In recent years scholars of abusive supervision have expanded the scope of outcomes examined and have advanced new psychological and social processes to account for these and other outcomes. Besides the commonly used relational theories such as justice theory and social exchange theory, recent studies have more frequently drawn from theories about emotion to describe how abusive supervision influences the behavior, attitudes, and well-being of both the victims and the perpetrators. In addition, an increasing number of studies have examined the antecedents of abusive supervision. The studied antecedents include personality, behavioral, and situational characteristics of the supervisors and/or the subordinates. Studies have reported how characteristics of the supervisor and that of the focal victim interact to determining abuse frequency. Formerly postulated outcomes of abusive supervision (e.g., subordinate performance) have also been identified as antecedents of abusive supervision. This points to a need to model dynamic and mutually reciprocal processes between leader abusive behavior and follower responses with longitudinal data. Moreover, extending prior research that has exclusively focused on the victim’s perspective, scholars have started to take the supervisor’s perspective and the lens of third-parties, such as victims’ coworkers, to understand the broad impact of abusive supervision. Finally, a small number of studies have started to model abusive supervision as a multilevel phenomenon. These studies have examined a group aggregated measure of abusive supervision, examining its influence as an antecedent of individual level outcomes and as a moderator of relationships between individuals’ experiences of abusive supervision and personal outcomes. More research could be devoted to establishing the causal effects of abusive supervision and to developing organizational interventions to reduce abusive supervision.
1-20 of 237 Results
Article
Tracey Bretag
Academic integrity is an interdisciplinary concept that provides the foundation for every aspect and all levels of education. The term evokes strong emotions in teachers, researchers, and students—not least because it is usually associated with negative behaviors. When considering academic integrity, the discussion tends to revolve around cheating, plagiarism, dishonesty, fraud, and other academic malpractice and how best to prevent these behaviors. A more productive approach entails a focus on promoting the positive values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage (International Center for Academic Integrity, 2013) as the intrinsically motivated drivers for ethical academic practice. Academic integrity is much more than “a student issue” and requires commitment from all stakeholders in the academic community, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, established researchers, senior managers, policymakers, support staff, and administrators.
Article
Tracey J. Riley and Alex C. Yen
Although accounting is typically seen as a numbers-oriented discipline, with an emphasis on quantifying economic events and activity, the nexus of language and accounting, specifically the role of language in communicating corporate accounting results, has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. This is because quantified accounting results (e.g., earnings per share, sales revenue) are rarely communicated in isolation. Rather, they are usually accompanied by a non-quantitative narrative, such as an earnings press release, a corporate annual report, or the president’s letter, which, along with conference calls and content at corporate websites, we collectively refer to as “accounting narratives.” These narratives allow management to elaborate on and contextualize the financial performance of the company. However, because they are not as extensively regulated as the financial statements and are not standardized, these narratives can also be used by companies for impression-management purposes, to obfuscate (poor) performance and to “spin” the financial results to the companies’ favor.
Research into accounting narratives dates back to 1952 and has focused on a wide variety of features of narratives and on how those features affect financial statement readers’ (most notably, investors’) reactions. The earliest studies focused on accounting narratives’ readability by performing a syntactic analysis to assess the cognitive difficulty of written passages. This line of research has found that accounting narratives are syntactically complex and difficult to read and that management intentionally makes bad news less readable in order to strain the readers’ cognitive processes and lead to lower comprehension of the bad news. In addition to this evidence of obfuscation, researchers have found support for managers engaging in attributional framing, which is the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to actions within the company and negative outcomes to actions external to the company (e.g., the government or the weather) in an effort to influence readers’ perception of good versus bad news. More recently, researchers have found that managers use syntactic (sentence structure), semantic (word meaning), and metasemantic (abstract versus concrete construal) manipulation and make broad stylistic choices such as emphasis, length, and scenario form. In terms of how those features affect the readers of the narratives, readers (most notably, investors) have been shown to respond to length and readability; level of negativity; words pertaining to risk, uncertainty, credibility, commitment, and responsibility; justifications of excuses of poor performance; optimistic and pessimistic tone; vivid versus pallid language; internal versus external attributions; and use of self-references.
