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
A Practice-Based View of Innovation Adoption
Rangapriya Kannan and Paola Perez-Aleman
Article
The Arts and the Art and Science of Management Teaching
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
Blame: Stakeholder Judgments That Impact Organizations and Entrepreneurs
Varkey Titus and Izuchukwu Mbaraonye
Blame is a feature of everyday life, whether or not that blame is directed toward an individual for a willful act of moral transgression, an entrepreneur for taking reckless action that puts the venture and its employees at risk, or a company for the violation of some social norm. Blame identifies morally wrong behavior and has the power to pressure individuals to adhere to a set of norms. More broadly, blame is worthy of scholarly consideration because it is a reality for organizations and the individuals who lead them.
Blame is multifaceted because it entails psychological, social, and legal issues. Historically, psychological theories of blame emphasized the rational and prescriptive—how blame attribution processes ought to occur to produce an accurate blame attribution, for example. Over time, psychological theories started to incorporate nonrational elements—such as how socially attractive the potentially blameworthy is, whether the blameworthy engage in “positive” or “negative” actions that are unrelated to the blameworthy act, and so forth. Blame becomes more complicated when it moves from a specific individual (e.g., an entrepreneur) to an aggregate group (a venture) or an abstract entity (a corporation). The aggregation of blame creates an apportionment problem in that it is unclear who within a group ought to be blamed. This complication is further illustrated in the court of law. For instance, courts in the United States have struggled to consistently judge cases of corporate criminal liability due, in part, to the difficulty of knowing how to assign blame to an abstract entity. Part of the challenge relates to establishing a criminal “state of mind” to a corporation, and the broader question whether a corporation can even have such a state of mind (or if that state of mind resides in its leaders, employees, etc.).
Management research on blame is limited. Existing work examines blames-shifting tactics, such as scapegoating, wherein organizations place blame on specific organizational actors who may or may not have any direct connection to the blameworthy event. Importantly, blame attributions can flow both ways: employees may sometimes blame the broader organization, despite the employees’ involvement in the blameworthy act.
Given the complexities of blame, entrepreneurs face unique blame-related challenges at different points of their venture’s life cycle. At early stages of the life cycle, blameworthy acts are unlikely to have significant societal impact, and attributions are relatively simple due to the minimal number of actors involved in the venture. As the venture grows, the impact of a blameworthy act grows in magnitude, as does the difficulty of accurately apportioning blame for the act among the numerous actors involved. If the venture eventually adopts a formal corporate structure, it also adopts corporate characteristics such as dispersed decision-making processes, a board of directors that are meant to provide some level of oversight, and so forth. This formal corporate structure introduces the challenge of establishing a “state of mind” for a blameworthy act. Ultimately, blame affects entrepreneurs, their ventures, and the corporations that eventually grow from them, and is worth further scholarly investigation.
Article
Content and Text Analysis Methods for Organizational Research
Rhonda K. Reger and Paula A. Kincaid
Content analysis is to words (and other unstructured data) as statistics is to numbers (also called structured data)—an umbrella term encompassing a range of analytic techniques. Content analyses range from purely qualitative analyses, often used in grounded theorizing and case-based research to reduce interview data into theoretically meaningful categories, to highly quantitative analyses that use concept dictionaries to convert words and phrases into numerical tables for further quantitative analysis. Common specialized types of qualitative content analysis include methods associated with grounded theorizing, narrative analysis, discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and conversation analysis. Major quantitative content analyses include dictionary-based approaches, topic modeling, and natural language processing. Though specific steps for specific types of content analysis vary, a prototypical content analysis requires eight steps beginning with defining coding units and ending with assessing the trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the overall coding. Furthermore, while most content analysis evaluates textual data, some studies also analyze visual data such as gestures, videos and pictures, and verbal data such as tone.
