Center for Organizational Research (COR)

Past Events

June 2012

COR End of Year Event
Featuring Research Conducted by 2011/12 COR Fellowship Recipients

Friday, June 1
12:00-1:30
Social Ecology 1, Room 306

May 2012

Merage School of Business Organization & Management Colloquium

How Anticipated Employee Mobility Affects Acquisition Likelihood:
Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Lee Fleming
University of California, Berkeley

Tuesday, May 15
11:30-1:00
School of Business 112

ABSTRACT: This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the Extant M&A research has focused on how acquiring firms may use acquisitions to source human talents from target companies. In this study, we argue that acquirers incorporate expectations about employee mobility into decisions regarding whether to bid for a firm, suggesting a negative relationship between the expected employee mobility in a firm and the likelihood of the firm becoming an acquisition target. We exploit a natural experiment in Michigan wherein an inadvertent change in the enforcement of non-compete agreements provides an observable, exogenous source of variation in employee mobility. Using a difference in-differences approach, we find causal evidence that constraints on employee mobility in Michigan raise the likelihood that a Michigan firm becomes an acquisition target. We also find that the effect is stronger when a firm is more exposed to the negative consequences of employee mobility, such as when a firm employs more knowledge workers in its work force and when a firm faces greater in-state competition; by contrast, the effect is weaker when a firm is protected by a stronger intellectual property regime that mitigates the consequences of employee mobility.

COR Faculty Development Workshop

How Dispute Resolution System Design Matters:
An Organizational Analysis of Dispute Resolution Structures and Consumer Lemon Laws

Shauhin Talesh
School of Law
University of California, Irvine

Discussants: Evan Schofer, Martha Feldman

Friday, May 11
12:00-1:30
Social Ecology 1, Room 306

ABSTRACT: This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the extent to which managerial and business values influence the meaning and implementation of consumer protection law, and consequently, the extent to which repeat players are advantaged. My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine the relationship between organizational governance structures and law: neo-institutional studies of law and organizations and socio-legal studies of repeat players’ advantages in disputing. Specifically, I compare an instance where powerful state consumer protection laws are resolved in private dispute resolution forums funded by automobile manufacturers but operated by independent third-party organizations (California) with one where consumer disputes are resolved in public alternative dispute resolution processes run and administered by the state (Vermont). Through in-depth interviews and an ethnographic study of the training programs that dispute resolution arbitrators undergo in each state, I show how different dispute resolution structures operating in California and Vermont give different meanings to substantially similar lemon laws. Although my data do not allow me to establish a causal relationship, they strongly suggest that the form of the dispute resolution structure, and how business and state actors construct the meaning of lemon laws through these structures, have critical implications for the effectiveness of consumer protection laws for consumers.

April 2012

Merage School of Business Faculty Colloquium

When Originality Brings Recognition:
Evidence from a Technology-Oriented Research Community

Denis Trapido
Merage School of Business
University of California, Irvine

Wednesday, April 25
9:30-11:00
School of Business 223

ABSTRACT: Producers of creative work face a perennial dilemma. On the one hand, they must ensure that their contribution is original, i.e. different from the existing body of work. On the other hand, excessive departure from the state of the art makes ideas vulnerable to criticism and rejection by evaluating audiences. While this dilemma implies the existence of an optimal level of originality, the rewards of the same divergence from the state of the art vary among producers. Why is some producers’ originality rewarded more than others’, and still others’ originality rejected? This study examines how the practical applicability of technology-oriented researchers’ work, their productivity, social status characteristics (educational prestige and gender), and the alternation between original and non-original production affect the recognition of the originality of their work. The findings, obtained with a combination patent, publication, advising, and career history data, indicate that recognition of original work accrues to producers who develop a reputation for consistent originality. They show a similar but less pronounced effect of practical applicability, productivity, and academic pedigree. I discuss paths for future theoretical and methodological refinement of understanding of the rewards of originality that these results suggest.

