No abstract

History has long been recognized as a strategic and organizational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm's ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organizations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue that managers package this knowledge in historical narratives to address particular organizational concerns and audiences. As well, we show that different historical narratives are produced with the goal of achieving different organizational outcomes. The success of an organization is thus dependent on the ability of its managers to skilfully develop historical narratives that create a strategic advantage.

The institutional environment is complex. This complexity is characterized by forces that ebb and flow in wavelike patterns as societal expectations evolve, with attention coalescing around specific events and then dissipating. Some of these critical events are broad and affect many firms, whereas others are narrow and affect individual firms. In either case, when they occur, these events elevate organizational susceptibility to societal demands but encourage different kinds of behavior in response. This study seeks to model this complexity in an area of growing interest for organization scholars—business ethics. In particular, I examine how firms respond to shifting societal pressures for greater ethical behavior by adopting and implementing the Ethics and Compliance Officer position, from 1990 to 2008. Results demonstrate that although firms decide when to adopt in response to broad fieldwide critical events, it is narrower firm-specific critical events that determine resource commitments in implementation.

We know that organizations change over time as a result of their ability to learn and their tendency to forget. What we know less about, however, is why they might change back, despite evidence suggesting that this occurs. In this paper, we develop and test a model of organizational oscillation that explains why firms cycle through periods of learning and periods of forgetting. In particular, we identify a dual role for serious errors, which push firms toward a focus on safety while also pulling them away from other foci, such as efficiency or innovation. Although existing learning research recognizes errors as disruptive, this dual effect has not been theorized. We also demonstrate that, over time, the effect of a serious error on safety weakens, allowing alternative activities to emerge that lead to subsequent errors. We draw on qualitative data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Challenger and Columbia accidents to build theory about why organizations oscillate between safety and other foci, and how serious errors trigger these shifts. We then test this theory using a data set of all pharmaceutical firms that introduced Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs in the United States from 1997 to 2004. Results confirm our theory, which contributes to our understanding of complex learning processes by identifying a mechanism by which organizations learn, then forget; then learn, then forget again.

A review of the literature on organizational rankings across management, sociology, education, and law reveals three perspectives on these complex evaluations-rankings are seen as a form of information intermediation, as comparative orderings, or as a means for surveillance and control. The information intermediation perspective views rankings as information products that address information asymmetries between the ranked organizations and their stakeholders; the comparative orderings perspective views them as representations of organizational status and reputation; and the surveillance and control perspective emphasizes their disciplining power that subjects ranked organizations to political and economic interests. For each perspective, we identify core contributions as well as additional questions that extend the current body of research. We also identify a new perspective-rankings entrepreneurship-which has been overlooked to date but presents significant opportunities to extend our understanding of the production and consumption of rankings.