Content analysis has several advantages over other data collection and analysis methods. Content analysis provides a flexible set of tools that are suitable for many research questions where quantitative data are unavailable. Many forms of content analysis provide a replicable methodology to access individual and collective structures and processes. Moreover, content analysis of documents and videos that organizational actors produce in the normal course of their work provides unobtrusive ways to study sociocognitive concepts and processes in context, and thus avoids some of the most serious concerns associated with other commonly used methods. Content analysis requires significant researcher judgment such that inadvertent biasing of results is a common concern. On balance, content analysis is a promising activity for the rigorous exploration of many important but difficult-to-study issues that are not easily studied via other methods. For these reasons, content analysis is burgeoning in business and management research as researchers seek to study complex and subtle phenomena.
Article
Corporate Governance in Business and Management
Erik E. Lehmann
Corporate governance is a recent concept that encompasses the costs caused by managerial misbehavior. It is concerned with how organizations in general, and corporations in particular, produce value and how that value is distributed among the members of the corporation, its stakeholders. The interrelation of value production and value distribution links the ubiquitous technological aspect (the production of value) with the moral and ethical dimension (the distribution of value). Corporate governance is concerned with this link in general, but more specifically with the moral and ethical dimensions of distributing the generated value among the stakeholders. Value in firms is created by firm-specific investments, and the motivation and coordination of value-enhancing activities and investment is protected by the power concentrated at the pyramidal top of the organization. In modern companies, it is the CEO and the top management who decide how to create value and how to distribute it among the relevant stakeholders. Due to asymmetric information and the imperfect nature of markets and contracts, adverse selection and moral hazard problems occur, where delegated (selected) managers could act in their own interest at the costs of other relevant stakeholders.
Corporate governance can be understood as a two-tailed concept. The first aspect is about identifying the (most) relevant stakeholder(s), separating theory and practice into two different and conflicting streams: the stakeholder value approach and the shareholder value approach. The second aspect of the concept is about providing and analyzing different mechanisms, reducing the costs induced by moral hazard and adverse selection effects, and balancing out the motivation and coordination problems of the relevant stakeholders. Corporate governance is an interdisciplinary concept encompassing academic fields such as finance, economics, accounting, law, taxation, and psychology, among others.
As countries differ according to their institutions (i.e., legal and political systems, norms, and rules), firms differ according to their size, age, dominant shareholders, or industries. Thus, concepts in corporate governance differ along these dimensions as well. And while the underlying characteristics vary in time, continuously or as a result of an exogenous shock, concepts in corporate governance are dynamic and static, offering a challenging field of interest for academics, policymakers, and firm managers.
Article
Corporate Governance in Entrepreneurial Firms
Julio De Castro, Jose Lejarraga, and Qiong Wu
Corporate governance unfolds in entrepreneurial firms, giving rise to concerns about the coordination and control of resources. Understanding corporate governance in entrepreneurial firms (CGEF) is important because of the challenges of liability of newness and smallness and issues of transition. In particular, two issues affect these firms: a diluted separation between ownership and control and the role played by boards of directors. As a result, most of the literature on CGEF revolves around the interrelations between these governance mechanisms and how they affect the outcomes of entrepreneurially driven firms. This combination of factors present in entrepreneurial firms gives rise to new theoretical perspectives that enrich the corporate governance literature.
Article
Cultural Entrepreneurship: Four Domains of Inquiry
Jean-François Soublière and Christi Lockwood
Cultural entrepreneurship research investigates the many cultural means and processes by which innovative courses of action come to fruition. Although commercial and technological concerns clearly matter, this area of research draws much-needed attention to the meaning-making activities that underpin entrepreneurship, innovation, and change. For instance, entrepreneurs tell stories that convey how their endeavors came to be and what they could accomplish. Innovators challenge the boundaries of familiar market categories and bring forward products that customers may not yet be equipped to understand. Creators develop novel experiences that challenge established conventions in surprising ways. In all these situations, entrepreneurial actors must harness their cultural context to convey the value of their endeavors to targeted others, including both external audiences and other related actors. In turn, these targeted others also draw on their cultural context to ascribe value to endeavors and decide whether to confer their attention and support.
