OS Seminar

Peter Kim - US Marshall

When Transparency Confronts its Limits:  The Implications of Situated Cognition and the Struggle for Interpretive Dominance 

Organizational transparency is generally portrayed as a phenomenon that can be controlled by altering the quantity and quality of information available. The present inquiry challenges that view with a field study of organizational stakeholders who sought to become as transparent as possible. Their efforts to promote transparency far exceeded those reported in any other setting. Yet despite those efforts, the perceived level of transparency among those stakeholders remained surprisingly low. This revealed that i creasing transparency may not be as straightforward as the literature suggests and prompted the development of a grounded theory to explain why such efforts can fail. This analysis details how increasing transparency can require overcoming four distinct challenges that can be far more elusive than the literature has presumed. It suggests that we view transparency, not as an objective state based on the information conveyed, but rather as a situated perception based on the sense that one's  ,interpretive goals have been fulfilled. And it considers how efforts to increase transparency may themselves become a basis for conflict as each stakeholder' s own interpretive goals interfere with the interpretive goals of others. 

Cindy P. Muir (Zapata) - Mendoza College of Business – University of Notre Dame 

Musings on Displays of Humility

Although humility is often considered a virtue, perhaps even a “meta-virtue” - essential to other virtues such as courage or wisdom (Grenberg, 2005: 133; see also McCullough, 2000), and scholarly work focusing on the outcomes of humility is associated with various demonstrable benefits for others (Chandler et al., 2023; Morris et al., 2005; Ou et al., 2017; Ou, Waldman, & Peterson, 2018; Owens et al., 2013) - outcomes for the humble person themselves seem less unequivocally beneficial (Exline & Geyer, 2004; Owens & Hekman, 2012; Zapata & Hayes-Jones; 2019). What explains why a meta-virtue would be associated with anything less than overwhelmingly positive consequences for the virtuous individual? Our work aims to develop theory to explain the disconnect between work that seems to exalt humble leaders with empirical evidence demonstrating mixed views on how humble leaders tend to be evaluated by others. We posit that this disconnect is partly attributable to the humility literature’s focus and conceptualization of expressed humility. We rely on both archival (from www.ratemyprofessor.com) and experimental data to test our predictions.  

Crystal Farh - Foster School of Business - University of Washington

The Gendered Costs of Voice (Un)Enacted: Differential Implications for Belonging in Traditionally Male-Dominated Contexts

Despite their potential to enhance team functioning, employees’ suggestions and concerns are often ignored or rejected. This is especially the case for women in traditionally male-dominated contexts, who are not only less likely to have their voice acted upon but also suffer lower belonging than their counterparts who are men. In this paper, we draw a novel link between these two phenomena. Integrating self-in-role (Kahn, 1990) and social belonging theories (Walton & Cohen, 2007), we argue that because voice employs and displays the self, voicers look to collective reactions to their voice—expressed through voice enactment—to inform whether the self fits in, is accepted, and is valued. We further argue that the effect of voice enactment on belonging is strengthened for women in traditionally male-dominated contexts due to their heightened experience of social identity threat, which makes them particularly attuned to voice enactment as a cue for belonging. Data from active-duty marines (Study 1) and student engineering project teams (Study 2) showed that low voice enactment indeed reduced belonging more strongly for women compared to men. Data from a randomized controlled experiment (Study 3) further showed that the strengthened relationship between voice enactment and belonging for women in majority-men settings was indeed mediated through social identity threat. Altogether, our work highlights the asymmetrical cost of low voice enactment – as well as the importance of high voice enactment for equalizing belonging – for women in traditionally male-dominated contexts.

Judith Clair - Boston College

Holding Oneself Accountable for a History of Cultural Harms: A Visual Ethnography of U.S. Museums and the Catalyzing Impact of George Floyd's Murder

Pressure on museums to become more inclusive of diverse voices and narratives, to set the story straight on cultures that have been misconstrued or misrepresented, to repatriate cultural treasures, and to engage audiences around related critical conversations, has reached a sort of tipping point. As with other organizations, the #MeToo movement and George Floyd killing and protests sparked a wake-up call for many museums that they had not been doing enough. Museums have traditionally been conceived of as repositories of the past and as a place where one learns of history, enjoys art, and can be inspired by beauty. Is a museum also a site in which social justice is forged? A site for building gender, racial and cultural inclusion? In this context, I present a qualitative study exploring how general and natural history museums are grappling with inherent tensions regarding identity and structure amidst the ongoing 'culture wars' surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Of particular interest is how these museums are endeavoring to "turn the page," leaving behind a problematic past and responding to calls for greater inclusion, despite their strong ties to history and culture rooted in a less equitable, diverse, and inclusive era, and given that their physical structures shapes what is possible to do and to achieve.

