Article Abstracts

Articles

Agency and Social Networks: Strategies of Action in a Social Structure of Position, Opposition, and Opportunity
William B. Stevenson - Boston College
Danna Greenberg - Babson College

This study uses social movement concepts to explain the success and failure of actors in a network of relationships trying to influence policies on environmental issues in a small city. Results show that strategies to take action and mobilize others in a network of interorganizational relationships can vary depending on the social context, which consists of the political opportunity structure defined by government regulators, whether the actor faces opposition, and the actor's position in the network. Decisions to engage in strategies to try to influence government regulators directly, to use a broker to reach agreements with the opposition, or to form a coalition with actors in other organizations to influence government decision makers are affected by this social context. Results also show that even peripheral actors, usually assumed to be powerless in network studies, can influence policy if they use a direct-contact strategy and the political opportunity structure is favorable.

The Role of Institutional and Market Forces in Divergent Organizational Change
Thomas D'Aunno - University of Chicago
Melissa Succi - Chapman University
Jeffrey A. Alexander - University of Michigan

This paper focuses on a radical change, in which organizations abandon an institutionalized template for arranging their core activities, that is likely to occur in organizational fields that have strong, local market forces and strong but heterogeneous institutional forces. We examine the role of market forces and heterogeneous institutional elements in promoting divergent change in core activities among all U.S. rural hospitals from 1984 to 1991. Results support the view that divergent change depends on both market forces (proximity to competitors, disadvantages in service mix) and institutional forces (state regulation, ownership and governance norms, and mimicry of models of divergent change).

Boundary Management Tactics and Logics of Action: The Case of Peer-Support Providers
Samuel B. Bacharach - Cornell University
Peter Bamberger - Technion: Israel Institute of Technology
Valerie McKinney - Cornell University

From a qualitative study of flight attendants volunteering as support providers in a peer-based employee assistance program, we derive a typology of the boundary management tactics used by peer-support providers to maintain a comfortable distance from help recipients and propose a grounded theory explaining providers' selection of tactics. After identifying two factors associated with tactic selection (personal experience and social structure), we demonstrate that support providers' cognitive orientations, or logics of action, mediate the relationship between these factors and tactic selection. We identify four types of support providers' logics of action and show how a provider's logic may predict his or her preference for a particular boundary management tactic.

The Lessons We (Don't) Learn: Counterfactual Thinking and Organizational Accountability after a Close Call
Michael W. Morris and Paul C. Moor - Stanford University

We investigate how individuals learn from imagined might-have-been scenarios. We hypothesize that individuals are more likely to learn when they have responded to an event with upward-directed, self-focused counterfactual thoughts, and, additionally, that this learning process is inhibited by accountability to organizational superiors. Support for these hypotheses was obtained in two studies that assessed learning by aviation pilots from the experience of near accidents. Study 1 analyzed counterfactual thoughts and lessons in narrative reports filed by experienced pilots after actual dangerous aviation incidents. Study 2 involved laboratory experiments in which college students operated a flight simulator under different conditions of organizational accountability.

Making the Next Move: How Experiential and Vicarious Learning Shape the Locations of Chains' Acquisitions
Joel A.C. Bau and Stan Xiao Li - University of Toronto
John M. Usher - Memorial University of Newfoundland

We examine acquisitions by multiunit chain organizations to determine why they acquire a particular target rather than others that are available to them and thus better understand chain growth. We advance experiential and vicarious learning processes as an explanation for chains' next spatial move. Our analysis of Ontario nursing home chains' acquisition location choices from 1971 to 1996 provides broad support for a learning perspective, demonstrating how experiential and vicarious processes shape and constrain the locations of chains' acquisitions. Experiential processes lead chains to replicate themselves by acquiring components geographically and organizationally similar to their own most recent and most similar prior acquisitions and their own current components. Vicarious processes lead chains to imitate location choices of other visible and comparable chains' most recent acquisitions, prior acquisitions nearest to potential targets, and their current components. Our study thus establishes organizational learning as a conceptual foundation for predicting the location of a chain's next acquisition and, more generally, the spatial expansion of chains over time.

In this study we develop a model of how diversity in positive affect (PA) among group members influences individual attitudes, group processes, and group performance. We test the model on a sample of 62 U.S. top management teams. Greater affective fit between a team member and his or her group is related to more positive attitudes about group relations and perceptions of greater influence within the group. Results also suggest there is a negative relationship between a team's diversity in trait positive affect and both the chief executive officers' use of participatory decision making and financial performance. Exploratory analyses reveal that affectively diverse, low mean trait PA groups experienced the greatest task and emotional conflict and the least cooperation. Analyses of diversity in trait negative affect produced no significant results. We discuss the implications of our study for the group emotion, team composition, group performance, and top management team literatures.