The escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is often attributed to self-justification motives that presumably are evoked by personal responsibility for initiating the original action (e.g., B. M. Staw, 1976). Nevertheless, personal responsibility-operationalized as choice-has been confounded with public justification, which might engender self-presentation concerns. The present laboratory experiment extended past research by examining the impact of choice on escalating commitment with and without justification that was either public or private. Results showed that escalating commitment was not significantly different in conditions of public or private justification but that justification was necessary in addition to choice itself. The data suggest that justification of past choices may be necessary for escalating commitment.

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Research on identity in organizations takes endurance overtime as a taken‐for‐granted expectation, but then often explores how identity changes. Conversely, research on memory in organizations takes change as a taken‐for‐granted expectation and then explores how particular memories might be maintained by purposeful action. We used both of these literatures as a basis for exploring what happened to two aspects of an organizational group's identity over the course of its first seven years. One aspect of identity centered on the group's mission and the other on the group's internal processes. Based on analysis of the processes involved in the evolution of the group's identity, we suggest several factors that foster stability in identity and several factors that foster change in identity. From the identification of these factors, and based on Lewin's Field Theory approach, we suggest a more complex depiction of what identity stability or change might mean overtime.

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As organizational success becomes increasingly tied to the generation of new technologies and the continuous improvement of existing technologies, numerous questions arise regarding the management of knowledge in ways that maximize the technical value of the resulting innovations. Scholars and practitioners alike need to gain a better understanding of not only how knowledge can be applied to the generation of technically valuable innovations, but also how that value can be captured and retained by the innovating organization itself. Using patent-based measures across 117 innovations in the inkjet printing field over the last two decades of the twentieth century, the research described in this study investigates the relationships among selected components of intellectual capital, different knowledge exploration (i.e., search and selection) strategies, and the retained technical value of organizationally generated innovations.