Jennifer Petriglieri - INSEAD

Storying Loneliness:  The Psychodynamic Social Construction and Deconstruction of Persistent Loneliness

Through an inductive study, we examine how executives get trapped in experiences of persistent loneliness and how they can break free from them. We reveal the key roles of relational contexts and relational scripts - intrapsychic blueprints that encode how people believe they should behave in a specific context to elicit a desired response from others - in these processes. We find that competitive work contexts that value success activate a relational script that guides executives to be self-reliant and distance themselves from others, behaviors that led to persistent loneliness. These scripts were forged in early relational contexts that taught people to associate self-reliance with success. This association anchored executives’ stories of the pain, price, and payoff of loneliness and became the central theme of their self-narratives at work. Some executives were able to overcome persistent loneliness through a developmental crisis which led them to update the relational script they enacted in success-valuing contexts, and their self-narrative which it anchored. Building on these findings, we develop a psychodynamic theory of the social construction and deconstruction of persistent loneliness that shows how social contexts that value success can unwittingly encourage people to psychologically invest in loneliness at work.

James Mellody,  MIT Sloan School of Management 

A Different Kind of Tradeoff: Cultural Diversity in Ecologies of Attention  

What determines the diversity of cultural material produced in a market? In many consumer product markets, periods of competition support cultural diversity, but alternating periods of concentration drive cultural homogeneity. A stable partition can emerge, separating a culturally homogenous market center from a culturally diverse periphery. Cultural diversity exists temporarily or is relegated to the market fringe. These conditions are reflected in the choice faced by organizations: grow in the market center by producing culturally generic material, or attract a smaller, more engaged consumer base by producing culturally distinct material in the periphery. I examine a different market context: ecologies of attention, in which consumers can readily engage with multiple organizations (e.g., online communities, voluntary organizations) simultaneously and easily transition from being consumers to also producers of content. I study Reddit as a case of an attention ecology, leveraging user participation data and the text of over 2 billion comments from over 14 thousand subreddits. I find that subreddits face a tradeoff contingent on their location in the resource space, enabling cultural diversity to survive in crowded, competitive locations, while cultural homogeneity emerges in sparse, uncompetitive areas. I draw on these findings to introduce a broader theory of market partitioning. 

Raquel Kessinger, MIT Sloan School of Management 

Speaking Up and Speaking Out: How Employee Activists Raise Social, Political, and Moral Concerns at Work 

Despite leaders’ attempts to encourage employees to speak up inside their firms, employees may view internal voice mechanisms as insufficient to address their social, political, and moral work-related concerns. Thus, employee activists may instead co-opt the voice mechanisms that leaders set up to facilitate internal employee voice, such as townhall meetings and new communication technologies, to publicly challenge their firm either by mobilizing for collective action or engaging in noisy exits. Specifically, when they mobilize, employee activists may use these internal voice mechanisms to widely air grievances, quickly assess the level of internal support for their cause, and prepare for action. These tools may help reduce some of the barriers to engaging in contentious activism and enable employee activists to mobilize larger coalitions faster than previous mobilization tactics. However, organizational leaders may respond by revising firm values and introducing restrictive internal communication policies to limit employee activists’ use of these tools. Activists may, in turn, adapt by using these tools for early stages of organizing and later moving to more secure, external platforms. This study of how employee activists raise social, political, and moral issues at work adds an important nuance to the current literature’s understanding of both employee intra-organizational voice and employee extra-organizational voice and collective action. 

