Research Interests: Organizational Theory, Behavioral Strategy, Organizational Goals, Stakeholders, Non-market Strategy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Movements, Entrepreneurship
Raising the Bar: Organizational Alignment Driven by Societal Aspirations (job market paper)
I propose a novel theory of how external stakeholders influence organizations to pursue new goals. External stakeholders hold expectations for both the goals that organizations should pursue, as well as aspirations for performance on these goals. I refer to such aspirations as societal aspirations, and argue that when societal aspirations rise beyond current performance expectations, organizations adopt goals valued by external stakeholders and change their behaviors accordingly. I test this theory using data on corporate board appointments before and after the 2010 SEC Board Diversity Disclosure Rule, which required public firms to disclose how they consider diversity in selecting board candidates amidst calls from investors to “do more” for diversity; the rule did not implement a quota or regulated outcome. Analyzing S&P 1500 firms from 2007 to 2023, I find that after the rule, firms performing below their industry peers were more likely to appoint a woman or person of color. By contrast, high-performing firms—those already above industry peers in board diversity—were not more likely to appoint women or directors of color. I conclude by discussing implications for the behavioral theory of the firm, social movement theory, and new stakeholder theory.
Competitive Position and Performance Differentials: Merit or Privilege? (with Chris Rider; preparing for submission to Administrative Science Quarterly)
In markets, organizations are positioned vis-à-vis competitors, and some positions are associated with greater performance than others. Prior research attributes such “positional advantages” to superior capabilities but also to superior opportunities. We propose an analytical framework for adjudicating these respective “merit” and “privilege” accounts, highlighting three distinct theoretical mechanisms: (1) access to superior opportunities (i.e., privilege); (2) superior selection capabilities (i.e., merit); and (3) superior development capabilities (i.e., merit). Analyzing over 50,000 deals by nearly 3,000 new U.S. venture capital firms between 2000 and 2021, we find evidence of access and selection, but not development. Firms whose members possess ascribed (i.e., race, gender) and achieved (i.e., prior education and employment) characteristics that are associated with high performance invest in observably high-potential deals but do not systematically produce performance in excess of that predicted by deal observables. Assuming plausible deal access in supplementary analyses, we infer that access to high-potential opportunities contributes more to performance differentials than do superior selection capabilities. We discuss assumptions justifying merit versus privilege interpretations of positional advantage.
Entrepreneurship and Social Mobility: Three Status Metaphors for Future Research (with Chris Rider, Susie Choe, and Kyle McCullers)
Research in Organizational Behavior, 2023. Download paper
We consider how entrepreneurship and employment differentially shape opportunities for social mobility across people and contexts. Specifically focusing on changes in an individual’s social status, or vertical mobility, we propose three metaphors for studying entrepreneurship: (1) production (i.e., increased status); (2) preservation (i.e., maintained status); and (3) consumption (i.e., decreased status). Each metaphor features theoretical mechanisms that account for how founding an organization can facilitate inter-occupational transitions and, thus, enable status mobility. We offer a proposed research agenda for studying entrepreneurship’s role in social mobility processes, including mechanism-specific propositions at the individual and population levels of analysis as well as guidance on sampling and measurement.