Expanding beyond more traditional views of entrepreneurship, which focus on the creation or exploitation of profitable opportunities, cultural entrepreneurship scholars recognize that entrepreneurial action is always embedded in its cultural context. This context provides a rich pool of cultural resources—that is, values, beliefs, practices, vocabularies, identities, logics, symbols, and practices—that entrepreneurial actors assemble, combine, or develop to bring innovative courses of action to fruition. These innovative courses of action are not limited to economic or technological pursuits but encompass a wider range of entrepreneurial possibilities, including the creation of new products and services as well as efforts to foster strategic change, advance social innovations, or tackle grand challenges, for instance.
Cultural entrepreneurship has developed into a vibrant area of research, examining a variety of outcomes at different levels of analysis. Four distinct domains of inquiry can be gleaned from this. Two of the domains speak to the interplay between entrepreneurial actors—be they individuals, organizations, or broader collectives—and their external audiences. The first domain, entrepreneurship and innovation, uncovers the cultural processes by which entrepreneurial actors win the backing of external audiences, such as potential investors, market analysts, or customers. The second domain, market mediation and activism, draws attention to the active influence that external audiences have on the innovative courses of action that actors pursue, and how they do so. The last two domains speak to the interplay between focal actors and other related actors. The third domain, market creation and strategy, focuses on how actors shape the collective boundaries of given market categories, and what other related actors do within these boundaries. Finally, the fourth domain, intrapreneurship and organizational change, examines how actors account for what other related actors do too, and how they develop their organizational capacity to innovate and create innovative courses of action. Despite their different emphases, these four domains are united by a common interest in understanding how entrepreneurial actors bring innovative courses of action to fruition and the broader meaning systems in which such efforts are embedded.
Article
External Corporate Governance Mechanisms: Linking Forces to Behaviors
G. Tyge Payne and Curt Moore
Corporate governance research has a long and varied history, having evolved from a broad number of scholarly disciplines, including sociology, law, finance, and management. Across these various disciplines, it is maintained that governance is essential to corporate success, as it provides strategic and ethical guidance to the company. While research has largely focused on internal mechanisms through which governance is enacted (such as ownership arrangements, board structures, managerial rewards and incentives, etc.), external forces and mechanisms are increasingly important to modern businesses. External corporate governance mechanisms emanate from outside the organization and support forces that promote governance structures, processes, and practices by top executives and board directors. Institutions, industries, markets, networks, and strong individual external stakeholders all work to influence corporate governance decisions and behaviors both directly and indirectly. The external forces induce mechanisms that influence desirable behaviors or intervene when internal mechanisms are compromised or ineffective.
Recent literature on external governance mechanisms can help scholars and practitioners develop a better understanding of this important area of inquiry, and future research should consider three broad suggestions to move the field forward: differentiating between forces and mechanisms; recognizing unique stakeholders, boundaries, and levels of analysis; and improving empirical designs to better recognize and understand what factors matter in instituting governance adjustments and behavior changes.
Article
External Enablers of Entrepreneurship
Per Davidsson, Jan Recker, and Frederik von Briel
“External enabler” (EE) denotes nontrivial changes to the business environment—such as new technology, regulatory change, demographic and sociocultural trends, macroeconomic swings, and changes to the natural environment—that enable entrepreneurial pursuits. The EE framework was developed to increase knowledge accumulation in entrepreneurship and strategy research regarding the influence of environmental factors on entrepreneurial endeavors. The framework provides detailed structure and carefully defined terminology to describe, analyze, and explain the influence of changes in the business environment on entrepreneurial pursuits. EE characteristics specify the environmental changes’ range of impact in terms of spatial, sectoral, sociocultural, and temporal scope as well as the degree of suddenness and predictability of their onset. EE mechanisms specify the types of benefits individual ventures may derive from EEs. Among others, these include cost saving, resource provision, making possible new or improved products/services, and demand expansion. EE roles situate these (anticipated) mechanisms in entrepreneurial processes as triggering and/or shaping and/or outcome-enhancing. EE’s influence is conceived of as mediated by entrepreneurial agency that—in addition to agent characteristics—is contingent on the opacity (difficulty to identify) and agency-intensity (difficulty to exploit) of EE mechanisms, with the ensuing enablement being variously fortuitous or resulting from strategic deliberation.
