Fabrizio Perretti

Filling Empty Seats: How Status and Organizational Hierarchies Affect Exploration Versus Exploitation in Team Design

Informal and formal mechanisms affect choices between exploitation and exploration in team design. We argue that the status differentiation of team members and differences in organizational structure limit exploration in the form of introducing newcomers to teams and creating new combinations of team members. High- and low-status team members and one- and three-layer organizational structures were expected to be positively related to exploration, and middle-status team members and two-layer structures were expected to be negatively related to it. We used data on 6,446 motion pictures produced by the Hollywood film industry in the period 1929-58 to test our hypotheses.

Micro‐costs: Inertia in Television Viewing*

We document substantial default effects despite negligible switching costs in a novel setting: television programme choice in Italy. Despite the low costs of clicking the remote and of searching across only six channels and viewers’ extensive experience with the decision, show choice depends strongly on whether viewers happened to watch the previous programme on the channel. Specifically, male and female viewership of the news depends on whether the preceding programme appealed to men or women, and a show’s audience increases by 2‐4% with an increase of 10% in the demand for the preceding programme. These results are robust to endogenous scheduling.

Categorical Stigma and Firm Disengagement: Nuclear Power Generation in the United States, 1970-2000

How do organizations react to stakeholder disapproval of a category to which they belong? In this paper, we draw on the categorization, stigma, and identity literatures in building a theory to predict whether firms that are involved in stigmatized activities will choose to reduce or terminate their involvement in them, as opposed to resorting to less drastic measures such as defensive practice adoption or impression management techniques. Conceptualizing groups of organizations involved in such contentious practices as stigmatized categories in the eyes of an audience, we argue that organizational responses rest on three elements: 1 the intensity of stigma targeting the category, 2 the media exposure of the category, and 3 the extent to which an organization is a member of the category. A quantitative study of proposed new nuclear reactor units in the United States between 1970 and 2000, in the face of mounting opposition to atomic power, provides empirical support for our claims.

Challenger Groups, Commercial Organizations, and Policy Enactment: Local Lesbian/Gay Rights Ordinances in the United States from 1972 to 20081

Drawing on theories of social movements and organizations, the authors examine how the expanding presence of commercial organizations and the growing diversity of their forms foster policy change securing rights for a group of challengers. In particular, they suggest that these organizations can operate as bridges and can signal the legitimacy of the group in a community. Empirically, they analyze organizations linked to lesbians/gays and the promulgation of local ordinances banning discrimination, using a data set covering American counties from 1972 to 2008. Using hazard models, they find that the rate of policy enactment increases (1) with greater presence of lesbian/gay commercial organizations, particularly of those linking toward the larger community, and (2) with greater diversity of their organizational forms. Finally, they find evidence that commercial and political organizations are linked in a complex way.

Temporary Identities: Hybridity and the Construction of Identities in the U.S. Feature Film Industry

In current research on market categories, hybridity (i.e., the association of organizations and/or the products they offer with multiple category memberships) represents an important issue with many practical implications, especially for project-based forms of organizations. This chapter explores the evolution of hybridity and the conditions under which different kinds of project-based organizations develop hybrid projects. By studying the feature film industry in the United States from 1920 until 1970, this chapter contrasts the current perspective based on status-organizing processes and suggests that hybridity is a population-level process that can be interpreted as the result of the construction and interplay of different identities, and on the dynamic of the identity dimensions employed by different actors in such effort. The chapter shows that the development and construction of the identity of a temporary organization is different from other types of organizations, and is linked to identification processes both at the organizational level, with the company or with specific individuals in key roles, and at the institutional/collective level, with pure (single-category) and hybrid (multi-category) genres. This chapter highlights the mutual interactions and constraints between these two levels in different life stages of the film industry.

ORGANIZATIONS COEVOLVING: SYSTEM DEPENDENCE IN THE POPULATION OF U.S. COMMERCIAL TELEVISION STATIONS.

The theory of system-dependent organizational evolution is a recent attempt to provide a coherent analytical framework for exploring the feedback mechanisms that link changes in numbers of organizations in a population to changes in patterns of resource availability. According to the theory, organizations are both consumers as well as producers of resources. This view has at least two implications for the way in which we think about the relation between organizations and their environments. The first is that the carrying capacity for organizational populations cannot be constant over time. The second is that the carrying capacity changes as a function of density - the number of organizations in a population. If the feedback view behind the theory is correct, the level of organizational density and the level of relevant resources are simultaneously determined. So far, the theory of system dependent organizational evolution has been validated only through computer simulation. In this paper we use data that ...