Alan Zhang, MIT Sloan School of Management 

Authenticity Frictions: Harnessing Risk as a Catalyst for Authenticity in Fine Wine Production 

The market for cultural goods prizes authenticity, valuing those products that seem “true” or “genuine” to what they claim to be. But unstable supply-side conditions can alter production activities and put the achievement of authenticity at risk. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic field work at an internationally renowned winery (Cal-Cru) in Northern California, I examine how actors contend with environmental instabilities in the production of authentic fine wine. Cal-Cru has been producing fine wines consistently for over half a century, and these products are widely regarded in the industry as authentic. Yet, Cal-Cru’s achievement of authentic productions entails a perennial struggle with volatile grape-growing and wine-making conditions. What is particularly distinctive about Cal-Cru’s production process is that multiple kinds of actors (i.e., humans, weather, plants, microbes) are given considerable latitude to participate in the wine-making process, making production conditions highly complex and unstable. Instead of following industry practice to mitigate or suppress these risks, I find that Cal-Cru actively promotes and sustains them, thus harnessing risk in the service of authenticity. By allowing multiple heterogenous actors to contest and destabilize the course of production—fostering what I call authenticity frictions—Cal-Cru cultivates risky conditions as a catalyst in the production of authentic products. Cal-Cru does this through a set of recurrent trajectory management practices which incorporate and repurpose ongoing instabilities in the production process. My research explains how Cal-Cru’s consistent achievement of authenticity is accomplished not despite supply-side instabilities, but because of them.  

McKenzie Preston, Wharton 

Moral Framing as a Double-Edged Sword for Motivating Majority Group Leaders to Support DEI Issues 

Integrating research on moral frames and social norms in organizations, I generate theory to explain how employees’ use of moral frames to sell diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues—such as racial and gender equity—can be a double-edged sword for motivating majority group leaders to support DEI initiatives. On the one hand, I argue that moral framing conveys descriptive social norms concerning the appropriateness and legitimacy for majority group leaders to champion DEI initiatives. As a result, moral framing heightens majority group leaders’ sense of psychological standing, and thus indirectly increases their support for these issues. On the other hand, I contend that moral framing establishes injunctive social norms that dictate that majority group leaders should champion DEI initiatives. As a result, moral framing triggers psychological reactance for majority group leaders, and thus indirectly reduces their support for the DEI issue. Finally, I posit that employees can strengthen the positive relationship between moral frames and psychological standing, while weakening the relationship between moral frames and psychological reactance, when they emphasize majority group leaders’ problem-solving autonomy in determining how to address the DEI issue. I test these predictions across four studies (two recall studies, a field experiment, and an online experiment) that cover racial and gender equity issues. I discuss several theoretical and practical implications. 

Xi Song, University of Pennsylvania 

Declining Jobs, Declining Opportunities? Mobility of Workers in Occupations With Job Contraction, 2000–2020 

Labor market restructuring—the changing size, content, and significance of different occupations—affects workers’ job mobility opportunities and outcomes. However, the existing literature either overlooks workers’ mobility response to occupational restructuring or analyzes it within occupational changes across broad categories (e.g., farming, manufacturing, or service occupations). We construct a novel occupational dataset that includes thousands of occupations from the Occupational Outlook Handbooks (2000–present) to describe changes in occupational structures, with a focus on declining occupations. By linking occupational prospects data to workers’ mobility in the Current Population Surveys, we examine job mobility opportunities of workers in occupations with contracting employment. Our analyses show that workers in occupations with job contraction face a double disadvantage with respect to occupational mobility. First, their jobs are more unstable than workers in stable occupations. Second, when they change occupations, they are likely to move from one declining occupation to another and experience downward mobility into lower-paying occupations. Our results suggest that changing occupational demand in recent decades has influenced inequality in opportunities for mobility. Workers in declining occupations face significant challenges in seeking and securing jobs in the new economy. 

Dean Knox, Wharton 

Computational Methods for Police Oversight and Reform Under Incomplete Data 

America's 18,000 police agencies are among the nation's most ubiquitous public organizations, making contact with more than one in five residents each year. For decades, high-profile incidents of excessive police force against minorities have fueled public demands for improved oversight and reform. Yet the nature of policing data, which has relied almost exclusively on agent self-reported behavior, has posed severe challenges for democratically elected principals who seek to uphold civil rights. In this talk, I summarize a number of published and ongoing projects that collectively: (1) identify institutional challenges in accountability, with particular attention to the organizational processes by which police data are collected; (2) demonstrate the inherent limitations of this data in monitoring deviant agent behavior; (3) offer high-profile examples of how inattention to data limitations has led to underestimates of racial bias and excessive force, distortions in public discourse, and a high-profile retraction; and (4) develop computational techniques for reasoning about imperfectly observed agent behavior by fusing administrative records with novel sources, such as traffic sensors and body-worn camera footage. Throughout, I describe how the proposed methods have been implemented in collaboration with national civil-rights organizations. 