Article
Familization of Lone-Founder Firms: Highlights from Asian Firms
Yijie Min, Yanlong Zhang, and Sun Hyun Park
Family firms can either be “born” or “made.” Although previous studies suggest that most of the family firms in the US context are “born,” family firms can be “made” by the founder’s decision to invite family members to the management. We conceptualize this process of family firm emergence as familization, during which lone-founders’ family influence increases as more family members are appointed to director and/or executive positions. Transition from lone-founder-control to family-control is often accompanied by significant changes in governance structure, strategic decisions, and firm performance. This work documents the pervasiveness and heterogeneity of the familization process and proposes an analytical framework covering four research areas associated with the phenomenon: the antecedents that motivate founders to choose the familization path, the familization process involving internal and external firm constituents, the consequences of familization decision, and the potential moderators of the familization impact. To better understand these theoretical perspectives, an explorative empirical investigation is conducted based on a sample of Chinese-listed firms that experienced familization. Familization cases in other Asian emerging economies were also discussed in comparison with the family firms in Western economies.
Article
Innovation in Family Business
Alfredo De Massis, Emanuela Rondi, and Samuel Wayne Appleton
The involvement of families in firms’ ownership, management, and governance is a key driver of organizational attitudes, behaviors, and performances, especially those related to innovation. Starting from the beginning of the 21st century, the academic interest toward family firm innovation has bloomed. This body of research has mostly emerged from family firm scholars, while mainstream innovation scholars have often overlooked family variables in their studies. Indeed, innovation is one of the main areas in family firm research, integrating family and business aspects, leading to a plethora of sometimes contradictory findings. Initially, research compared innovation between family and nonfamily firms. While this approach has been beneficial to the rise of this stream of research and underlined the idiosyncratic characteristics of family firms on this matter, it soon emerged that within family firms there is a high degree of heterogeneity, especially in their attributes and the way they relate to innovation. Therefore, scholars have delved deeper into the heterogeneous influence that different types and degrees of family involvement in the firm can exert on innovation. This vast body of literature can be reconciled according to an antecedents–activities–outcomes framework allowing to attune current understanding of family firm innovation and recommend directions for future research. While most of current research has examined the antecedents of family business innovation, further examination of the activity of innovating in family firms is needed. Fostering accessibility to this literature allows students, practitioners, and scholars to grasp and digest this insightful area of family business research. It also encourages an extension of the range of perspectives adopted to examine innovation in family firms, contributing to advance current knowledge.
