Forrest Briscoe

The Nixon-in-China Effect: Activism, Imitation, and the Institutionalization of Contentious Practices

This paper seeks to understand how contentious practices spread from initial targets of activism to become accepted by organizations in the mainstream. Using a dataset on the diffusion of domestic partner benefits in the Fortune 500 from 1990 to 2005, we show that widespread adoption among mainstream firms was triggered by the prior adoptions of companies known to resist activism. We also find that employee activist groups within firms played a different role depending on the companys orientation toward activism. Employee groups increased the likelihood of adoption in activism-prone firms, but in mainstream firms, they increased the susceptibility of the firm to prior adoptions by others. These findings support a view of institutionalization as a contested process and suggest an alternative mechanism through which social networks influence that process. Like the effect of Cold-War President Richard Nixons surprising visit to the Peoples Republic of China in 1972, which led other countries to open relations with China, adoption of a practice by activism-resistant firms signaled to mainstream firms that an advocated practice had lost its contentiousness. Rather than providing pressure toward conformity, adoption events in a firms environment can be seen as a cultural resource that supports or undermines the arguments made by proponents of change inside organizations.

From Iron Cage to Iron Shield? How Bureaucracy Enables Temporal Flexibility for Professional Service Workers

This paper develops a model of how organizations influence the temporal flexibility of professional service workers. The model starts by identifying a key source of temporal inflexibility for these workers: an inability to hand clients off among one other. Hand-offs are impeded by high levels of client-to-worker specificity, stemming from three common characteristics of professional service work. The organizational processes that reduce that specificity, and therefore facilitate hand-offs, function by (a) reshaping client participation and expectations about the nature of their service interactions, (b) partly standardizing client-related work practices, and (c) facilitating the sharing of knowledge about clients between workers. The presence of these organizational processes represents greater bureaucracy---an interesting twist, given that they create more temporal flexibility for workers. The model is grounded in field research conducted with primary care physicians, and is also evaluated using a unique survey data set of physician organizations. Implications are drawn for the study of temporal flexibility across professional services in general, as well as for recent attempts to rethink the meaning of bureaucracy for workers.

The Initial Assignment Effect Local Employer Practices and Positive Career Outcomes for Work-Family Program Users

One of the great paradoxes of inequality in organizations is that even when organizations introduce new programs designed to help employees in traditionally disadvantaged groups succeed, employees who use these programs often suffer negative career consequences. This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature by investigating how local employer practices can enable employees to successfully use the programs designed to benefit them. Using a research approach that controls for regulatory environment and program design, we analyze unique longitudinal personnel data from a large law firm to demonstrate that assignment to powerful supervisors upon organization entry improves career outcomes for individuals who later use a reduced-hours program. Additionally, we find that initial assignment to powerful supervisors is more important to positive career outcomes—that is, employee retention and performance-based pay—than are factors such as supervisor assignment at the time of program use. Initial assignment affects career outcomes for later program users through the mechanism of improved access to reputation-building work opportunities. These findings have implications for research on work-family programs and other employee-rights programs and for the role of social capital in careers.

Sleight of Hand? Practice Opacity, Third-party Responses, and the Interorganizational Diffusion of Controversial Practices:

We examine the role of a practice’s opacity (versus transparency) in the interorganizational diffusion of organizational practices. Though the opacity of a practice is typically thought to impede diffusion, a political-cultural approach to institutions suggests that opacity can sometimes play a positive role. Given that adoption decisions are embedded in a web of conflicting interests, transparency may bring negative attention that, when observed by prospective adopters, inhibits them from following suit. Opacity, in contrast, helps avoid that cycle. Using the curtailment of health benefits for retirees among large U.S. employers (1989 to 2009), we compare the diffusion of transparent adoptions (i.e., partial or complete benefit cuts) with opaque adoptions (i.e., spending caps that trigger disenrollment). We find that transparent adoptions reduce subsequent diffusion of the practice to other organizations. This effect is fully mediated by negative media coverage, which is itself conditioned by the presence of opposition from interest groups. Opaque adoptions, in contrast, increase subsequent diffusion to other organizations and are facilitated by the involvement of professional experts. Thus, in addition to providing findings on practice opacity, our study contributes insight into how organizational fields shape diffusion by illuminating the role of third parties in the spread of controversial practices.

