Center for Organizational Research (COR)

Dear colleagues,

As the year nears a close, we wanted to extend our gratitude to the COR community for your engagement in our center’s activities, and send our very best wishes to you and your families for 2018.

Looking ahead, please join us for the first COR event in 2018…

COR Faculty Development Paper Workshop with Prof. John Joseph (Merage)

Discussants: Martha Feldman (Social Ecology) and Jone Pearce (Merage)

Friday, January 12

SBSG 1321

12:00-1:30pm

RSVP by Jan 2

Lunch will be provided

 

LEARNING WITHIN HIERARCHIES: ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE, LEARNING AND INNOVATION IN THE MULTI-UNIT FIRM

In this study, we provide an extension and the first empirical test of March’s Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning (1991). Theoretically, we qualify and extend March’s conclusions by examining the possibility that learning varies within the corporate hierarchy of a multidivisional (M-form) firm.  To do so, we consider the impact of turnover at the corporate level and at the subunit level and their impact on the exploration-exploitation tradeoff.  We also unpack the different effects of arrivals and departures.  Empirically, we use company directories from Motorola over a 24-year period, to construct membership turnover measures for the corporate office as well as for the firm’s subunits.  We pair this data with patenting behavior over the same period to test our conjectures and better understand the exploration-exploitation impact of learning within hierarchies.   Our results indicate that corporate departures matter for for learning than either corporate departures or subunit arrivals/departures.  Our theory contributes to perspectives of organizational learning and organizational design.

 

Dear COR colleagues,

You are cordially invited to a COR seminar with Professor David Obstfeld.

“Getting New Things Done: Networks, Brokerage, and the Assembly of Innovative Action”

Friday, December 1

12:00-1:30

SBSG 1321

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by November 21.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

 

Nina Bandelj

Melissa Mazmanian

COR Co-Directors

 

Talk Abstract

This talk presents the core ideas from my new book with Stanford University Press: “Getting New Things Done: Networks, Brokerage, and the Assembly of Innovative Action.”  Mobilizing people to pursue action in the pursuit of innovation depends critically on the effective orchestration of social networks and knowledge sharing.  This orchestration is vital to the pursuit of innovation, especially in a world increasingly reliant on collaborative projects that assemble actors with diverse interests, abilities, and knowledge. In the talk, I offer a conceptual framework along with original ethnographic data from an automotive design context for conceptualizing how social network and knowledge processes combine to influence success in both routine and non-routine innovation.  I integrate recent work to propose a theory of social skill with implications at the micro-, organizational-, and industry levels and how it applies (briefly) to artistic movements, collective action, and entrepreneurship.  I will also discuss a new research direction (in collaboration with Richard Arum and others), which applies the above theoretical framework to identifying student behaviors and institutional practices associated with underrepresented minority college student success and career advancement.

 

Speaker Bio

David Obstfeld is Associate Professor of Management at the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics, California State University at Fullerton. Professor Obstfeld’s research examines how the knowledge-intensive, network-based social processes that result in organizational change and innovation unfold at the local and firm levels. Currently, his interests focus on how the interaction of social network-based brokerage activity, knowledge articulation, creative projects, and collective action influence entrepreneurship, innovation, and firm strategy. David Obstfeld has published in such journals as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Industrial and Corporate Change. At Mihaylo, Professor Obstfeld teaches courses in entrepreneurship and strategy. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Prior to embarking on an academic career, he served as Director of Training and Development at The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae).

Dear COR community,

You are invited to a Colloquium by Prof. Noah Askin (INSEAD)

“THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF CREATIVITY, EVIDENCE FROM POPULAR MUSIC, 1955-2000”

Friday, December 8

Porter Colloquium Room SB1-5200

10:30-12:00

 

ABSTRACT:

Creativity is central to cultural production, but what makes certain producers more likely to innovate than others? More specifically, what are the different sources of social influence that drive variation in creative output, and through what mechanisms do these sources operate? To answer these questions, we leverage original data on over 25,000 musical artists and 600,000 songs recorded and released between 1955 and 2000, using fine-grained musical features to construct a continuous measure of creative output (i.e., song novelty). We then test whether artists draw creative inspiration through the recombination of diverse ideas, or are instead stimulated by the creativity of their musical neighbors. We find that both of these mechanisms explain an artist’s propensity to write and release novel songs, but in systematically different ways: creative artists tend to recombine material from diverse genres that they encounter through their collaboration networks, while they draw inspiration from—and are granted legitimacy by—other creative artists with shared genre, record label, and/or geographic affiliations. This pattern holds even after controlling for an individual or group’s historical propensity to produce novel songs. These findings suggest that the likelihood of generating new ideas is influenced not only by direct interaction and collaboration with others, but also through indirect exposure via shared cultural, organizational, and geographic contexts. Understanding when and how creative potential travels across these “spheres of influence” sheds new light on the production of novelty in music and the social foundations of creativity more generally.

 

Noah Askin is Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, France.  His research examines the creation and performance of cultural products and impact of network- and rankings-based status on organizations.  His recent article in the American Sociological Review, “What Makes Popular Music Popular?”, was covered by  Forbes, Business Insider, Quartz.com, The Times of London, M Magazine, and the New York Post, among others.

Dear colleagues,

You are cordially invited to join us for the Center for Organizational Research Beginning-of-Year Event.

DATE: Friday, October 20
WHEN: 12:00-1:30
WHERE: SBSG 1321

This will be an opportunity to connect with old friends and meet new colleagues and hear about each other’s research projects.

The second round of COR Small Grants recipients will briefly present their research projects as well, including Andrew Penner, John Joseph, Kelly Ward and Stephanie Pulles.

Lunch will be provided.

Please RSVP by October 12 to cor@uci.edu.

We hope to see many of you!

Best wishes,

Nina Bandelj and Melissa Mazmanian
COR Co-Directors