Christine M. Beckman

Disentangling risk and change: internal and external social comparison in the mutual fund industry

Using data on 3,225 actively managed U.S. mutual funds from 1980 to 2006, we test hypotheses designed to disentangle risk and change as outcomes of behavioral performance feedback routines. We theorize that managers make decisions involving risk and decisions involving change under different conditions and motivated by different concerns. Our results show internal social comparison across units within a firm will motivate risk, whereas external social comparison across firms will motivate change. When a fund experiences a performance shortfall relative to internal social comparison, the manager is likely to make decisions that involve risk because the social and spatial proximity of internal comparisons trigger individual concern and fear of negative individual consequences, such as job loss. In contrast, when a fund experiences a performance shortfall in comparison with external benchmarks, the manager is more likely to consider the shortfall an organizational concern and make changes that do not necessarily involve risk. Although we might assume that negative performance in comparison with both internal and external benchmarks would spur risky change, our results indicate that risky change occurs most often when a decision maker receives unfavorable internal social performance feedback and favorable external social performance feedback. By questioning assumptions about why and when organizational change involves risk, this study begins to separate change and risk outcomes of the decision-making process.

Prominent but Less Productive The Impact of Interdisciplinarity on Scientists’ Research

Federal agencies and universities in the U.S. promote interdisciplinary research because it presumably spurs transformative, innovative science. Using data on almost 900 research-center–based scientists and their 32,000 published articles, along with a set of unpublished papers, we assess whether such research is indeed beneficial and whether costs accompany the potential benefits. Existing research highlights this tension: whereas the innovation literature suggests that spanning disciplines is beneficial because it allows scientists to see connections across fields, the categories literature suggests that spanning disciplines is penalized because the resulting research may be lower quality or confusing to place. To investigate this, we empirically distinguish production and reception effects and highlight a new production penalty: lower productivity, which may be attributable to cognitive and collaborative challenges associated with interdisciplinary research and/or hurdles in the review process. Using an innovative measure of interdisciplinary research that considers the similarity of the disciplines spanned, we document both penalties (fewer papers published) and benefits (increased citations) associated with it and show that it is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor, one that partly depends on field-level interdisciplinarity.

“Making” Your Numbers: Engendering Organizational Control Through a Ritual of Quantification

Numbers such as output controls drive action in organizations, yet we know little about how key numbers are created and take on authority. Using qualitative data from multiple properties managed by a hotel management firm, we find that individuals develop and then become committed to achieving budget goals through a ritual of quantification. The budget numbers serve as output controls for the properties and employees. We find that the strength of the budget number as an undisputed future projection emerges from the ritualistic intertwining of process and normative controls in the course of producing a robust output control. Process controls delineate stages in the budgeting cycle, while normative controls (performative work and emotional investment) operate at each stage, propelling people from one stage to the next while also increasing commitment to both the process and the outcome. The result is a single reified budget number. This ritual of quantification further fosters collective solidarity and an u...