Krystal Lareya, Stanford University 

Playing Up Difference  

How do groups reckon with differences in members’ identities and beliefs? A fundamental tension exists between groups, whose identities are singular and stably positioned, and their members, whose identities are multiple, intertwined, and constituted in interaction. Existing work shows how this tension is addressed through downplaying difference and playing up likeness, but we know less about how difference is played up in group life. Drawing on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork with two collegiate groups, I examine how group members play up identities and beliefs that are not shared by all members and how co-members respond. This analysis reveals two pathways that playing up difference takes: an engagement pathway and an avoidance pathway. The engagement pathway depends on the activation of shared structural, relational, and epistemic foundations. I conclude with a broader consideration of how playing up difference relates to the pursuit of plurality and wholeness in contemporary organizations and communities.   

Blair Sackett, Brown University 

Circuit Breakers in Social Networks: Social Capital Mobilization and Resource Halts in a Refugee Camp 

Most research on social capital examines who people turn to for help, assuming that the presence of a social tie lends access to their resources. Less is known about the contingencies of social capital mobilization and the dynamics of resource flows between social ties. This talk illuminates the social conditions of rejected requests for resources between stable social ties, drawing on the empirical case of a refugee camp in Kenya with a population of over 180,000 people. Based on 153 interviews with aid workers and refugees, a unique data set of longitudinal surveys with 14 refugee households varying across nationality and employment status, and 14 months of ethnographic observations with refugee households and seven humanitarian organizations in the camp, this talk develops the concept of “circuit breakers” to account for halts in social capital mobilization. I show that the timing of requests—when and how often requests are made—matters for the success of mobilization. Each request is embedded within a context of organizational resource cycles and network resource fluctuations. When resource demands surged, social ties rejected requests. Thus, it is not just who you ask, but when you ask. Rather than assuming the steady flow of resources between social ties, studies of social capital need to take into account the temporal context with changes in the success of mobilization over time. These findings have implications for the role of organizations in structuring resource flows in social networks. 

Nathan TeBlunthius, University of Michigan 

Density-Dependent Competition in Discourse: Evidence from Online Petitions 

Collective action depends on discourse to construct shared understandings of grievances and goals that are communicated through language. Ecological dynamics within this discourse are important in efforts to mobilize participation because concurrent campaigns frequently involve different activists who use similar language. How does the coexistence of these campaigns shape their success? Do concurrent campaigns compete over participants or do they complement each other? Ecological models of organizational behavior predict (1) a density-dependent trade-off between language similarity and participation, and (2) decreased competition between generalists and specialists. To instantiate such models, I use a novel application of computational text analysis in a population of campaigns where language is central to mobilizing activists and levels of participation are extremely varied: online petitioning on Change.org. In contrast to prior results from organizational ecology, I find that competition for signatures among similar petitions is intense and that more specialized petitions do not escape it. 

Lara Yang - Stanford Graduate School of Business 

Contextualizing Homophily: How Similarity in Enacted Identity Shapes Social Ties 

Homophily is a fundamental principle that orders and structures social ties. Existing work conceptualizes homophily as a static phenomenon. In the commonly studied case of gender homophily, for instance, two individuals either share the same gender or they do not. However, a core insight in the identity literature is that identities are dynamically enacted as a function of social contexts and interactions. Integrating this insight, I maintain that homophily is also a dynamic, interactional, and contextualized process. Building on prior work, I theorize that similarity in enacted identity predicts tie existence and strengthens existing ties. I further deconstruct enacted identity similarity into its intra-relational and extra-relational components. That is, for each pair of individuals, I distinguish between identity enacted within and outside of the purview of their relationship. Under the contextualized view of identity, intra- and extra-relational enacted identities should diverge, and only intra-relational enacted identity similarity should strengthen social ties. Finally, I contend that the effect of intra-relational enacted identity similarity is amplified when enacted in private contexts, as privacy renders enacted identity more authentic and intimate. By applying word embedding models to a corpus of proprietary Slack communication records, I develop a novel approach to measuring enacted identity and its similarity. Through analyzing channel membership on Slack, I identify the intra-relational and extra-relational components of enacted identity similarity. Combining this approach with responses from a network survey, I find consistent support for my hypotheses.