Managers’ Prototypes of Financial Terms

Abstract

Like most experience, people endow organizations with meaning. Meaninggiving has been explained as a categorization process of matching stimuli against prototypes. This study explores the applicability of such a view to organizations by focusing on a central component of the perspective -prototypes. A phenomenological design is used to uncover the content of organizational prototypes. Data collected from a sample of managers in the financial industry demonstrate the utility of the prototype notion, indicating that further exploration is warranted of how organizations are categorized.

Maps for Managers: Where Are We? Where Do We Go From Here?

“…Cognitive psychologists have determined that categorization is a common technique for framing, structuring, and making sense of one's surroundings (Neisser, 1987), and organization researchers have explored several different ways of eliciting these judgements (see Fuller et al, 1987;Gronhaug and Falkenberg, 1987;Hodgkinson and Johnson, 1987;Walton, 1986). The Porac et al (1987) study given as one of our first examples describes the structural/ hierarchical categories that a group of retailers use to understand their competition environment.…”

“…The map reporting this work, which takes a form also used by Walton (1986) and others, can be plotted on x and y axes directly from factor analysis. A more generic map, which is also used by Bowman and Johnson (1991), can display the relative emphasis given to a larger number of variables.…”

Taxonomic Mental Models in Competitor Definition

“…The prevalence of hierarchical cognitive structures has prompted some researchers to claim that they are fundamental to human thinking and understanding (e.g., Anderson, 1983;Schank, 1982 Direct evidence for Proposition I has been obtained in recent studies by Walton (1986), Reger (1987), Hodgkinson and Johnson (1987), and Porac, Thomas, and Baden-Fuller (1989). Both…”

Interorganizational Macrocultures: A Multilevel Critique

“…As readily acknowledged by Abrahamson and Fombrun (1994), the conceptual foundations of the macrocultures notion were laid in a number of prior studies of how rival organizations come to be configured into discernibly meaningful collectives (e.g., Grinyer & Spender, 1979;Gripsrud & Gronhaug, 1985;Reger & Huff, 1993;Walton, 1986). Particularly noteworthy in our view is the notion of industry recipes (Grinyer & Spender, 1979;Spender, 1989), the idea that industrywide collectives of managers handle uncertainty by evolving shared beliefs about what works and what does not.…”