Article
Torben Juul Andersen and Carina Antonia Hallin
Contemporary organizations operate under turbulent business conditions and must adapt their strategies to ongoing changes. Sustainable performance can be achieved when the organization engages in interactive processes that link emerging opportunities to forward-looking analytics. But few organizations are able to practice this consistently. Fast processes performed by managers at the frontline respond to ongoing environmental stimuli and slow processes initiated by managers at the center interpret events and reasons about updated strategic actions. Current experiential insights from the fast processes can be aggregated systematically to inform the slow processes of reasoning. When the fast and slow processes interact they can form a dynamic system that adapts organizational activities to changing conditions.
Article
Lucy L. Gilson, Yuna S. H. Lee, and Robert C. Litchfield
Although creativity research has historically focused on individuals, with more and more employees working in teams, researchers have started to explore the construct of team creativity. Rather than a comprehensive review, this article takes an in-depth look at the most recent team creativity research. To do this, key themes and trends are discussed, which are then tied back to prior reviews, and new avenues for future research are proposed. Team creativity is a challenging construct because it can be conceptualized as both an outcome and a process, and there is no clear definition of either. When considering team creativity as an outcome, research has employed both complex mediation models as well as a more nuanced examination of moderating variables and constructs that may strengthen or attenuate the effects of relationships related to team creativity. This growing avenue of research recognizes the variability in team creativity that is possible in different circumstances and contexts, and seeks to identify what drives different outcomes. These approaches also acknowledge that team creativity is not guaranteed even when enabling conditions are in place, and that other variables may exert forces in different ways.
The recognition that team creativity is unlikely to be the simple sum of members’ creative processes is becoming very apparent, with researchers examining ways of encouraging, fostering, and sustaining creativity in teams over time. Researchers have also recognized that team creativity is more likely to unfurl over time as a process, rather than a discrete point-in-time event. To this end, the key areas examined are the roles of member diversity and leadership. For diversity, racio-ethno, cultural, gender, age, political orientation, and diversity training have all been examined. For leadership, the focus has shifted away from the more traditional transformational theories and to newer constructs such as humility, ethical and shared leadership, as well as what it means to have an ideational leader who facilitates idea generation. Taken together, what the most recent research tells us is that creativity in teams remains a growing and evolving area of inquiry. While no longer unexplored, much remains to be clarified such as the barriers to effective team creativity, and practices that may help transcend these barriers. A lot of promising areas for future research are highlighted, which will become more important as workplaces pivot toward cultivating team creativity in a systematic and intentional way.
Article
G. Tyge Payne and Oleg V. Petrenko
Agency theory is one the most prominent theoretical perspectives utilized in business and management research. Agency theory argues—using fundamental assumptions that agents are: (a) self-interested, (b) boundedly rational, and (c) different from principals in their goals and risk-taking preferences—that a problem occurs when one party (a principal) employs another (an agent) to make decisions and act in their stead. Essentially, the value of a principal-agent relationship is not optimized because the two contracted parties may have different interests and information is asymmetric (not equal). Agency costs are the result of principal and agent conflicts of interest and disagreements regarding actions that are taken. As such, monitoring and incentive-alignment systems are used to curb costs associated with opportunist behavior.
Agency theory is commonly utilized to understand and explain corporate governance phenomena, including executive incentive alignment, board monitoring, and control of top managers; this strand of the literature is founded in economics and represents the bulk of the research in business and management. However, other important principal-agent relationships are commonly seen in business and society, such as with politicians/voters, brokers/investors, and lawyers/clients, and have benefited from the vast stream of research that has explored the principal-agent relationship in various forms and contexts. Also, alternative theoretical perspectives have emerged to accommodate variations of the principal-agent relationship. Namely, principal-principal agency, behavioral agency, and stewardship theories are prominent alternative theories that challenge, expand, or relax the basic assumptions of the classic theory to extend our understanding of important relationships and mechanisms in business and management.
