Administrative Science Quarterly Online Table of Contents Alert
The March 2024 issue of Administrative Science Quarterly is available online: Vol. 69, No. 1
The March issue of ASQ has arrived, and I hope you take this leap day to treat yourself to a leisurely read over a cup of coffee or tea. With this bonus day, you can read about the importance of entrepreneurial ecosystems, the instantiation of institutional logics, the impact of organizational structures on innovation, the drivers of the liability of foreignness, and the digitization of creative work. This issue is a page turner with fascinating details about accelerators, startups, Nashville music, systems biology, corporate lobbyists, and a rape crisis center. And if you want some smaller nuggets, we have a fabulous set of substantive and engaging book reviews.
Coming from a Good Pond: The Influence of a New Venture’s Founding Ecosystem on Accelerator Performance
Daniel C. Fehder
Accelerators can help startups, but who and when do they help? This article considers how a startup’s founding environment can influence an accelerator’s impact. Fehder shares evidence from an accelerator that, holding startup quality constant, startups admitted to the accelerator have more benefits when they are already proximate to venture capitalists and formal networks, and when they are founded in the same environment as the accelerator. These findings have implications for understanding how resource-rich ecosystems provide advantages to startups and the challenges of extending those benefits to firms in other regions.
Tedious Work: Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization in the Arts and Sciences
Hille C. Bruns and Elizabeth Long Lingo
What do systems biology and the Nashville music scene have in common? They both require creativity. Although we may like to believe that creative work is loads of fun, the truth is less sexy. Tedious work is an essential component of the creative process and is made increasingly prominent with digitization. Tedious work is repetitive and detail-based, but it also requires expertise. This makes it part and parcel of the creative process. This article explores how tedious work emerges and becomes problematic, as well as how creatives manage the time spent doing tedious work, to remain engaged and prevent information overload.
The Impact of Partner Organizational Structure on Innovation
Sarath Balachandran and John Eklund
We know that a firm’s own structure shapes innovation, but do the structures of its partners also matter? Indeed, they do. This research shows that a partner’s level of R&D centralization shapes the ability of a startup to access information to innovate. When a startup needs diverse information, and when the partner has broad expertise, partner centralization can help the startup access a greater breadth of information. But partner centralization also slows down the rate of information sharing, which can be alleviated by the startup being located near the partner or by the partner’s managers having a strong network within the firm.
Paying for Legitimacy: Autocracy, Nonmarket Strategy, and the Liability of Foreignness
Jin Hyung Kim and Jordan I. Siegel
The liability of foreignness is a well-documented phenomenon whereby foreign firms face higher costs and other economic barriers to achieving high performance. The authors argue for a new driver of the liability of foreignness whereby foreign firms are stigmatized by their countries’ value-based ideologies. In the context of corporate lobbying in Washington DC, the authors find that foreign firms pay more than equivalent US domestic firms for representation, and firms from autocratic countries pay the highest fees of all. For firms seeking legitimacy, and paying others to help them achieve it, this liability is costly and enduring.
Narrating Institutional Logics into Effect: Coherence Across Cognitive, Political, and Emotional Elements
Tammar B. Zilber
Zilber studied decision-making in a rape crisis center to determine how institutional logics were negotiated and instantiated in the narration of stories. She found that narrators invested considerable effort in arguing for a particular logic to be used to understand and interpret events. The acceptance of these efforts was affected by the storytellers’ perceived interests and emotions. All these elements—cognitive, political, and emotional—needed to cohere for the narration of the story to lead to the decision it implied. This demonstrates the collective dynamics by which decisions are constrained by the coherence of the story.
Book Reviews
Joseph Jupille and James A. Caporaso. Theories of Institutions
C. R. Hinings
Matt Vidal. Management Divided: Contradictions of Labor Management
Victor G. Devinatz
Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao. Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise
Heather Haveman
Karl Wennberg and Christian Sandström, eds. Questioning the Entrepreneurial State: Status-Quo, Pitfalls, and the Need for Credible Innovation Policy
Anita M. McGahan
Kimberly Kay Hoang. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets
Samantha Ortiz Casillas
ASQ articles have often been featured on Henrich Greve’s blog site Organizational Musings. Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. To stay informed, follow us on LinkedIn.
Christine Beckman, University of Southern California
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Christine Beckman
University of Southern California
Los Angeles CA
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