Article
Institutional Logics
Heather A. Haveman and Gillian Gualtieri
Research on institutional logics surveys systems of cultural elements (values, beliefs, and normative expectations) by which people, groups, and organizations make sense of and evaluate their everyday activities, and organize those activities in time and space. Although there were scattered mentions of this concept before 1990, this literature really began with the 1991 publication of a theory piece by Roger Friedland and Robert Alford. Since that time, it has become a large and diverse area of organizational research. Several books and thousands of papers and book chapters have been published on this topic, addressing institutional logics in sites as different as climate change proceedings of the United Nations, local banks in the United States, and business groups in Taiwan. Several intellectual precursors to institutional logics provide a detailed explanation of the concept and the theory surrounding it. These literatures developed over time within the broader framework of theory and empirical work in sociology, political science, and anthropology. Papers published in ten major sociology and management journals in the United States and Europe (between 1990 and 2015) provide analysis and help to identify trends in theoretical development and empirical findings. Evaluting these trends suggest three gentle corrections and potentially useful extensions to the literature help to guide future research: (1) limiting the definition of institutional logic to cultural-cognitive phenomena, rather than including material phenomena; (2) recognizing both “cold” (purely rational) cognition and “hot” (emotion-laden) cognition; and (3) developing and testing a theory (or multiple related theories), meaning a logically interconnected set of propositions concerning a delimited set of social phenomena, derived from assumptions about essential facts (axioms), that details causal mechanisms and yields empirically testable (falsifiable) hypotheses, by being more consistent about how we use concepts in theoretical statements; assessing the reliability and validity of our empirical measures; and conducting meta-analyses of the many inductive studies that have been published, to develop deductive theories.
Article
Institutional Theory in Organization Studies
Robert J. David, Pamela S. Tolbert, and Johnny Boghossian
Institutional theory is a prominent perspective in contemporary organizational research. It encompasses a large, diverse body of theoretical and empirical work connected by a common emphasis on cultural understandings and shared expectations. Institutional theory is often used to explain the adoption and spread of formal organizational structures, including written policies, standard practices, and new forms of organization. Tracing its roots to the writings of Max Weber on legitimacy and authority, the perspective originated in the 1950s and 1960s with the work of Talcott Parsons, Philip Selznick, and Alvin Gouldner on organization–environment relations. It subsequently underwent a “cognitive turn” in the 1970s, with an emphasis on taken-for-granted habits and assumptions, and became commonly known as “neo-institutionalism” in organizational studies. Recently, work based on the perspective has shifted from a focus on processes involved in producing isomorphism to a focus on institutional change, exemplified by studies of the emergence of new laws and regulations, products, services, and occupations. The expansion of the theoretical framework has contributed to its long-term vitality, though a number of challenges to its development remain, including resolving inconsistencies in the different models of decision-making and action (homo economicus vs. homo sociologicus) that underpin institutional analysis and improving our understanding of the intersection of socio-cultural forces and entrepreneurial agency.
Article
National Systems of Innovation
Erik E. Lehmann and Julian Schenkenhofer
The pursuit of economic growth stands out as one of the main imperatives within modern economies. Nevertheless, economies differ considerably in their competitiveness. Theories on the endogeneity of growth agree on the value of knowledge creation and innovativeness to determine a country’s capability to achieve a sustained performance and to adapt to the dynamics of changing environments and faster information flows. To this effect, national institutional regimes shape nation-specific contexts and embed individuals and firms. The resulting incentive structures shape the attitudes and behavior of individuals and firms alike, whose interactions contribute to the accumulation and flow of knowledge among the nodes of their networks. National systems of innovation (NSIs) therefore embody a concept that aims to analyze the national innovation performance of economies. It rests its rationale in the variation of national institutions that shape the diffusion of technologies through the process of shared knowledge creation and the development of learning routines. Both public and private institutions are thought to interact in a given nation-specific institutional context that essentially affects incentive schemes and resource allocation of the involved economic agents in creating, sharing, distributing, absorbing, and commercializing knowledge. To this effect, public policy plays a key role in the NSI through building bridges between these actors, reducing information asymmetries, and providing them with resources from others within the system. The different actors contributing to the creation and diffusion of knowledge within the system are needed to exchange information and provide the engine for sustained economic growth. Universities, research institutes, companies and the individual entrepreneur are in charge of shaping their economic system in a way that resource and skill complementarities are exploited to the mutual benefit.