Article
Despite the term being coined in the early 1990s, heteronormativity is a longstanding and enduring hierarchical social system that identifies heterosexuality as the standard sexuality and normalizes gender-specific behaviors and roles for men, women, and transgender and non-binary individuals. As a system, it defines and enforces beliefs and practices about what is ‘normal’ in everyday life. Although there are many factors that shape heteronormative beliefs and attitudes, religion, the government, education, and workplaces are the principal macro-level factors that normalize and institutionalize heteronormative beliefs and attitudes. These institutions contribute an outsize influence on the perpetuation of heteronormativity in society because these institutions create and inculcate the norms and standards of what are and are not acceptable values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in our society. As such, in order to create effective interventions to eliminate the negative outcomes of heteronormativity, particular attention should be paid to each of these institutions. Parents, relatives, and other adults contribute to the normalization and institutionalization of heteronormativity at the individual- or micro-level. Although some people benefit from the system of heteronormativity (mainly heterosexual cisgender conforming men), much of the research on heteronormativity focuses on the negative outcomes. Heteronormativity is responsible for a host of pernicious outcomes such as lower self-esteem, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and greater rates of suicide ideation, verbal and physical abuse, and workplace mistreatment and discrimination. Future research should investigate identify effective micro- and macro-level interventions that could mitigate or eliminate the negative effects of heteronormativity.
Article
Andy El-Zayaty and Russell Coff
Many discussions of the creation and appropriation of value stop at the firm level. Imperfections in the market allow for a firm to gain competitive advantage, thereby appropriating rents from the market. What has often been overlooked is the continued process of appropriation within firms by parties ranging from shareholders to managers to employees. Porter’s “five forces” model and the resource-based view of the firm laid out the determinants of value creation at the firm level, but it was left to others to explore the onward distribution of that value. Many strategic management and strategic human capital scholars have explored the manner in which employees and managers use their bargaining power vis-à-vis the firm to appropriate value—sometimes in a manner that may not align with the interests of shareholders. In addition, cooperative game theorists provided unique insights into the way in which parties divide firm surplus among each other. Ultimately, the creation of value is merely the beginning of a complex, multiparty process of bargaining and competition for the rights to claim rents.
Article
Rangapriya Kannan and Paola Perez-Aleman
Innovation adoption is challenging at both intra-organizational and interorganizational levels. Several decades of innovation adoption research have identified various barriers at both levels. Intra-organizational barriers are often related to the characteristics of the innovation, adopters, managers, environment, and ecosystem but can also include an incompatibility with an organization’s strategy, structural impediments, organizational resource constraints, a lack of fit of the innovation with an organizational culture and climate, decision making challenges, a lack of integration with an organization’s knowledge management, human resource management practices, dynamic capabilities, and active innovation resistance from customers. Interorganizational barriers include uncertainty with learning and implementation, the distributed nature of the innovation process, differences in production systems, disparities in regulatory systems, variation within local contexts, and the nature of embedded knowledge adopted in diverse organizational contexts.
One of the key missing aspects in understanding innovation adoption is how extant practices within an organizational or interorganizational context enhance or hinder innovation adoption. Although the practices of innovation adoption emerge and evolve dynamically, existing research does not highlight fine-grained practices that lead to its success or failure. A practice lens focuses on people’s recurrent actions and helps to understand social life as an ongoing production that results from these actions. The durability of practices results from the reciprocal interactions between agents and structures that are embedded within daily routines. A practice lens allows us to study practices from three different perspectives. The first perspective, empirically explores how people act in organizational contexts. The second, a theoretical focus investigates the structure of organizational life. This perspective also delves into the relations between the actions that people take over time and in varying contexts. Finally, the third perspective which is a philosophical one focuses on how practices reproduce organizational reality.
