We examine the antecedents and consequences of creating a national stock exchange among developing countries, a core technology of financial globalization. We study local conditions and global institutional pressures in the rapid spread of exchanges since the 1980s, and examine how conditions at the point of adoption affected their subsequent vibrancy. Little prior research connects the process of diffusion with the operational performance of adopted policies. We find that international coercion was associated with more ceremonial adoption, but contrary to expectations common in institutional research, contagion processes via peer groups and normative emulation of prestigious actors enhanced vibrancy.

We examine how executives' ambivalent evaluation of a strategic issue relates to organizational actions taken in response. Ambivalence occurs when a decision-maker evaluates an issue as simultaneously positive and negative, a state that has received scant attention in organizational research. We integrate findings in social psychology with the behavioral theory of the firm to suggest how executives’ ambivalence prompts wider and more vigorous search for action responses and enables broader participation. Data from a two-wave survey of 104 German CEOs who evaluated the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and reported their organizations’ responses show that organizations whose CEOs evaluated the event as both positive and negative were more likely to take action when both evaluations were also strongly held. The reported actions were also of greater scope, novelty and riskiness. The study contributes to research on organizational decision making by theorizing the role of top executives’ ambivalence, and by providing a first systematic test of how ambivalence affects responses to strategic issues.

Organizational scholars have highlighted the importance of interpretive ambivalence for mindfulness, creativity, and strategic change. Ambivalence occurs when an issue is seen simultaneously as positive and negative. We examine organizational factors that influence the propensity of organizational leaders to evaluate a new strategic issue ambivalently. Data come from a survey of 220 German CEOs confronted with the enlargement of the European Union. We find that CEOs of firms with a more ambidextrous strategic orientation and a moderate sense of organizational control over their environment are most likely to be ambivalent about this issue. Our findings affirm the prevalence of interpretive ambivalence at the executive level, and suggest ways for organizations to promote, or prevent, ambivalence in strategic sensemaking.

How do social movements affect decisions within corporations, such as the commercialization of new technologies? We suggest that the effect of movement activism is conditioned by the internal polity and therefore varies across organizations. This article examines how the anti-genetic movement in Germany during the 1980s affected six domestic pharmaceutical firms’ commercialization of biotechnology. We develop a process model of how movements penetrate the relatively closed polity of private organizations. External contestation weakened the position of internal champions of biotechnology, precipitated divisions among organizational elites, and undermined collective commitment to the technology. The movement also increased perceptions of investment uncertainty, but the consequences of this uncertainty depended on organizational logics of decision making. As a result, investments in some firms were tilted away from domestic biotechnology projects. The model also explains this variation in organization-level outcomes of movement contestation.

This study illuminates how new markets emerge and how social movements can effect cultural change through market creation. We suggest that social movements can fuel solutions to three challenges in creating new market segments: entrepreneurial production, the creation of collective producer identities, and the establishment of regular exchange between producers and consumers. We use qualitative data on the grassroots coalition movement that has spurred a market for grass-fed meat and dairy products in the United States since the early 1990s. Our analysis shows that the movement’s participants mobilized three broad cultural codes - authenticity, sustainability and naturalness - and that these codes motivated producers to enter and persist in a nascent market, shaped their choices about production and exchange technologies, enabled a collective identity, and formed the basis of the products’ exchange value.

This essay examines a mechanisms-based approach to theory building in organization studies and identified conditions under which such an approach is likely to be fruitful. Mechanisms-based theorizing is a promising path to reviving organization theory but has the potential pitfalls of overly reductionist models of organizations and the complete abandonment of grand theorizing. These undesirable side-effects can be reduced when researchers act as playful pragmatists and treat mechanisms as toolkits for working on theoretical puzzles. The article describes some tactics for accomplishing this goal.

Karl Weick’s sensemaking perspective has proven to be a central influence on process theories of organizing. Yet, one persistent criticism leveled at his work has been a neglect of the role of larger social and historical contexts in sensemaking. We address this critique by showing how institutional context is a necessary part of sensemaking. We propose that there are salient but unexplored connections between the institutional and sensemaking perspectives. We explain how three specific mechanisms – priming, editing, and triggering – bring institutional context into processes of sensemaking, beyond a more conventional notion of internalized cognitive constraint. Our contribution seeks to be forward-looking as much as reflective, addressing a critique of one of Karl Weick’s key theoretical contributions and offering amendments that extend its reach.