Article
New Venture Legitimacy
Greg Fisher
Starting an entrepreneurial endeavor is an uncertain and ambiguous project. This uncertainty and ambiguity make it difficult for entrepreneurs to generate much needed resources and support. In order to address this difficulty, a new venture needs to establish legitimacy, which entails being perceived as desirable, proper, or appropriate within the socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions within which it operates. New venture legitimacy is generated from various sources and hence has three broad dimensions—a cognitive, a moral, and a pragmatic dimension. The cognitive dimension accounts for the extent to which the activities and purpose of a venture are understood by key audiences and how knowledge about that venture spreads. The moral dimension reflects the extent to which a venture is perceived to be doing the right thing. The pragmatic dimension accounts for the extent to which a new venture serves the interests of critical constituents. All three of these dimensions factor into a legitimacy assessment of a new venture. Legitimacy is important for new ventures because it helps them overcome their liabilities of newness, allowing them to mobilize resources and engage in transactions, thereby increasing their chances of survival and success.
Although legitimacy matters for almost all new ventures, it is most critical if an entrepreneur engages in activities that are new and novel, such as establishing a new industry or market or creating a new product or technology. In these circumstances, it is most important for entrepreneurs to strategically establish and manage a new venture’s legitimacy. The strategic establishment and management of new venture legitimacy may entail arranging venture elements to conform with the existing environment, selecting key environments in which to operate, manipulating elements of the external environment to align with venture activities, or creating a whole new social context to accommodate a new venture. Enacting each of these new venture legitimation strategies may necessitate employing identity, associative, and organizational mechanisms. Identity mechanisms include cultural tools and identity claims such as images, symbols, and language by entrepreneurs to enhance new venture legitimacy. Associative mechanisms reflect the formation of relationships and connections with other individuals and entities to establish new venture legitimacy. Organizational mechanisms account for manipulating the organization and structure of a new venture and the achievement of success measures by that venture to attain legitimacy. Ultimately all of this is done so that various external parties, with different logics and perspectives, will evaluate a new venture as legitimate and be prepared to provide that venture with resources and support.
Article
Optimal Distinctiveness
Karl Taeuscher
Optimal distinctiveness research is a rapidly growing area of scholarship that integrates key theoretical insights from strategic management and institutional theory. Strategic management research highlights differentiation as a key driver of competitive advantage and superior performance, while institutional theory emphasizes conformity as a central driver of organizational legitimacy and resource acquisition. Optimal distinctiveness research synthesizes these two perspectives and explores the tension that arises from conflicting pressures for differentiation (distinctiveness) and conformity (similarity). This emerging body of research departs from traditional positioning research in strategic management—which primarily explored corporations’ strategic positions within mature industries—by attending to a variety of competitive settings (e.g., newly emerging market categories, online marketplaces), forms of differentiation (e.g., based on product features, narratives, or category affiliations), levels of analysis (e.g., business level, product level), and performance outcomes (e.g., customer demand, resource acquisition, audience evaluations). By advancing understanding about a broad array of phenomena, optimal distinctiveness research has profound implications for strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organization studies.
A central concern in this rapidly growing body of research is to understand how positions on the continuum between similarity and distinctiveness affect performance outcomes. Early optimal distinctiveness research showed that organizations often benefit from positioning themselves near the middle of this continuum, where the relationship between their distinctiveness and performance resembles an inverted U-shape. Over time, however, scholars spotlighted various contingencies that shape the distinctiveness–performance relationship, pointing to important boundary conditions under which organizations derive the most desirable (i.e., optimal) outcomes through low or high levels of distinctiveness. Extant research also shows that organizations can strategically alleviate the tension between differentiation and conformity by, for instance, buffering legitimacy in alternative ways or by differentiating on dimensions that do not impose any related conformity pressures. Scholarship further explores the sources of heterogeneity in organizations’ distinctiveness, including the conditions and strategic considerations that lead organizations to pursue distinctiveness. Toward this aim, extant research particularly emphasizes organizations’ strategic efforts to attain optimal distinctiveness through storytelling and other symbolic forms of differentiation and conformity. Collectively, these explorations help to understand why, when, and how organizations pursue distinctiveness and how distinctiveness shapes varied performance outcomes.
