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We show political divisions in perceptions of police officers even before the divisive political and social events of 2016. We do so using respondents' interpretations of surprising and ambiguous headlines involving police officers (e.g., assumptions about what happened or who was involved).

We use affect control theory's ABO event structure and derivations of this structure to construct a set of headlines that describe ostensibly good people (A) doing bad things (B) to other good people (O) or are ambiguous on one or more of these components. We present 517 MTurk respondents with a set of seven headlines and collect quantitative and qualitative data on their reactions to, and interpretations of, these headline events.

Police headlines generate interest among readers. When interpreting events, respondents are less likely to modify or redefine police officers compared to other actors. However, assumptions related to ambiguous events involving police differ by political orientation. Liberals view police more negatively than conservatives, in part because they imagine them doing worse things to slightly better people. Qualitative analyses support and shed light on the mechanisms underlying this and other partisan effects.

The research was designed to examine interest in headline structure, not specific actors. Thus, the patterns unique to police and political differences were not an original focus. We believe these inductive results are informative, but a study expressly designed to test hypotheses regarding perceptions of events with police officers is recommended for future work.

Understanding the political divide in perceptions of police and the potential of media coverage for exacerbating these effects is essential and related to ACTs growing interest in meaning divergence.

The purpose of this study is to examine how informational faultlines on a board affect the management of knowledge owned by directors and the consequences on organizational performance. In this study, informational faultlines are defined as hypothetical lines that divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the alignment of several informational attributes among board members.

The study uses unique hand-collected panel data covering 7,247 board members at 106 publicly traded firms to provide strong support for the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. The authors use a fixed effects approach and a system generalized method of moments approach to test the hypothesis.

The study finds that the relationship between informational faultlines on a board and organizational performance is U shaped, with the least optimal organizational performance experienced when boards have moderate informational faultlines. More specifically, informational faultlines within boards are negatively related to organizational performance across the weak-to-moderate range of informational faultlines and positively related to organizational performance across the moderate-to-strong range.

By explaining the mechanisms through which informational faultlines are related to organizational performance, the authors contribute to the literature in a number of ways. By conceptualizing how the management of knowledge plays an important role in the particular setting of corporate boards, the authors add not only to literature on knowledge management but also to the faultline and corporate governance literature.

This study offers a rationale for prior mixed findings by providing an alternative theoretical basis to explain the effect of informational faultlines within boards on organizational performance. To advance the field, the authors build on the concept of knowledge demonstrability to illuminate how informational faultlines affect the management of knowledge within boards, which will translate to organizational performance.