This article illustrates a strategy for measuring and comparing the cultural toolkits in use by different actors in a larger field. The strategy allows quantitative comparisons of similarity at the level of large comprehensive toolkits instead of selective elements or inferred deeper dimensions. It also takes into account the embeddedness of actors’ cultural toolkits in larger social fields and the specificity of toolkits to communication contexts. While the strategy is potentially applicable to any actor’s toolkit in a recurring communication context, I use as an illustration the repertoires that different corporations employ to account for their activities in their annual reports.

Academic management research was originally motivated to help meet society’s social and economic objectives and in so doing, serve the public interest. However, scholarship in our field has pursued society’s economic objectives much more than it has its social ones. Surveying the supply and demand for all of the empirical research published by the Academy of Management between 1958 and 2000 and all of the research published between 1972 and 2001 that attempts to link a firm’s social and economic performance, we provide evidence for this claim. We then propose reasons for why this research imbalance exists and conclude by foreshadowing a research agenda that honors our field’s historic social values.

We draw on a survey study to examine the relationship between top executive teams' perceptions of a company's market environment and their interpretive orientations, and the company's subsequent financial performance. Companies with executives that see their environment with a moderate degree of accuracy outperform those with highly accurate or highly inaccurate assessments. Positive interpretative orientations and a low sense of control also enhance subsequent performance. The study supports a pragmatic sensemaking view of executive cognition.

Part of a discussion issue on the origins and prospects of the Critical Management Studies movement in the U.S. academic context.

Whether economic globalization leads organizations in different countries to adopt increasingly similar cultural resources has received growing attention in managerial research. This study combines an assessment of such convergence trends at the national level with testing alternative mechanisms that may drive such aggregate convergence. It identifies multi-level mechanisms implied by an evolutionary account of international convergence based on cohort replacement processes and tests this account against the baseline of a perspective that sees convergence as the result of adaptation by existing organizations to increased market competition. Data come from a population of pharmaceutical firms in Germany and the USA, over the period 1980-2001. The data comprise annual information of 97 companies, which at some stage during this period participated in this industry. The cultural repertoires employed by these organizations were extracted from their annual reports. The analysis found evidence for convergence at the country aggregate level and evidence for both demographic and adaptive processes as drivers. While support was found for the specific mechanism suggested by both accounts at the inter-organizational level, aggregation mechanisms to the national level were only partially supported for the adaptive account, as the increase in similarity was not matched by a corresponding increase in competitive overlap. This suggests that additional factors not considered in current research moderate this dynamic.

This study examines how producers in the market of financial analysis attain status through their framing repertoire, defined as the pattern of producers’ choices in presenting their work to a customer audience. We observe these choices through a systematic text analysis of 14,500 reports of security analysts that covered biotechnology companies between 1986 and 2005. We expected analysts to attain high status when they use framing repertoires that resonate with the values of investors, focus on specific values or styles, use a moderate amount of novel elements, present conclusions that deviate from their peers, and finally deviate in a direction that resonate with the investors’ values. Our findings confirm that cultural resonance with audience values is associated with status, as is novelty, but that diversified rather than pure styles confer status. The study contributes to a growing body of research on the cultural underpinnings of market processes.

This paper provides an empirical assessment of how an organization’s structural location in a field patterns its use of cultural resources. Cultural resources are the symbolic means with which organizations make sense of and negotiate their environment. The study identifies the repertoires of such resources that U.S. and German pharmaceutical firms deployed in their public statements over a 21 year period. It examines how four sources of field structure may account for similarities and differences in organizations’ repertoires: nationality, industry taxonomies, connectedness in interaction networks and positions of role equivalence in market interfaces. Methods combine qualitative and statistical analysis. The results support a model that seeks to situate the use of cultural resources in sensemaking processes in structural factors at the level of organizational fields.