Article
Qualitative Comparative Analysis in Business and Management Research
Johannes Meuer and Peer C. Fiss
During the last decade, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has become an increasingly popular research approach in the management and business literature. As an approach, QCA consists of both a set of analytical techniques and a conceptual perspective, and the origins of QCA as an analytical technique lie outside the management and business literature. In the 1980s, Charles Ragin, a sociologist and political scientist, developed a systematic, comparative methodology as an alternative to qualitative, case-oriented approaches and to quantitative, variable-oriented approaches. Whereas the analytical technique of QCA was developed outside the management literature, the conceptual perspective underlying QCA has a long history in the management literature, in particular in the form of contingency and configurational theory that have played an important role in management theories since the late 1960s.
Until the 2000s, management researchers only sporadically used QCA as an analytical technique. Between 2007 and 2008, a series of seminal articles in leading management journals laid the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations for QCA as a promising research approach in business and management. These articles led to a “first” wave of QCA research in management. During the first wave—occurring between approximately 2008 and 2014—researchers successfully published QCA-based studies in leading management journals and triggered important methodological debates, ultimately leading to a revival of the configurational perspective in the management literature.
Following the first wave, a “second” wave—between 2014 and 2018—saw a rapid increase in QCA publications across several subfields in management research, the development of methodological applications of QCA, and an expansion of scholarly debates around the nature, opportunities, and future of QCA as a research approach. The second wave of QCA research in business and management concluded with researchers’ taking stock of the plethora of empirical studies using QCA for identifying best practice guidelines and advocating for the rise of a “neo-configurational” perspective, a perspective drawing on set-theoretic logic, causal complexity, and counterfactual analysis.
Nowadays, QCA is an established approach in some research areas (e.g., organization theory, strategic management) and is diffusing into several adjacent areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, marketing, and accounting), a situation that promises new opportunities for advancing the analytical technique of QCA as well as configurational thinking and theorizing in the business and management literature. To advance the analytical foundations of QCA, researchers may, for example, advance robustness tests for QCA or focus on issues of endogeneity and omitted variables in QCA. To advance the conceptual foundations of QCA, researchers may, for example, clarify the links between configurational theory and related theoretical perspectives, such as systems theory or complexity theory, or develop theories on the temporal dynamics of configurations and configurational change. Ultimately, after a decade of growing use and interest in QCA and given the unique strengths of this approach for addressing questions relevant to management research, QCA will continue to influence research in business and management.
Article
Social Capital and Founder, Team, and Firm Networks in Entrepreneurship
Ha Hoang
Entrepreneurial activity is facilitated by the ties that connect founders and their venture to a broader network of actors. This insight on the value of social capital has been enriched by a large body of research that builds on core concepts of network content, governance, and structure. Network content refers to the resources, information and social support that is exchanged or flows between actors. Governance encompasses the mechanisms that organize and regulate the exchange. Network structure refers to broader patterns created from the relationships between actors. With these building blocks, key findings that have emerged over 30 years of research can be organized into two domains: how networks influence entrepreneurial outcomes and how networks develop over the entrepreneurial process. Core findings regarding the performance consequences of social capital underscore its benefits while identifying limitations due to decreasing returns to growing and maintaining a large network or to contingencies tied to the stage of the venture’s growth. Our understanding of the sources of network evolution and the resulting patterns have also developed significantly. As a motor of network change, scholars have emphasized the goal-oriented behavior of the entrepreneur, but recognize social relationships also engender mutual concern, obligation, and emotional attachment. From a focus on founder and founding team ties to start-up, small firm networks, the literature now spans multiple levels and accounts for contextual variation between industries and institutional environments. Advances within each of these domains of inquiry have led to rich insights and greater conceptual complexity. Future research opportunities will arise that leverage cross-fertilization of the process and performance research streams.