Overcoming Relational Inertia: How Organizational Members Respond to Acquisition Events in a Law Firm

This paper examines how organizational members overcome relational inertia and contribute to integration and value creation following an acquisition, through an analysis of a large law firm’s acquisition of two smaller firms. When merging law firm partners share clients with one another, both within and across the boundaries of the formerly separate firms, they create new relationships that connect the organizational units together. We examine both the antecedents and consequences of post-acquisition integration through client sharing. Drawing on network theory, we consider how the configuration of prior referral relationships influences new sharing of clients undertaken by individual partners. We also use the prior referral-network structure to predict which partners will cut their former intraunit client-sharing ties. To ascertain how client sharing creates value for the combined organization, we analyze the effects of client sharing on revenue generation and human capital development. Our findings uncover a paradox in integration behavior: the same referral-network structures that contribute to integration by increasing interunit sharing also tend to detract from integration because they are associated with cutting existing intraunit ties. We also find that interunit client sharing is positively associated with revenue generation but negatively associated with human capital development. Overall, this research advances a relational perspective on post-acquisition integration and sheds new light on how networks are formed and become reconfigured inside organizations.

Social Activism in and Around Organizations

AbstractOrganizations are frequent targets for social activists aiming to influence society by first altering organizational policies and practices. Reflecting a steady rise in research on this topic, we review recent literature and advance an insider-outsider framework to help explicate the diverse mechanisms and pathways involved. Our framework distinguishes between different types of activists based on their relationship with targeted organizations. For example, “insider” activists who are employees of the target organization have certain advantages and disadvantages when compared with “outsider” activists who are members of independent social movement organizations. We also distinguish between the direct and indirect (or spillover) effects of social activism. Much research has focused on the direct effects of activism on targeted organizations, but often the effects on non-targeted organizations matter more for activists goals of achieving widespread change. Drawing on this framework, we identify and ...

Social Activism and Practice Diffusion How Activist Tactics Affect Non-targeted Organizations

This paper examines how social activist tactics affect the diffusion of social-responsibility practices. Studying collegiate adoptions of a controversial supplier-sanction practice championed by anti-sweatshop activists, we compare how non-targeted organizations are influenced by different types of practice adoptions in their environment. Drawing on interorganizational learning theory, we argue and show that disruption-linked adoptions—those that occur following activists’ disruptive protests against the adopting organization—appear to be taken under coercive pressure and therefore provide non-targeted organizations with poor inferences about the merits of the practice. In contrast, strong inferences are provided by evidence-linked adoptions—those that occur after activists use evidence-based tactics with the adopting organization—and by independent adoptions occurring without any activism. Hence the contagious effect of independent and evidence-based adoptions is greater than that of disruption-linked adoptions. We further explore differences in receptivity to contagious influence, proposing that features of an organization and its proximal environment that increase issue salience also increase susceptibility to diffusion. Our findings demonstrate the importance of including non-targeted organizations in research on social movements and corporate social responsibility. They also offer a new vantage for interorganizational diffusion research, based on how activists and other third parties shape organizational decision makers’ inferences.

Temporal Flexibility and Careers: The Role of Large-Scale Organizations for Physicians

This study investigates how employment in large-scale organizations affects the work lives of practicing physicians. Well-established theory associates larger organizations with bureaucratic constraint, loss of workplace control, and dissatisfaction, but this author finds that large scale is also associated with greater schedule and career flexibility. Ironically, the bureaucratic processes that accompany large-scale organization also allow for a reduction of patient demands on individual physicians, freeing those physicians to pursue other career activities or to fulfill family responsibilities. Large-scale organizations thus appear to represent a trade-off between workplace control and temporal flexibility, and many physicians appear to embrace this trade-off. The data come from surveys and interviews conducted in 2002. Implications extend to other professional and managerial labor markets in which client demands constrain schedules and careers.

There's money in the air: the CFC ban and DuPont's regulatory strategy

DuPont, the worlds dominant CFC producer, played a key role in the development of the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. We argue that DuPonts pursuit of its economic interests, along with the political impact of the discovery of an ozone hole and the threat of domestic regulation, shaped the international regulatory regime for ozone-depleting substances. International regulation offered DuPont and a few other producers the possibility of new and more profitable chemical markets at a time when CFC production was losing its profitability and promising alternative chemicals had already been identified. DuPonts organization and strategy were key to the successful leveraging of the Montreal process. For example, the Freon Division had close interaction with public officials and external groups, and benefited from the input of DuPonts external affairs department. This positioned DuPont to exploit the situation when regulatory discussions were stepped up. From a public policy perspective, the Montreal process offers a valuable example of harnessing diversity in industry: some producers stood to gain more from the envisioned regulations than others. Such industry heterogeneity provides frequent opportunities for coalitions of ‘the green and the greedy’, such as that between DuPont and environmental interests. Methods to encourage potential industry winners into supporting environmental initiatives deserve further attention.

Paradox and Contradiction in Organizations: Introducing Two Articles on Paradox and Contradiction in Organizations

For the first time, this volume of the Academy of Management Annals features two articles that we paired together to present complementary perspectives on a common theme. [Schad, Lewis, Raisch, and Smith (2016)][1] review research on paradox theory in management science, and [Putnam, Fairhurst, and