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Action–state orientation (ASO) describes the ability to plan, initiate, and complete intended activities. Action-oriented individuals, compared to state-oriented, are better able to focus their efforts and therefore move toward goals. While Kuhl (1994) posits that affect mediates the relationship between personality traits like ASO and successful self-regulation, ASO scholarship rarely examines the role of affect, and no ASO studies have examined self-regulation over time. We address these limitations by examining students’ academic self-regulation over a semester. HLM analyses show that action- versus state-oriented people exhibit better academic self-regulation as expected. However, we found no support for affect as a mediator.

Alternative enterprises – organizations that operate as a business while still also being driven by a social purpose – are sometimes owned by workers or other stakeholders, rather than shareholders. What role does ownership play in enabling alternative enterprises to prioritize substantively rational organizational values, like environmental sustainability and social equity, over instrumentally rational ones, like profit maximization? We situate this question at the intersection of research on: (1) stakeholder governance and mission drift in both hybrid and collectivist-democratic organizations; and (2) varieties of ownership of enterprise. Though these literatures suggest that ownership affects the ability of alternative enterprises to maintain their social missions, the precise nature of this relationship remains under-theorized. Using the case of a global, social, and environmental values-based banking network, we suggest that alternative ownership is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to combat mission drift in enterprises that have a legal owner. A supermajority of this network’s banks deploy alternative ownership structures; those operating with these structures are disproportionately associated with social movements, which imprint their values onto the banks. We show how alternative ownership acts through specific mechanisms to sustain enterprises’ missions, and we also trace how many of these mechanisms are endogenous to alternative ownership models. Finally, we find that ownership models vary in how well they enable the expression and maintenance of these social values. A ladder of mission-sustaining ownership models exists, whereby the dominance of substantive, non-instrumental values over operations and investment becomes increasingly robust as one moves up the rungs from mission-driven investor ownership to special shareholder and member-ownership models.

Homophily, or the tendency for individuals to be attracted to those who resemble them, is significantly influential in the formation of startup founding and top management teams. But its role in subsequent stages of startup growth remains largely unclear. We consider the impact of homophily on matching of early workers to startups. We propose that, in the case of underrepresented minority groups, the tendency toward homophily plays an important role in this matching process, albeit in an asymmetric way. In particular, homophily exerts a stronger influence on the supply than the demand side: job candidates are more inclined to favor startups with demographically similar founders than startup founders are inclined to favor demographically similar job-seekers. Focusing on an important group of historically disadvantaged workers – women – we examine these arguments using unique data on the online recruiting of high-tech startups concentrated in the Silicon Valley. We find evidence suggesting that female candidates' propensity to apply to a job at a given startup increases with the proportion of female founders. However, startups with a higher proportion of female founders are not more likely than other startups to favor female candidates in personnel selection.

Organizational approaches to racial inequality have provided contextual insight into a host of traditional stratification outcomes (e.g., hiring, earnings, authority). This chapter extends the organizational approach by drawing on the health-stress framework to explore how organizational context affects experiential and health-related outcomes – discrimination, social support, and psychological distress. Drawing on a sample of Black workers in the United States, we examine the relationship between workplace racial composition and psychological distress, as well as two potential mediators – racial discrimination and workplace social support. Our findings reveal that psychological distress is similar for Black workers in token (<25% Black coworkers), tilted other race (25–49.99% Black coworkers), and tilted same race (50–74.99% Black coworkers) job contexts. Workers in Black-dominated jobs (>75% Black coworkers), however, experience significantly less psychological distress than other compositional thresholds, net of individual, job, and workplace characteristics. This relationship is not explained by either racial discrimination experiences or supervisor and coworker social support. This finding suggests that researchers need to theorize and examine other protective factors stemming from coworker racial similarity.