March 2012

The Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Weathering the storm:
Negative Slack, Identity and Resilience in Entrepreneurial Firms

Ted Baker
Management, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Department
North Carolina State University College of Management

Thursday, March 1
12:00-1:30
School of Business 116

ABSTRACT: In this inductive field study of thirteen resource-constrained textile firms attempting to deal with both the severe decline in the US textile and garment industry and the global financial crisis and recession, we discover strong effects of entrepreneurs’ individual-level identity structures on organization level resilience. We develop grounded typologies of entrepreneurial identity and of entrepreneurial resilience and induce a process model demonstrating how entrepreneurs’ sense of “who I am” and “who I want to be” shapes their firms’ patterns of resilient behaviors. Our model provides the groundwork for understanding variations in patterns of disbanding the firm or keeping it going among ventures facing similar sets of challenges. Our results challenge and extend traditional notions of resilience from organizational theory, traditional notions of identity from the entrepreneurship literature and strongly held presumptions about the motivations of entrepreneurs from the entrepreneurship, strategy and economics literatures. Our findings regarding sources of entrepreneurial identity demand integration between long-competing strands of theory from sociological and psychological social psychology.

COR Methods Training Event

Training Session on Ethnography & Grounded Theory

Friday, March 2
10:00am-1:30pm
SBSG (Social Ecology 1), Room 112

Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science

Reconfiguring Agencies at the Interface

Lucy Suchman
University of Lancaster

Friday, March 9
3:00-4:00
Bren Hall 6011

ABSTRACT: Drawing from recent scholarship in science and technology studies, this talk will explore new configurations at the interface of bodies and military machines. As science fiction and popular culture anxiously anticipate a future of autonomous weapons and robot soldiers, more intimate configurations of human and machine are presently in play in the form of new devices (drone aircraft, battlefield robots) for the projection of action at a distance. While critics rightly direct our attention to questions regarding the ethical and legal status of mechanized decision making, I focus here on a prior question regarding the promise of ‘decision’ itself. Arguably always a fictive prelude to action, the moment of decision becomes further distributed across messy assemblages that presuppose the recognizability of their objects, at the same time that those objects become increasingly difficult to define.

Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Prescriptions for Network Strategy:
Does Evidence of Network Effects in Cross-Section Support Them

Joel Baum
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

Thursday, March 15
12:00-1:30
School of Business 112

ABSTRACT: While intuitively appealing (and common), drawing network strategy implications from empirical evidence of network performance effects in pooled cross-section is not necessarily warranted. This is because network positions can influence both the mean and variance of firm performance. Strategic prescriptions are warranted if empirically observed network effects reflect increases in mean firm performance. If network effects reflect increases in firm performance variance, however, such prescriptions are warranted only if the increase in the odds of achieving high performance are sufficient to compensate for the concomitant increase in the odds of realizing poor performance. Our simulation study, designed to examine network performance effects in both pooled cross-section and within-firm over time under a wide range of conditions, counsels caution in drawing implications for network strategies.

Merage School of Business Organization & Management Colloquium

The Importance of Tie Content:
A Sociostructural View of Negative Ties in Organizations

Joe Labianca
University of Kentucky

Monday, March 19
12:00-1:30
School of Business 116

ABSTRACT: Much of the social network research program in management has been built on the study of positive ties between individuals. While negative ties — ongoing relationships where at least one party dislikes or is intentionally harming another — are rarer, they can be potentially more explanatory in terms of understanding what is happening in organizational behavior. I examine the relationship between direct and indirect positive and negative ties and individuals’ outcomes in a number of different organizational settings. In the first study, I show a relationship with individual performance in an organizational setting (a life sciences organization). In the second study, I examine the evolution of behavioral control and peer performance ratings in an elite military academy setting. In the third study, I’ll discuss the creation of a proposed new measure of political independence that incorporates both positive and negative ties simultaneously. The goal is to push a social ledger approach to network analysis that intentionally considers direct and indirect positive and negative ties when attempting to explain outcomes.

February 2012

Merage School of Business Strategy Colloquium

Shoot for the Stars?
Predicting the Recruitment of Prestigious Directors at Newly Public Firms

Timothy Pollock
Smeal College of Business
Pennsylvania State University

Friday, February 3
1:30-3:00 pm
School of Business 306

Merage School of Business Strategy Colloquium

The Impact of Information Institutions on Acquirer Returns in International Acquisitions

Jaideep Anand
Fisher College of Business
Ohio State University

Monday, February 6
1:30-3:00 pm
School of Business 306

Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science

Is Resistance Futile?
Power Reasserted in Networked Society

Yochai Benkler
Harvard University

Thursday, February 9
3:00-4:00
Bren Hall 6011

ABSTRACT: A major hope for the networked information environment was that it would decentralize power and facilitate the emergence of a society where more people have more degrees of freedom to make their own lives and participate in their polity. As the network matures, a few companies appear to control a core set of platforms; the personal computer is giving way to the proprietary handheld, tied to a proprietary cloud; and social production systems like Wikipedia or the blogosphere begin to develop their own governance and hierarchical structures, we must begin to ask how robust is decentralized freedom in the networked environment, and what shape is it taking as it emerges from infancy.