By focusing on the unfolding of constellations of everyday activities in relation to other practices within and across time and space, a practice lens hones in on everyday actions. Everyday actions are consequential in producing the structural contours of social life. A practice lens emphasizes what people do repeatedly and how those repetitive actions impact the social world. A practice theory lens also challenges the assumption that things are separable and independent. Instead, it focuses on relationality of mutual constitution to understand how one aspect of the issue creates another aspect. Relationality of mutual constitution is the notion that things such as identities, ideas, institutions, power, and material goods take on meaning only when they are enacted through practices instead of these being innate features of these things Focusing on duality forces us to address the assumptions that underlie the separation.
A practice perspective on innovation adoption highlights the concepts of duality, dynamics, reciprocal interactions, relationality, and distributed agency to inform both the theory and practice of innovation adoption. Understanding these concepts enables a practice lens for successful adoption of innovations that impact organizational and societal outcomes, such as economic development, productivity enhancement, entrepreneurship, sustainability, equity, health, and other economic, social, and environmental changes.
Article
Michael G. Pratt and Gabriel R. Sala
Central to all empirical research—in particular, inductive qualitative field research—observations can provide core insights to work practices, the physical or material elements of organizations, and the integrity of research informants. Yet management research has devoted less attention to observations than it has to other methods. Hence, providing resources and guidance to current and aspiring researchers as to what constitutes observations and how to tackle key questions that must be addressed in designing and implementing observations is key.
Observing, as pertains to research, can be defined as a method that involves using one’s senses, guided by one’s attention, to gather information on, for example, (a) what people are doing (acts, activities, events); (b) where they are doing it (location); and (c) what they are doing it with (objects), over a period of time. Once researchers have determined they want to engage in observation, they have to make several decisions. First, they have to figure out whether observation is a good fit with their study and research question(s). If so, various other choices must be made with regard to degree of revelation, degree of immersion, time in the field, and how to be present in the research context, and still more choices follow. Researchers need to decide when to start (and stop) observing as well as how to observe, record, and report their findings. The article provides a decision-tree model of observational methods to guide researchers through these various choices.
Article
Martin Obschonka and Christian Fisch
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are intensively shaping businesses and the economy as a whole, and AI-related research is exploding in many domains of business and management research. In contrast, AI has received relatively little attention within the domain of entrepreneurship research, while many entrepreneurship scholars agree that AI will likely shape entrepreneurship research in deep, disruptive ways.
When summarizing both the existing entrepreneurship literature on AI and potential avenues for future research, the growing relevance of AI for entrepreneurship research manifests itself along two dimensions. First, AI applications in the real world establish a distinct research topic (e.g., whether and how entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures use and develop AI-based technologies, or how AI can function as an external enabler that generates and enhances entrepreneurial outcomes). In other words, AI is changing the research object in entrepreneurship research.
The second dimension refers to drawing on AI-based research methods, such as big data techniques or AI-based forecasting methods. Such AI-based methods open several avenues for researchers to gain new, influential insights into entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures that are more difficult to assess using traditional methods. In other words, AI is changing the research methods. Given that, so far, human intelligence could not fully uncover and comprehend the secrets behind the entrepreneurial process that is so deeply embedded in uncertainty and opportunity, AI-supported research methods might achieve new breakthrough discoveries.
We conclude that the field needs to embrace AI as a topic and research method more enthusiastically while maintaining the essential research standards and scientific rigor that guarantee the field’s well-being, reputation, and impact.
Article
Joan V. Gallos
The arts have played a major role in the development of management theory, practice, and education; and artists’ competencies like creativity, inventiveness, aesthetic appreciation, and a design mindset are increasingly vital for individual and organizational success in a competitive global world. The arts have long been used in teaching to: (a) explore human nature and social structures; (b) facilitate cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral growth; (c) translate theory into action; (d) provide opportunities for professional development; and (e) enhance individual and systemic creativity and capacities for change. Use of literature and films are curricular mainstays. A review of the history of the arts in management teaching and learning illustrates how the arts have expanded our ways of knowing and defining managerial and leadership effectiveness—and the competencies and training necessary for them.
