Search results

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which organizations that compete in both market and non-market domains might engage in collective strategy. We study low-power FM radio activists in the U.S., who employed a collective strategy both within and across geographic communities to gain the right to broadcast in low-power broadcast spectra. By comparing and contrasting two stages of the micro-radio movement, we argue that, under certain conditions, for collective strategy to be viable, organizations competing on the dimensions of both ideology and resources must recognize themselves as members of an identity group, based on their common struggle against a stronger, more salient enemy. We highlight the role of collective strategies in the processes of organizational ecology, and discuss the generalizability of our argument.

Industry platforms can alter relations among exchange partners in such a way that the industry structure is changed. The focus of much industry platform research has been on how platform creation and leadership offers advantages to the most central firms, but platforms can also be advantageous for small specialist firms that compete with the most central firms. We examine book publishing as an example of an industry in which the central players – large publishing firms – are losing power to self-publishing authors because the distributor Amazon has a powerful platform for customers to communicate independently, and the non-publishing platform Twitter also serves as a medium for readers to discuss and review books. Our empirical analysis is based on downloaded sales statistics for Amazon Ebooks, matched with Amazon reviews of the same books and tweets that refer to the book or the author. We analyze how Ebook sales are a function of publisher, Amazon reviews, and tweets, and we are able to assess the importance of each factor in the sale of book titles. The main finding is that Amazon reviews are powerful drivers of book sales, and have greater effect on the sales of books that are not backed by publishers. Twitter also affects book sales, but less strongly than Amazon reviews.

This paper extends organizational ecology by making an attempt to disentangle the consequences of scale and scope economies for organizational survival under different product market configurations. We test our hypotheses by analyzing the mortality rates of 643 UK motorcycle producers during the 1899–1993 period. The findings obtained offer two specific contributions. First, by separating the performance impact of scale from scope economies we clarify the complex mechanisms behind the survival consequences of different organizational strategies. Second, we show how the intensity of both scale and scope forces is relative to the aggregate market-level product configuration. The implications of these findings for organizational ecology and strategic management, and their cross-fertilization, are further discussed.

We show how organizational forms shape job structures, specifically the variety and types of jobs employees hold, extending previous research on job structures in four ways. First, the social codes associated with wineries’ generalist and specialist forms constrain the number of jobs and functional areas delineated by job titles. Second, form-based constraints are weakened by institutional rules that impose categorical distinctions on organizations. Third, these constraints are stronger when there is more consensus around forms. Fourth, these constraints are contingent on the legitimacy and resources of organizations of varying ages and sizes.

The collaborative economy (CE), and within it, collaborative consumption (CC) has become a central element of the global economy and has substantially disrupted service markets (e.g. accommodation and individual transportation). The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends and develop future scenarios for market structures in the CE. This allows service providers and public policy makers to better prepare for potential future disruption.

Thought experiments – theoretically grounded in population ecology (PE) – are used to extrapolate future scenarios beyond the boundaries of existing observations.

The patterns suggested by PE forecast developmental trajectories of CE leading to one of the following three future scenarios of market structures: the centrally orchestrated CE, the social bubbles CE, and the decentralized autonomous CE.

The purpose of this research was to create CE future scenarios in 2050 to stretch one’s consideration of possible futures. What unfolds in the next decade and beyond could be similar, a variation of or entirely different than those described.

Public policy makers need to consider how regulations – often designed for a time when existing technologies were inconceivable – can remain relevant for the developing CE. This research reveals challenges including distribution of power, insularity, and social compensation mechanisms that need consideration across states and national borders.

This research tests the robustness of assumptions used today for significant, plausible market changes in the future. It provides considerable value in exploring challenges for public policy given the broad societal, economic, and political implications of the present market predictions.