Merage School of Business Strategy Colloquium

Technology Shocks in Multi-Sided Markets:
The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers

Feng Zhu
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California

Friday, February 17
2:00-3:30 pm
School of Business 112

Department of Informatics

Advocates for the Evidence:
Forensic Science as Boundary Work

Beth Bechky
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Davis

Friday, February 17
3:00-4:30
Bren Hall 5011

ABSTRACT: Criminalists work at the boundary between science and law, analyzing evidence and drawing conclusions that are used in legal proceedings. In this talk, I show how what I call the “specter of testimony” creates anxieties that narrow the ways that evidence is presented. Criminalists do not testify often, but testifying is an emotionally challenging event, the impact of which is heightened through vicarious and simulated testimony experiences. Criminalists balance the tensions between the norms and rules of engagement of two different institutions — science and law — by becoming advocates for the evidence. To do so, they achieve confidence in the scientific facts, enhance their feelings of external control, and create comfort in the courtroom. These findings help us to understand how emotions shape work at institutional boundaries.

Merage School of Business Organization & Management Colloquium

Where Do Lawsuits Come From?
The Role of Spatial Distribution of Principals and Legal Mediating Agents

Maxim Sytch
Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

Thursday, February 23
12:00-1:30
School of Business 112

ABSTRACT: This study investigates the origins of interorganizational litigation. It explores how the spatial distribution of principals (companies) and mediating agents (intellectual property litigation firms) can facilitate and sustain patent infringement lawsuits among companies. Spatial propinquity is hypothesized to determine the nature of interaction and social relationships between the principal’s and the mediating agent’s employees, which can subsequently affect the mediating agent’s involvement in identifying opportunities for the principal to engage in litigation. This study’s context is the patterns of spatial distribution of 405 U.S. biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies (the principals) and the population of 365 intellectual property (IP) litigation firms (the mediating agents) and their 2,255 U.S. regional offices. It relates these patterns to the companies’ involvement in patent infringement disputes from 1999 to 2006. Additionally, this study uses evidence from thirty-six semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners. Results suggest that proximity to IP litigation firms increases the number of lawsuits a company files, even when accounting for the endogeneity in law firms’ location choices. Greater proximity to the IP litigation firm retained for a given lawsuit also lengthens that lawsuit’s duration, although this effect is moderated by the characteristics of the local institutional environment in which the company is located.

January 2012

Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science

The Lure of the Virtual

Stephen Barley
Management Science and Engineering
Stanford University

Friday, January 27
3:00-4:00
Bren Hall 6011

ABSTRACT: To understand how virtuality affects work, we need to make better distinctions between types of virtual work. In this paper, we draw on semiotics to distinguish among three types of virtual work — virtual teams, remote control and simulations — based on what a technology makes virtual and whether work is done on, through or within representations. We know the least about simulations, yet they have the greatest potential to change work’s historically tight coupling to physical objects. We show how digital simulation technologies in an automobile company prompted a shift from symbolic to iconic representation of vehicle performance. This, in turn, altered workers’ dependence on each other and on physical objects, leading managers to confound operating within representations with operating on representations. Accordingly, managers assigned simulations to virtual teams, thereby distancing workers from the physical referents of their models and making it difficult to validate them. The consequences were troubling.