The scholarship of management teaching is large, primarily ‘how-to’ teaching designs and the assessments of them. There is a clear need to expand the research on how and why the arts are and can be used more effectively to educate professionals, enable business growth and new product development, facilitate collaboration and team building, and bring innovative solutions to complex ideas. Research priorities include: the systematic assessments of the state of arts-based management teaching and learning; explorations of stakeholder attitudes and of environmental forces contributing to current educational models and practices; analyses of the learning impact of various pedagogical methods and designs; examining the unique role of the arts in professional education and, especially, in teaching for effective action; mining critical research from education, psychology, creativity studies, and other relevant disciplines to strengthen management teaching and learning; and probing how to teach complex skills like innovative thinking and creativity. Research on new roles and uses for the arts provide a foundation for a creative revisiting of 21st-century management education and training.
Article
There are no clear definitions of entrepreneurship and art. It is therefore difficult to explain and theorize arts entrepreneurship education. Here, what artists think about these issues in the United States, India, and Mexico is explored. Suggestions made by artists were examined and included in the proposed arts entrepreneurship education theory. Artists stated that they do experience lack of business skills that arts entrepreneurship education can help them acquire. These business and aesthetic skill sets are needed to make a living as an artist. The Coleman Fellows Program provided an opportunity to test the arts entrepreneurship theory constructs being proposed. The results from these tests are included the article.
The 2017 annual Strategic National Arts Alumni study reported that artists continue to suffer from several skill gaps. Of these, financial, business management, and entrepreneurship skills were identified as the main gaps that continue to plague artists. This is troubling because numerous educational and training efforts have been underway to address these and other skill gaps since at least the early 2000s. However, they have not closed these skill gaps. A modified arts entrepreneurship education theory is proposed in order to do so. Artists who acquire these skills should have a higher probability of success making a living practicing their art form. The article proposes three arts entrepreneurship education theory constructs, namely collaborative pedagogies utilizing the modules infusion method, entrepreneurial universities where these pedagogies can be tested and improved, and effectively managing the commodification of arts. Supporting evidence is provided for the three constructs, along with examples of the modules of entrepreneurship content for infusion. Implications and recommendations for future arts entrepreneurship education programs are provided and discussed.
Article
Steven A. Stewart and Allen C. Amason
Since the earliest days of strategic management research, scholars have sought to measure and model the effects of top managers on organizational performance. A watershed moment in this effort came with the 1984 introduction of Hambrick and Mason’s upper echelon view and their contention that firms are a reflection of their top management teams (TMT). An explosion of research followed and hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscripts have since been published on the subject. While a number of excellent reviews of this extensive literature exist, a relative few have asked questions about the overall state and future of the field. We undertook this assessment in an effort to answer some key questions. Are we still making progress on the big questions that gave rise to the upper echelon view, or have we reached a point of diminishing returns with this stream of research? If we are at an inflection point, what are the issues that should drive future inquiry about top management teams?
Article
Good assessment and feedback are essential for high student achievement, retention, and satisfaction in contemporary higher education, and adopting a fit-for-purpose approach that emphasizes assessment for learning can have a significant impact, but it is a complex and highly nuanced process so needs careful and research-informed design principles. Here the crucial importance of assessment in contemporary higher education pedagogy is considered, the key principles of good assessment are reviewed, and some suggestions are made for a framework to effectively interrogate individual practice with a view to continuous improvement.
Additionally, different means of offering feedback can help students to get the measure of their learning and point them toward future enhancement strategies but must be achieved in ways that are manageable for all stakeholders. Taxing questions are provided here for use by curriculum designers and all those who deliver and assess it enabling them to draw together key issues into a workable framework for assessment enhancement.
