Daniel Stewart

The Organizational Selection of Status Characteristics: Status Evaluations in an Open Source Community

Organizations mediate societal cultural belief systems and group-level encounters by filtering, and sometimes transforming, social information regarding which status characteristics are salient during group encounters embedded within organizations. This study uses status characteristics theory to add to our understanding of social status within organizations by explaining why organizations matter in determining which status characteristics will be activated within task groups. By analyzing status rankings within an organization of open source software programmers, we find that the organization develops its own unique shared belief system, which inculcates actors with beliefs about status characteristics that are potentially unique within the boundaries of the organization. Specifically, in this study we find that through a process of status generalization, organizational members create new status markers (location) that are potentially only meaningful for the given social situation, and they selectively nullify others (education and age). To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first work in the expectation states tradition to demonstrate an outcome for an organization-level selection process for status characteristics. This paper adds to status characteristics theory by empirically analyzing how organizational contexts create boundaries around groups in which new and extant status characteristics are activated and in which predefined characteristics inherited from more global, society-level contexts are deactivated.

Close Encounters: Lessons From an Indigenous MBA Program

Entrepreneurship is perceived to be a key to revitalizing the economies of American Indian communities. Gonzaga University offers an MBA specifically designed to prepare tribal college instructors to teach entrepreneurship. Beginning with the relevant background on the need for and benefit of indigenous management education, this article describes the elements of this unique program such as the cohort system, on-line and on-campus courses, and culturally appropriate curriculum changes. The program is analyzed through a qualitative examination of an alumni survey. The survey reveals that the foremost challenge for the program is the integration of indigenous cultural values and management practices with mainstream business curricula. The most prominent success factor the survey reveals is the fit between the program’s goals and the mission of the Jesuit institution in which the program resides. Finally, the survey results provide some insight into the impact the program is having on indigenous communities.

Being Native American in business: Culture, identity, and authentic leadership in modern American Indian enterprises

Tribally owned American Indian enterprises provide a unique cross-cultural setting for emerging Native American business leaders. This article examines the manner in which American Indian leaders negotiate the boundaries between their indigenous organizations and the nonindigenous communities in which they do business. Through a series of qualitative interviews, we find that American Indian business leaders fall back on a strong sense of “self,” which allows them to maintain effective leadership across boundaries. This is highly consistent with theories of authentic leadership. Furthermore, we find that leaders define self through their collective identity, which is heavily influenced by tribal affiliation and tribal culture. We add to the literature on authentic leadership by showing the role that culture and collective identity have in creating leader authenticity within the indigenous community.

The Trappings of Status: The Relationship Between Tenure and Status in an Open Innovation Community

Within marketing channels, reputation and status matter a great deal, not only for brand success but for the creation of relationships within the channel. Understanding the dynamics of status within entrepreneurial communities can help us to understand the interface between marketing and entrepreneurship. Open innovation communities are, by definition, entrepreneurial. This study examines the temporal dynamics that influence an individual’s status mobility within an open innovation community of software developers. Because stable status hierarchies emerge within such communities, it is important for innovators who wish to establish high status to do so quickly. Structural and institutionals forces begin to work immediately to establish an individual’s status position. As tenure increases and an individual’s reputation becomes increasingly entrenched, it becomes difficult to generate changes in status position, in essence trapping the individual within a particular social stratum. Therefore, members of an entrepreneurial community who desire high status should work swiftly, or else they run the risk of being cast into an inert, low‐status position.