Giacomo Negro

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.

RESEARCH ON CATEGORIES IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS

The concept of a “category” and the social process of “categorization” occupy a crucial place in current theories of organizations. In this introductory chapter to Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume on Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, we review published work in various streams of research and find that studies of organizational forms and identities, institutional logics, collective action frames, and product conceptual systems have key commonalities and predictable differences.

Category Reinterpretation and Defection: Modernism and Tradition in Italian Winemaking

When two groups of market actors differ in how to interpret a common label, each can make claims over the label. One categorical interpretation and the group that supports it risk disappearance if the rival interpretation gains ground. We argue that when members of the endangered category become partial defectors that span categories, their history presents challenges to the identity of nondefectors that will inhibit further change. Our empirical analysis of “traditionalism” and “modernism” in the making of Barolo and Barbaresco wines supports this argument.

Stained Red A Study of Stigma by Association to Blacklisted Artists during the “Red Scare” in Hollywood, 1945 to 1960

We suggest that moral panics exert spillover effects through stigma by mere association. Individuals are harmed even if their ties to stigmatized affiliates are heterophilous, and high-status individuals can also suffer. This creates a broadcast effect that increases the scale of the moral panic. Analyzing the U.S. film industry from 1945 to 1960, we examine how artists’ employment in feature films was influenced by their associations with co-workers who were blacklisted as communists after working with the focal artist. Mere association reduces an artist’s chances of working again, and one exposure is enough to impair work prospects. Furthermore, actors’ careers are impaired when writers with whom they worked are blacklisted. Moreover, the negative effects of stigma by mere association hold even when the focal artist has received public acclaim. These findings have broad implications. When a few individuals or organizations are engaged in wrongdoing and publicly targeted, stigma by association can lead to false positives and harm many innocents.

“Actual” and Perceptual Effects of Category Spanning

Literature to date has demonstrated that producers and products spanning multiple categories have inferior market performance. However, two related but distinct explanations exist as to the source of such a discount. One explanation suggests that “actual” skills are degraded when producers attempt to engage across diverse categories. Another explanation involves perceptual fit to category representations held by an audience as the cause. These two explanations tend to be confounded in archival studies because external observers, responsible for the evaluation of market performance, are often aware of both the identity of producers and the underlying characteristics of their products. This leaves researchers unable to empirically separate effects. We present an analysis conducted in a setting in which it was possible to distinguish the two mechanisms: critics’ ratings of the same wines through “blind” and “nonblind” tastings. The findings indicate that after controlling for the value of ratings assigned blindly, the wines made by wineries spanning styles continue to receive lower ratings in the nonblind situation.

Organizational Form Emergence A Meta-Analysis of the Ecological Theory of Legitimation

In this study, the authors provide an assessment of the ecological theory of organizational form emergence and focus on the positive density effect associated with legitimation. The argument comes in two steps. First, organizational ecology seeks to understand cross-population similarities in search of general patterns in form emergence processes. Using summative meta-analysis, the authors show that the average effect of density dependence on population-level legitimation is positive, but this average effect hides large variation across different populations. Second, in the spirit of recent revisions of this theory, the authors introduce two concepts that can be linked to industries or populations to explain this unaccounted-for variation: perceived simplicity of organizational goals and tangibility of offerings. Using formative meta-analysis, the study reveals that both population-level characteristics increase legitimation. Density effects on organizational founding rates tend to be stronger in manufacturing and for-profit industries, which are arguably settings featuring higher simplicity of goals and larger tangibility of offerings, respectively. On the basis of this set of findings, the authors conclude with a plea for a population-level theory of ecological differences, developing a comparative research strategy that is distinct from the current emphasis on single-population studies.

Category Signaling and Reputation

We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality when low-quality producers face higher costs of gaining membership. The strength of membership as a collective signal increases with the sharpness of the category boundary, that is, contrast. Our empirical study focuses on biodynamic and organic viticulture in Alsace.

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.

Balancing the skill sets of founders: Implications for the quality of organizational outputs

The jack-of-all-trades theory of entrepreneurship suggests that technically adept employees require additional skills in order to effectively transition to the more generalist role of founder. However, it is silent about the effect of broader skill acquisition on the quality of the outputs that new ventures produce. This silence is problematic given ecological research that indicates how working across categories can hinder one’s performance in a focal role. This article examines the relationship between the pattern of prior career experiences of founders in the restaurant industry and consumer evaluations of the food that their restaurants produce. According to this analysis of 404 Toronto restaurants, founders with more prior kitchen experience receive superior food quality evaluations. However, their prior ownership experience – that which broadens their skill sets – has more tenuous implications. At the extreme, food quality ratings associated with restaurant founders who also claim to be head chefs at founding are harmed by their accumulated ownership experience.

The Competitive Dynamics of Vertical Integration: Evidence from U.S. Motion Picture Producers, 1912–1970

We investigate the competitive consequence of vertical integration on organizational performance using a comprehensive dataset of U.S. motion picture production companies, which includes information on their vertical scope and competitive overlaps. Vertical integration appears to change the dynamics of competition in two ways: (i) it buffers the vertically integrated firms from environmental dependence and (ii) it intensifies competition among non-integrated organizations. In contrast to the existing literature, our results suggest that vertical integration has implications well beyond both the level of the individual transaction and even the internal efficiency of the integrated firm.