Article
Pernille Eskerod
Organizations (whether they are permanent or temporary) have stakeholders, that is, individuals and groups that can affect or be affected by the organization’s activities and achievements. Assuming that the fundamental driver of value creation is stakeholder relationships, managing those relationships well is a prerequisite for obtaining and sustaining success in all businesses, regardless of the success measures applied. Therefore, applying a stakeholder perspective is of significant importance for any manager or entrepreneur. However, the essentials as well as the implications of applying such a perspective are not clear. Researchers and practitioners have offered many contributions, however, the existing literature is inconclusive. To provide clarity, stakeholder concepts (e.g. stakeholder definition, systems perspective, separation thesis, stakeholder analysis, stakeholder engagement, perception of fairness, stakeholder utility function, stakeholder salience, stakeholder disaggregation, stakeholder multiplicity, managing for stakeholders, Value Creation Stakeholder Theory, value destruction, shadows of the context) are defined and 15 propositions for further inquiry are offered. The Scandinavian and American origins of stakeholder thinking are presented. The propositions are intended to invite discussion—and could form the basis for future research questions as well as provide guidance for managers. By drawing on (a) Professor Eric Rhenman, who in the 1960s first proposed an explicit theoretical framework on stakeholder thinking; (b) Professor R. Edward Freeman, who has been the most influential contributor to the field; and (c) additional, selected contributions, the aim is to providevalue for both new and seasoned researchers as well as for managers, consultants, and educators. In order to give the reader the opportunity to self-assess and interpret the “raw data,” the text is rich on citations.
Article
Audrey Murrell
The concept of aversive racism has had a significant impact on theory, research, and practice devoted to better understanding bias, discrimination, and persistent disparities based on social identity group such as race, gender, social class, and so on. Originally developed to better explain subtle forms of bias toward racial and minoritized groups, this concept has been extended to understand the impact of disparities in a range of diverse settings, such as intergroup relations, health outcomes, fairness in employment setting, intergroup conflict, educational outcomes, racial bias in policing, experiences of stress and mental health issues, and persistent economic disparities. A core facet of the aversive framework paradigm is that because of human biases that are deeply rooted within a historical context and reinforced by ongoing societal ideologies, unintentional and subtle forms of discrimination emerge and persist. Given that these subtle forms of bias and discrimination exist within otherwise well-intentioned individuals, strategies to eliminate them require understanding the complexity of the aversive racism phenomenon in order to develop effective social interventions.
This article reviews the foundation, research, and impact of this important body of work. In addition, the concept of aversive racism is discussed in connection to emerging research on microaggressions and unconscious (implicit) bias in order to create a more integrated framework that can shape future research and applications. Lastly, practical implications for organizations and future directions are explored, such as using social identity as a theoretical lens, including global perspectives on intergroup bias and leveraging emerging work on intersectionality, as useful perspectives to extend the aversive racism framework. Setting a future agenda for research and practice related to aversive racism is key to greater understanding of how to reduce intergroup bias and discrimination through interventions that cut across traditional academic and discipline boundaries as one approach to create meaningful and long-lasting social impact.
Article
Christine Shropshire
The board of directors serves multiple corporate governance functions, including monitoring management, providing oversight on strategic issues, and linking the organization to the broader external environment. Researchers have become increasingly interested in board interlocks and how content transmitted via these linkages shapes firm outcomes, such as corporate structure and strategies. As influential mechanisms to manage environmental uncertainty and facilitate information exchange, Board interlocks are created by directors who are affiliated with more than one firm via employment or board service and allow the board to capture a diversity of strategic experiences. One critical corporate decision that may be influenced by interlocks and strategic diffusion is diversification (i.e., in which products and markets to compete). Directors draw on their own experiences with diversification strategies at other firms to help guide and manage ongoing strategic decision-making. There is broad scholarship on interlocks and the individuals who create them, with extant research reporting that some firms are more likely to imitate or learn from their interlock partners than others. Prior findings suggest that the conditions under which information is transmitted via interlock, such as an individual director’s experience with diversification strategies at other firms, may make that information more influential to the focal firm’s own strategic decision-making related to diversification. A more holistic framework captures factors related to the individual interlocking director, the board and firm overall and the context surrounding these linkages and relationships, helping to promote future research. Understanding the social context surrounding board interlocks offers opportunities to more deeply examine how these interconnections serve in pursuit of the board’s fundamental purpose of protecting shareholder investment from managerial self-interest. Overall, integrating multi-level factors will offer new insights into the influence of board interlocks on firm strategies on both sides of the partnership. Expanding knowledge of how inter-firm linkages transmit knowledge influential to board decision-making can also improve our understanding of board effectiveness and corporate governance.