Merage School of Business Organization & Management Colloquium

Diverse According to Whom?
Exploring Differences in Diversity Judgments and Their Consequences

Chris Bauman
Paul Merage School of Business
University of California Irvine

Wednesday, January 11
9:30-11:00 am
School of Business 223

ABSTRACT: People often treat diversity as an objective feature of situations that everyone perceives similarly. However, diversity judgments may diverge because they are social perceptions that reflect, in part, individuals’ motives and experiences, such as concerns about how a group would treat them. Therefore, whether a group includes in-group members should predict how diverse a group appears, even if it is heterogeneous in other ways. Supporting this idea, two experiments demonstrated that racial minority group members perceived more diversity when groups included members of their own race rather than another. This in-group representation effect was more pronounced among African Americans than Asian Americans and positively associated with strength of racial identification. Furthermore, variability in perceived diversity had important consequences for racial minority group members; across conditions that Whites rated as being equally diverse, perceived diversity explained differences in organizational attractiveness and expectations about how effectively the group would handle racial issues.

Department of Informatics

Towards a Materiality of Information

Paul Dourish & Melissa Mazmanian
Department of Informatics
University of California Irvine

Friday, January 13
3:00-4:00
Donald Bren Hall 5011

ABSTRACT: In this talk, we’d like to sketch some very preliminary ideas that we’re beginning to develop around the materiality of digital information. In the humanities and social sciences, the last few years have seen a rise in interest in “materiality” — an examination of the nature and consequences of the material forms of objects of social and cultural import. There are many different things that one might mean when talking of the materiality of digital information — everything from why iPods have a different cultural cache than Zunes (the domain of material culture) to how urban landscapes are reshaped by the material constraints of high-capacity network wiring or wireless access patterns (the domain of human geography). We will then examine more specifically the consequences of the fact that information — which we generally talk about as if it were ineffable and abstract — is something that we encounter only ever in material form, and that our information practices (the things we know how to do, as information scientists) are inextricably entwined with these material forms, both substrates (media) and representations (conventional patterns).

Merage School of Business Strategy Colloquium

Home Court Advantage:
Compensating Wage Differentials and Rent Appropriation in the NBA

Russ Coff
Wisconsin School of Business
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Friday, January 20
2:00-3:30 am
School of Business 112

ABSTRACT: The compensating differentials literature offers logic that pay is expected to be higher for undesirable jobs. The fact that employees may make tradeoffs between the desirability of a job or work environment and the amount of pay required to hold them in place is of great strategic significance. This willingness to make tradeoffs means that such non-pecuniary benefits may allow other stakeholders, such as shareholders, to capture more rents. But do employees routinely give up financial compensation when they receive non-pecuniary gains? While the compensating wage differentials literature offers some evidence that it occurs (consider the classic example of pay rates for sanitation workers), it has not been examined in the context of competitive advantage where many professionals may especially enjoy their work. To what extent are employees willing to take pay cuts based on the presence of non-pecuniary factors?
We examine this in the context of the National Basketball Association. Using team-level data from every regular season game spanning 2000-2009, combined with measures of firm performance, including wins, playoff performance, and attendance, we estimate a variety of specifications where firm performance relative to rivals is a function of the exchange value of team members’ skill portfolio and several proxies for individual mobility constraints. Counter to the compensating wage differentials literature, results indicate that players often do not take pay reductions when there are important non-pecuniary gains. In this way, the financial compensation understates the rent that such individuals actually appropriate. Analysis confirms that players recognize this value since a substantial premium is required to lure them away from their hometown teams – they need to be compensated for the utility lost by moving away. Accordingly, the theory of competitive advantage needs to be augmented to account for these, often hidden, sources of value creation that influence the total amount of rent generated as well as how it is allocated to the various stakeholders.

October 2011

The Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

No Exit: Failure to Exit Under Uncertainty

Anne Marie Knott
Olin School of Business
Washington University

Tuesday, October 6
12:00-1:30
School of Business 117

ABSTRACT: Delayed exit is a substantial economic problem. Studies indicate if VCs exited ventures optimally, returns would triple, and if corporations divested underperforming business units, shareholder wealth would increase 13.6%. A prevalent explanation for delayed exit is behavioral biases associated with escalated commitment. In general however exit will exhibit inertia even absent bias. This arises both from decision maker efforts to avoid Type I error while discovering the long run prospects of an endeavor (passive learning) and from the option value of exit. Solutions to exit delays differ depending upon which source predominates, yet empirical tests to date have not disentangled the relative importance of these sources. We characterize exit delay in the population of U.S. banks between 1984 and 1997, and examine its causes. We find that a substantial proportion of exit occurs beyond ‘rational’ benchmarks that incorporate option value. While the bulk of this delay appears to represent efforts to minimize Type I error, there is also evidence of the behavioral biases associated with escalated commitment.

