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The most striking result in working with Professor Gerald Salton over 20 years ago on the comparison between the SMART system and the MEDLARS system [Salton69] was the fact that whereas Boolean retrieval (MEDLARS) did very well or very poorly, the SMART system always seemed to find some of the relevant records. All of us working at Cornell University during that time wanted to run a full-scale comparison between these systems to demonstrate what was to us the clear superiority of a ranking retrieval system, but this was not possible due to lack of funding and other problems.

This paper investigates how organizational misconduct is perpetuated through intergenerational transmission. We theorize that early exposure to a subculture of misconduct imprints newcomers with the belief that misconduct is normal, which is then carried by these individuals into managerial positions and passed down to their subordinates. We test this using longitudinal administrative data from the Chicago Police Department from 1980 to 2017. We exploit a lottery that assigns applicants to training cohorts to demonstrate that officers exposed early on to a subculture of misconduct not only engage in more misconduct over their entire careers, but also increase the misconduct of their subordinates after they become managers. We also find that this intergenerational dynamic is stronger when subordinate officers were exposed to a subculture of misconduct themselves, are earlier in their tenure, and have not yet received their annual review from their manager. Taken together, these findings reveal a bottom-up dynamic whereby beliefs about misconduct are developed in an organization’s lowest ranks, carried by these individuals over time, and passed down to future generations. This study expands our understanding of how organizational misconduct is perpetuated as well as offers important policy implications for addressing the problem of police misconduct. This paper was accepted by Lamar Pierce, organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00580 .

Research SummaryHow do new things in nascent markets become legitimate? Existing research points to a process where legitimacy is built by making associations with already legitimate ideas from other domains. In this study, however, we investigate the Internet boom of the 1990s, a nascent setting where something new—engagement metrics used to evaluate firms—gained legitimacy amongst investors, but not by being associated with already legitimate metrics. Using a question‐driven mixed‐methods approach, we reveal that these new metrics instead gained legitimacy through a novel process we term prospective legitimation, where a new basis of legitimacy was constructed by firms linking their otherwise unproven new metrics to future profitability. We discuss how these findings inform research on legitimacy, the development of nascent markets, and future‐oriented communications.Managerial SummaryFirms in nascent markets often face the challenge of convincing investors to buy into something new. This is difficult because new ideas not only have few precedents, but they also have not been around long enough to have proven their value. Our research shows how firms can legitimate their new ideas prospectively by using future‐oriented communications that link their otherwise unproven new ideas to a desirable future outcome. Through an investigation of the Internet boom of the 1990s, we demonstrate that Internet firms gradually convinced investors to accept their new engagement metrics (e.g., traffic, visitors, users) before there was any concrete evidence that such metrics actually led to profitability. This study thus enhances our understanding of how new ideas gain traction in nascent markets.