Administrative Science Quarterly

This article tests hypotheses about the effects of social networks on inequitable salary negotiation outcomes using a U.S. high-technology company's salary negotiation data for 1985–1995. Analyzing results of 3,062 actual salary negotiations, we found that members of racial minority groups negotiated significantly lower salary increases than majority members, but this effect was dramatically reduced when we controlled for social ties to the organization. Having a social tie to the organization significantly increased salary negotiation outcomes, and minorities were less likely than majority members to have such a social tie.

We investigate the effect of community-wide political and ideological interests on the failure rate of Israeli workers' cooperatives. Political order may be provided by the state or through membership in a federation. Independently, both conditions should reduce organizational failure, but when they coexist, the influence of the state should dominate due to its comparative advantages as a supplier of order. Organizations that represent rival ideologies cause ideological competition, which should increase failure, while organizations that represent shared ideologies cause ideological mutualism, which should decrease failure. The context of Israeli workers' cooperatives provides a natural laboratory for testing these ideas, as it spans the formation of the Israeli state. It also includes a powerful federation, the Histadrut, to which many cooperatives belonged, as well as significant populations of organizations representing both capitalist and socialist ideologies. The analysis supports all of the above arguments, indicating the relevance of interdependence, broadly defined, for the evolution of organizational populations.

This paper uses data on radio format changes to test hypotheses on innovations as catalysts for nonmimetic change in organizations. Innovations are difficult to interpret using existing schemata, causing organizations to search for information on the opportunities and threats implicit in observed innovations. Such search may lead to mimetic adoption of the innovation or, more likely, to more varied nonmimetic change. Results show an effect of innovations on the rate of nonmimetic change in radio markets, with innovations in large or nearby markets having greater effect and innovations by large organizations having less effect. The social and competitive relations of the innovator to a given organization are thus modifiers of the catalytic effect. These findings have implications for theories of innovation, competition, and organizational isomorphism.

This paper investigates the relationship between organizational aging and innovation processes to illuminate the dynamics of high-technology industries, as well to resolve debates in organizational theory about the effects of aging on organizational functioning. We test hypotheses based on two seemingly contradictory consequences of aging for organizational innovation: that aging is associated with increases in firms' rates of innovation and that the difficulties of keeping pace with incessant external developments causes firms' innovative outputs to become obsolete relative to the most current environmental demands. These seemingly contradictory outcomes are intimately related and reflect inherent tradeoffs in organizational learning and innovation processes. Multiple longitudinal analyses of the relationship between firm age and patenting behavior in the semiconductor and biotechnology industries lend support to these arguments.

We used computer simulations to examine the role and interrelationship between search processes that are forward-looking, based on actors' cognitive map of action-outcome linkages, and those that are backward-looking, or experience based. Cognition was modeled as a simple, low-dimensional representation of a more complex, higher dimensional fitness landscape. Results show that, although crude, these representations still act as a powerful guide to initial search efforts and usefully constrain the direction of subsequent experiential search. Changing a cognitive representation itself can act as an important mode of adaptation, effectively resulting in the sequential allocation of attention to different facets of the environment. This virtue of shifting cognitive representation, however, may be offset by the loss of tacit knowledge associated with the prior cognition.

Previous research has shown that procedural fairness and outcome favorability interactively combine to influence people's reactions to their social exchanges. The tendency for people to respond more positively when outcomes are more favorable is reduced when procedural fairness (how things happen) is relatively high. This paper evaluates whether cultural differences in people's tendencies to view themselves as interdependent or independent (their self-construal) moderate the interactive relationship between procedural fairness and outcome favorability. In three studies, participants indicated their reactions to an exchange with another party as a function of the other party's procedural fairness and the outcome favorability associated with the exchange. In Study 1, participants' national culture was treated as a proxy for their self-construal. In Study 2, people's national culture and self-construal were assessed. In Study 3, participants were classified on the basis of their self-construals. Converging evidence across studies showed that the interactive relationship between procedural fairness and outcome favorability was more pronounced among participants with more interdependent forms of self-construal.