COR Kick-Off Event

Academic Speed Dating

Friday, October 14
12:00-1:30
SBSG (Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway) 1517

Refreshments will be provided.
Please rsvp to kenjik(at)uci.edu

The Center for Organizational Research and the Department of Informatics

Creativity and Culture: Understanding Team Creativity and What Fosters It

Pamela Hinds
Management Science and Engineering
Stanford University

Friday, October 14
3:00-4:00
Bren Hall 6011

ABSTRACT: In this talk, I will report on a study exploring what stimulates creativity in teams and how it varies by national culture. In particular, we examine rapid prototyping, a widely accepted practice for promoting creativity in the West. It is characterized by a short-term (rapid) process with disruptive interventions, which we found does not resonate well with teams composed of Easterners who are said to have a long-term orientation and value maintaining a harmony with their surroundings. On measures of novelty, feasibility, continuous improvement, and societal contribution, the Asian teams consistently demonstrated worse creative performance when doing iterative prototyping whereas the US teams performed the same or better on all measures when doing iterative prototyping versus devoting their time to a single prototype. Our results suggest that the effect is mediated by group process such that Asian teams reported less curiosity and engagement and demonstrated less collaborative behavior in the iterative prototyping conditions and the US teams reported more on all of these dimensions when doing iterative prototyping. Our results suggest that the same practices that promote creativity in teams composed of Westerners may not have the same benefit to creativity in teams composed of Easterners.

Merage School of Business Organization & Management Colloquium

Callings and Meaning at Work:
From Cages to Cubicles

Stuart Bunderson
Olin School of Business
Washington University in St. Louis

Tuesday, October 20
12:00-1:30
School of Business 117

ABSTRACT: In an earlier study of work meaning in the zookeeping profession (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009, ASQ), we identified and elaborated a “neoclassical” view of work as a calling — a view that mirrors classical conceptualizations of calling in its emphasis on occupational place, destiny, and duty. We found that a neoclassical calling is both binding and ennobling, that it fosters identification and meaning as well as duty and sacrifice. In this presentation, I will briefly summarize our earlier work and will then discuss our recent theoretical and empirical efforts to examine the relevance of a neoclassical calling for a more mainstream profession — the profession of management.

Merage School of Business Strategy Colloquium

The Influence of Intellectual Property Protection on the Geography of Trade in Knowledge-Intensive Goods

Anita McGahan
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

Friday, October 21
1:00-2:30
School of Business 112

Paper for Discussion

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the impact of legal institutions for patent enforcement on the diffusion of knowledge-based products. The context is the implementation of the TRIPS (trade-related intellectual property) agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which required member countries to adopt and enforce laws to protect intellectual property (IP). One stated goal of TRIPS was to promote “the transfer and dissemination of technology,” particularly from high-income to poorer countries. Using the United Nations Comtrade data, we analyze trade flows from 1995 to 2009 for 158 WTO countries to investigate how the diffusion of knowledge-based products changed with TRIPS implementation. In particular, we examine changes in trade across different sectors that vary in the importance of knowledge and IP as well as across countries of different income levels. We find that, relative to sectors that rely less on IP, exports of biopharmaceuticals and information and communications technology (ICT) products increased following the implementation of TRIPS. This result holds across all country income levels. In addition, we find an increase in ICT imports in developing countries. However, contrary to the TRIPS goal of transferring knowledge from rich to poor, the increase in importation of knowledge-based goods – particularly of biopharmaceuticals – was lower in poorer countries than in high-income countries. Furthermore, post-TRIPS biopharmaceutical imports into developing countries increased less than ICT imports. Overall, the results demonstrate that exports of IP-intensive products responded vigorously to the implementation of legal protections on trade, but that imports from high-income countries into developing countries – and consequently the dissemination of knowledge into poorer settings – was sensitive to other factors that affected receptiveness to these goods. These findings suggest that the patent system alone may not be sufficient for promoting knowledge diffusion from high-income to developing countries.