Comparative organizational analysis once dominated American organizational sociology, grounded in rich case studies about organizational processes and outcomes. The Columbia school's approach to organizational research was exemplary in this regard. Following the publication of Robert K. Merton's (1940) essay, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” he attracted a group of talented doctoral students to his formal organizations seminar (Crothers, 1990), the core of whom would go on to write dissertations, books, and articles forming the substance of American organizational sociology in the decades to come. Among those students were Philip Selznick, Alvin Gouldner, Peter Blau, Seymour Martin Lipset, Rose Coser, and James Coleman. While their work varied greatly in substantive content, their studies shared a theoretical interest in explaining intra-organizational dynamics and the unexpected outcomes of bureaucratic administration. Organizations, they demonstrated, developed “lives of their own,” quite outside the intents of their founders (Haveman, 2009; refer, especially, Selznick, 1957). Organizations, in other words, were adaptive to the needs of their constituents, but adaptations did not always produce the intended results. One of the unintended consequences of organizational development was increasing variety in the kinds of organizations that emerged to meet particular societal goals or ends. Thus, an inherent focus of this early comparative research was the explanation of variety in organizational types, policies, and outcomes and an emphasis on the ways in which organizations diverged from ideal types.

This paper analyzes a multidimensional model of organizational legitimacy, competencies, and resources in order to develop the linkage between institutional and resource-based perspectives by systematically detailing relationships among these factors and organizational viability. The underlying mechanisms of isomorphism and market partitioning serve as a point of departure by which the effects on organizational persistence of two sociocultural processes, cultural (constitutive) legitimation and sociopolitical (regulative) legitimation, are distinguished. Using data on 589 national self-help/mutual-aid organizations, this chapter explores how isomorphism and market partitioning foster legitimacy and promote organizational viability. Results show that the more differentiated an organization’s core competencies and resources, the greater the sociopolitical legitimacy; the more isomorphic an organization’s competencies and resources, the greater the cultural legitimacy. The latter isomorphic processes, however, do not promote greater organizational viability. In fact, while isomorphism legitimates with respect to cultural recognition, it is heterogeneity, not homogeneity, that promotes organizational survival.

Strategic positioning of foreign firms in a host market is vital for their success. By integrating the resource partitioning theory and the resource-based view, this study aims to investigate foreign firms’ strategic positioning (i.e. their choice of generalist or specialist positioning strategy) and its performance implications in the US market.

The final sample includes 212 foreign companies from 28 countries operating in the US market. Multiple data sources were used to collect data of these foreign companies’ subsidiaries in the USA This study used logistic regression to test its major hypotheses.

The results of this study suggest that a generalist positioning strategy is positively related to performance in a host market. It is also found that market concentration and local market knowledge moderate this strategic positioning – performance relationship.

For a foreign firm that enters a host market, market concentration (an industry-level factor) in the host market and the firm’s local market knowledge (a firm-specific factor) play prominent roles in the strategic positioning – performance relationship.

This study offers a novel perspective of international business strategy by applying the lens of resource partitioning theory to study the relationships between multinational enterprises’ strategic positioning and performance. This study contributes to the strategy literature in that it examines the performance implications of firms’ strategic positioning (i.e. generalist or specialist positioning).

During these unprecedented times, acts of charity are deemed essential to help individuals in need and support the social safety net. Given the importance of prosocial behavior for survival through the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, the authors investigate the effects of partitioning experiential consumption and self-construal on consumer responses.

Based on the literature on partitioning and self-construal, the findings across three experimental studies provide novel insights into the interplay between partitioning and self-construal, and offer psychological processes on prosocial and behavioral intention.

Individuals with predominantly independent (vs. interdependent) self-construals and those primed with independent (vs. interdependent) self-construals showed higher prosocial intention when the experiential product ad was in an aggregated (vs. partitioned) format. The fit between the type of format and self-construal leads to the high control coping mechanism, and ultimately prosocial intention.

Partitioning experiential consumption has not been directly examined using self-construal, providing novel insights into consumer reactions during the pandemic. This paper provides practical implications to practitioners and researchers to better understand and adapt to shifting digital consumption patterns.