Article
Matthew Rutherford and Duygu Phillips
Bootstrapping is a term, a construct, and a paradigm that has attracted substantial attention from both popular press writers and scholarly researchers. In the scholarly community bootstrapping research is concerned, broadly, with studying the phenomenon of startups in resource poor environments. While this would describe virtually all startups, bootstrapping is most focused upon those resource-starved startups that elected to use only the resources existing internally to the firm or founder(s). That is, in bootstrapped firms, no financing has been attained from individuals or entities outside the firm. In practice, bootstrapping is understood as (a) launching a business with no external debt or equity, and (b) finding creative ways to manage a business launched with no external debt or equity.
Most entrepreneurs bootstrap at founding. It is estimated that few (20%) take on external debt at startup; and far fewer (5%) launch with external equity. Examples of techniques employed because of the decision to bootstrap include using credit cards, drawing upon home equity and sweat equity, taking loans from family, and investing salary from one’s “day job.” There are fundamental reasons for this, both from a demand side and a supply side.
From the demand side entrepreneurs, on average, are autonomous and therefore have a preference for control and a general aversion to external forms of capital, both debt and equity. On the supply side, because of extreme asymmetric information that exists between financiers and entrepreneurs, financiers often cannot accurately gauge the underlying quality of the entrepreneur/venture and are therefore reluctant to provide capital to them.
With regard to outcomes of bootstrapping, though, the research is equivocal. Ceteris paribus, it appears that there is no significant difference in performance between bootstrappers and non-bootstrappers; however, contingencies likely exist. For example, non-bootstrappers are likely more prone to failure because they often take more risks. Therefore, while a few heavily financed ventures may achieve lofty success, many fail in dramatic fashion. By contrast, bootstrappers are often more cautious and therefore these firms demonstrate less variance in outcomes.
Understanding of both antecedents and outcomes of bootstrapping has grown since the introduction of the construct in the late 1980s. Because of this expanded understanding, the construct has evolved from phenomenological roots to one more grounded in theory. That said, there remain ambiguities around bootstrapping, not the least of which is the existence of myriad definitions and resultant operationalizations. Partially because of these varied conceptualizations, the scholarship on bootstrapping has been somewhat fragmented and challenging to decipher. This fragmented accumulation has led to not only a literature with vivid applications and examples, but also one with little universal logic. This fact has made it somewhat difficult for a field to advance.
However, insights from existing theory (e.g., signaling, cultural entrepreneurship) as well as the relatively recent development of closely related bases (e.g., effectuation, bricolage) can complement and advance bootstrapping by adding theoretical breadth and depth. When understood alongside these related lines of research in entrepreneurship, researchers are better equipped to create, catalog, and accumulate knowledge regarding bootstrapping. In turn, educators will be more effective in communicating how entrepreneurs are able to launch in resource poor environments, and ultimately achieve success.
Article
Mallory E. Compton and Kenneth J. Meier
Pathologies inherent in democratic political systems have consequences for bureaucracy, and they need to be examined. Limited in time, resources, and expertise, elected officials turn to bureaucratic institutions to carry out policy goals but all too often give public agencies too little support or too few resources to implement them effectively. In response to the challenges imposed by politics, public agencies have sought organizational solutions. Bureaucracies facing shortages of material resources, clear goals, representation of minority interests, or public trust have in recent decades adopted less hierarchical structures, exploited networks and privatization, and taken a representative role. In other words, the evolution of postbureaucratic governance institutions is in part a consequence of political incentives. Efforts to diagnose and resolve many of the shortcomings attributed to bureaucracy therefore require an accounting of the political processes shaping the context in which public managers and bureaucrats operate.
