive an award. Integrating social comparison theory with the functional theory of counterfactual thinking, we argue that non-winner nominees go through complex motivational states and affective experiences, which influence their collaboration responsiveness to colleagues. We conducted a quasi-experimental field study using collaboration records over 8 months (Study 1) and a multi-source study using survey data and collaborative records over 2 months (Study 2). The results revealed that compared to non-nominees, non-winner nominees have lower collaboration responsiveness to winners following the award announcement, especially when they have a higher structural proximity to winners. However, in the long run, non-winner nominees have higher collaboration responsiveness to others in general. In addition, we found that being nominated for but failing to receive an award simultaneously induces non-winner nominees to experience higher causal-inference counterfactual thinking and negative affect, which exerts opposing impacts on non-winner nominees’ collaboration responsiveness. This research advances the understanding of the impact, influencing mechanisms, boundary conditions, and temporal dynamics of employee awards on workplace collaboration.

We theorize that ally work (actions by employees belonging to advantaged social groups to support employees belonging to disadvantaged social groups) can be organized into three modalities: self ally work that is oriented toward developing skills and capabilities, relational ally work that is focused on building positive work relationships, and organizational ally work aimed at changing organizational practices to support disadvantaged coworkers. Drawing from the theory of political ideology as motivated cognition, across multiple pre-registered field studies we found that employees who were more liberal-leaning (vs. conservative-leaning) reported higher engagement in all three modalities. We also examined whether contextual affordances amplified the liberalism effect. Specifically, we tested whether personal accountability for diversity, colleague diversity, and organizational ideology directed liberals toward greater engagement in self, relational, and organizational work, respectively. As hypothesized, more liberal-leaning employees reported higher engagement in organizational ally work in more ideologically liberal organizations. However, the hypothesized effects of personal accountability were not supported. Notably, personal accountability had a positive effect on self ally work among more conservative-leaning employees. The moderating effects of colleague diversity were also mixed across studies. Highlighting both the plurality and politics of ally work, we discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

How do producers' distinctiveness and social structure influence third-party certifications? We argue that producers compete against prior and current competitors, as well as against their past selves. In the context of 153 artists active during a key period of the emergence of modern art (1905-1916), we use a convolutional neural network used in computer vision to extract feature vectors of artworks, and then measure quantitative distance of these artists' works from canonical reference points. We find that artists are rewarded for distinctiveness from prior and current competitors and their past selves (up to a point). However, the artists' autonomy to differentiate themselves depends on their position in social structure, which we divide into the supply-side of artist-to-artist networks, and the demand side of artist-to-gallerist networks. Artists with high or low supply-side status receive higher rewards for distinctiveness from current competitors than do artists with middle supply-side status. Artists with higher demand-side status receive higher rewards for distinctiveness from their own past, but lower rewards for distinctiveness from current competitors. These results show that peers strive to constrain each other to conform to positions of gravity within product space, and that market audiences deploy either higher or lower constraints on a producer's identity depending on the reference point.

In this study we consider whether 1) image- and word-based communication modes and 2) warmth and competence cues vary in their relative influence on different levels of stakeholder engagement on social media. Specifically, we explore social media fitness Influencers' abilities to attract followers and get them to positively interact with them via posts and comments. We theorize that differences in the ways each communication mode is processed, and differences in how competence and warmth cues are perceived, will lead to different relative effects on lower- and higher-engagement behaviors. Using the social media platform Instagram, we followed 488 social media entrepreneurs in the fitness and nutrition industry for six-months, and found that images have a positive relationship with less cognitively effortful engagement (following) whereas words do not have a significant relationship, and words have a stronger relationship than images with more cognitively effortful engagement (positive interactions). We also found that competence cues have a stronger positive relationship than warmth cues with the number of followers, and warmth cues have a positive relationship with positive interactions, whereas competence cues do not. Our findings have implications for research on multimode communication, social judgments, and entrepreneur-stakeholder engagement.

Scholars have long suggested that, to foster adoption for their innovations, entrepreneurs should engage with customers to better understand their unmet needs. Yet, customers frequently reside in organizations, and organizational members may not be aligned in their views regarding the benefits an innovation offers. Decision-making within organizations is rarely under the purview of a single executive and various members can wield influence. Given this plurality, how do entrepreneurial firms gain organizational adoption for their innovations? I explore how 54 entrepreneurial firms, all participating in a digital health accelerator, attempted to gain organizational adoption for their innovations. I show that, when entrepreneurs pursued an embedded process, they developed ways to expand the relevance of their innovations for new customers through new use cases, but strategically paced and withheld disruptive aspects of their innovations to appease different audiences within customer organizations. Firms that leveraged a market-centric process also expanded the relevance of their innovations. Despite sparking the interest of executives, firms using a market-centric approach did not gain adoption. By unpacking the process by which some entrepreneurs discovered how to strategically pace the deployment of their digital innovations, I contribute a mechanism that explains how digital innovations gain organizational adoption.

Grand challenges are system-wide problems. While top-down approaches to mitigating grand challenges may have potentially far-reaching impact, such initiatives from the higher scales can fail because of limited knowledge of ground realities. At the same time, resilient local efforts to address societal challenges can have limited reach. How can a grassroots organization work across locations and scales to address a grand challenge? We report the findings of a longitudinal case study of the Child In Need Institute (CINI), a non-profit organization that successfully scaled its impact to reach over seven million beneficiaries. Based on 40 years of archival data and four years of intensive fieldwork, our findings reveal “double weaving” as a recursive process of diagnosing and addressing problems by connecting actors and resources across locations and scales. The double-weaving process gives researchers a framework to explore the complex interplay between locations and scales that is necessary to address grand challenges. Our study contributes to research on grand challenges and scaling, advancing the spatial turn in organizational studies by developing the scalar dimension and expanding research that has primarily focused on locations.