COR Faculty Development Workshop

Who’s Actually Relating?
Bringing the Worker into Theories of Relational Coordination

Melissa Mazmanian
Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Assistant Professor in Informatics

Discussants: Christine Beckman, Paul Dourish

Friday, October 28th
12-1:30pm
Social Ecology I Room 306

Paper for Discussion

ABSTRACT: In this paper we investigate the role of the person in establishing and maintaining relational coordination and the ways in which actions can inspire a shift in how people understand their professional self. We provide an ethnographic account of an organizational change effort in an elite consulting firm that strove to provide individuals with predictable time off from work one night a week. We discuss how the collective process of enabling disconnect inspired positive shifts in coordination practices as teams moved from a wheel and spoke model to a way of working that can be accurately described as “relational coordination” – a form of coordination characterized by shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect. This shift is approached through the lens of the individuals performing the change effort. In this environment no one person could extract from the team and unilaterally choose to take time off, even in the evenings. In order to make time off legitimate, teams had to overcome the tension inherent in being asked to relate to each other in a manner that challenged cultural norms of constant connectivity and 24/7 availability. We provide a detailed account of how individuals were able to negotiate this tension between ‘being’ a good consultant and ‘doing’ the change effort. Specifically, this account depicts how teams legitimized new ways of acting and envisioning what it might look like to be a ‘good’ consultant in an environment of predictable time off. Theories of relational coordination have not focused on shifts in coordination practices. As such, they have tended to ignore the role of the person, their sense of self and desires to uphold social norms of legitimacy and success, in accounting for how relational coordination might emerge in a situated social dynamic. We suggest that enabling people to act in new ways is the first step toward allowing them to re-imagine themselves in a social environment. By ignoring the people who are doing the relating, theories of relational coordination suffer from a lack of nuanced understanding about what allows people to break out of current patterns of action and relate to each other in new ways.

September 2011

The Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Creating and Maintaining Institutions through the Production and Perpetuation of Ignorance

Kenji Klein
Paul Merage School of Business
University of California Irvine

Tuesday, September 27
12:00-1:30
School of Business 116

ABSTRACT: Institutional scholars have long argued that the inability of actors to conceptualize alternatives to dominant institutional arrangements plays a key role in the maintenance of those arrangements, yet little is known about how actors come to be unable to conceptualize alternatives to such arrangements. This paper addresses that gap through historical analysis of the origins and perpetuation of marijuana prohibition. This analysis reveals the way in which institutionalization depends upon the ongoing disruption and suppression of knowledge, communities, and material artifacts that undermine the taken-for-granted status of dominant institutions. It also suggests conditions under which the taken-for-granted status of dominant institutions becomes vulnerable to erosion. Implications for research on institutional work and power in institutional processes are discussed. A case is made for the relevance of the study of ignorance and forgetting in organizational processes to supplement the extensive literature on knowledge and learning.

The Center for Organizational Research and the Department of Informatics

Watching You Watching Me: Communication Technology and the Rise of Psychological Boundary Control

Christine Beckman
Paul Merage School of Business
University of California Irvine

Friday, September 30
3:00-4:00
Bren Hall 5011

ABSTRACT: As communication technologies proliferate in the workplace and organizational boundaries become increasingly blurred, organizations face unique challenges in controlling the work-home boundary and, in particular, controlling how and when employees engage in work and non-work activities. Using interview and archival data from the U.S. Navy, we explore one organization’s efforts at boundary control in the context of ubiquitous Internet and e-mail use. We find that although boundaries to the outside world are reinforced through extensive use of traditional mechanisms of organizational control, existing forms of control are inadequate to fully control behavior. We describe key limitations to traditional control mechanisms, namely the low speed of adjustability of traditional control mechanisms, the limited reach of traditional control mechanisms, and the desituated use of technology. We then outline a new form of control—psychological boundary control—that is both enabled and necessitated by technology. This psychological boundary control works by triggering uncertainty of technology access, by acting to contextualize technology use, and by making visible the electronic tether of organizational control. Our findings have implications for understanding how technology use reconfigures organizational control efforts.

Center for Organizational Research (COR)

Anthropology of Markets & Consumption

2011-2012 Calendar of Events

Past Events

COR Sponsors Academic Speed Dating

Grant Recipients 2011-2012

COR Grant Recipients
2011 – 2012

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2011-2012 AWARDEES!

Past Events

COR Grant Recipients 2011 – 2012

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2011-2012 AWARDEES!

COR Grant Recipients
2011 – 2012