Browsing by Subject "Organizations"

This dissertation explores the complex process of organizational change, applying a behavioral lens to understand change in processes, products, and search behaviors. Chapter 1 examines new practice adoption, exploring factors that predict the extent to which routines are adopted “as designed” within the organization. Using medical record data obtained from the hospital’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system I develop a novel measure of the “gap” between routine “as designed” and routine “as realized.” I link this to a survey administered to the hospital’s professional staff following the adoption of a new EHR system and find that beliefs about the expected impact of the change shape fidelity of the adopted practice to its design. This relationship is more pronounced in care units with experienced professionals and less pronounced when the care unit includes departmental leadership. This research offers new insights into the determinants of routine change in organizations, in particular suggesting the beliefs held by rank-and-file members of an organization are critical in new routine adoption. Chapter 2 explores changes to products, specifically examining culling behaviors in the mobile device industry. Using a panel of quarterly mobile device sales in Germany from 2004-2009, this chapter suggests that the organization’s response to performance feedback is conditional upon the degree to which decisions are centralized. While much of the research on product exit has pointed to economic drivers or prior experience, these central finding of this chapter—that performance below aspirations decreases the rate of phase-out—suggests that firms seek local solutions when doing poorly, which is consistent with behavioral explanations of organizational action. Chapter 3 uses a novel text analysis approach to examine how the allocation of attention within organizational subunits shapes adaptation in the form of search behaviors in Motorola from 1974-1997. It develops a theory that links organizational attention to search, and the results suggest a trade-off between both attentional specialization and coupling on search scope and depth. Specifically, specialized unit attention to a more narrow set of problems increases search scope but reduces search depth; increased attentional coupling also increases search scope at the cost of depth. This novel approach and these findings help clarify extant research on the behavioral outcomes of attention allocation, which have offered mixed results.

Although many organizations aspire to be diverse, both in their internal composition and external collaborations, diversity's consequences for organizational outcomes remain unclear. This project uses three separate studies to examine how diversity within and across organizations influences organizational outcomes. The first study uses original data from a national study of organizations to analyze how an organization's internal social composition is associated with its performance. It advances diversity-performance research by demonstrating how the mechanisms of social bridging and social bonding can work together within a diverse organization to improve its performance. The findings suggests that an organization can improve its performance by having socially diverse members who interact often and in ways that engage their social differences. The second study integrates social capital theory and network analysis to explore the relationship between interorganizational networks and organizational action. It uses cross-sectional and panel data from a national study of congregations to analyze the collaborative partnerships congregations form to provide social services. This study demonstrates that a congregation's network ties, net of the effects of its internal characteristics, are significantly associated with the number and types of social service programs it offers. The third study illustrates how an organization's external ties can shape its action by examining black churches and their responses to people living with HIV/AIDS. It uses data from a nationally representative sample of black congregations and draws on institutional theory to analyze congregations as open systems that can be influenced by their surrounding environment. This study indicates that black churches that are engaging their external environment are significantly more likely to have an HIV/AIDS program. Overall, by analyzing how individuals interact within organizations and how organizations interact with one another, these three studies demonstrate how diverse networks influence organizational outcomes.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Research in organizational ecology demonstrates that an organization’s competitive position within its market is highly associated with its survival chances, and that patterns of competitive constraint among organizations influence how markets evolve. However, the literature’s conceptualization of market structure is relatively coarse and static; it does not explore how individual organizations’ competitive positions shift or how market offerings change over relatively short intervals of time. In this study, I use social network analysis to study the structure of organizations’ competitive relationships directly. I examine both how changes in the structure of an organization’s competitive environment influence its survival chances, and how the structure of organizations’ competitive relationships affect the stability of market offerings. With a combination of a large crowd-sourced restaurant dataset from Yelp.com and census tract information from the American Community Survey (Census Bureau, 2009; Yelp, 2019), I apply methods from social network analysis, text analysis, and geographic information systems to track how restaurants’ competitive relationships change over time and space, and to study how these changes influence restaurants’ survival chances and overall market stability. This study provides evidence for new mechanisms of competitive constraint among organizations (niche centrality and niche compression) and new mechanisms of market stability (niche redundancy), offers a new theoretic framework for studying market structure and organizational evolution, and has critical implications for theory in the field of organizational ecology.

This dissertation examines offers a corrective to the world polity theory of globalization, which posits increasing convergence on a single global cultural frame. In contrast, I suggest that national culture limits the adoption of "world culture" by actors and institutions. Instead of adopting world cultural models wholesale, they are adapted through a process I call translated global diffusion. In order to assess my theory, I follow the creation and development of organizations founded by Australia, Canada, and the United States to foster scientific development within their borders. All three national organizations were initiated around 1915, part of an international wave of state science that prima facie appears to support the world polity thesis.

Through a comparative historical analysis that combines archival material and secondary histories from each case, I demonstrate that concerns tied to national identity mediate the incorporation of models sanctioned as part of a "world cultural canopy" of institutional scripts. More specifically, federal legislatures circumscribe new organizations to fit preexisting ideas of proper government. Secondly, the scientists effectively running state science organizations negotiate often conflicting nationalistic and professional impulses. Finally, the national news media report about science in a selective and nationally filtered way. The result is a kind of particular universality, science layered with national import only fully visible from within the nation-state.

The goal of this dissertation is to articulate specific modes and mechanisms by which the process of an individual choosing an organization is shaped by (1) the status of the organization, and (2) the attributes of the chooser. I do this with three types of chooser attributes: individual demographics, neighborhood context, and cultural values; and in two settings: choosing a hospital for cancer treatment, and choosing a church to attend and contribute to financially. Chapters 1 and 2 use data from the SEER-Medicare linked database to demonstrate the relationship between chooser (patient) demographics, at both the individual and neighborhood levels, on the likelihood of choosing a "high-status" cancer hospital in California. Chapter 1 does this in multiple ways. First, it shows that a patient's propensity to seek treatment for their cancer is a function of the patient's race, sex, and age, and by the racial makeup of a patient's neighborhood. Second, it shows that a patient's propensity to leave California for treatment is a function of both patient attributes and attributes of the hospitals they choose. Finally, it shows that patient choice of high-status cancer hospitals is moderated by the educational level of the patient's neighborhood. Chapter 2 shows that patient choice of high-status cancer hospitals is moderated by both individual-level race and the racial composition of the patient's neighborhood. Chapter 3 uses data from multiple sources to describe the ways that congregants' cultural values interact with organizational status (denomination) in the church choice process. Specifically, I use the National Congregations study to demonstrate the organization-level returns to nondenominational status on both legitimacy (attendees) and performance (tithes). Nondenominational churches are uniquely successful, even when compared only to conservative churches. I then use over 45,000 individual-level responses from the nationally-representative Religious Landscape/Faith in Flux Survey and Congregational Life Studies to demonstrate the individual-level valuative mechanisms behind organizational returns to categorical ambiguity. Though the settings and attributes differ across the three chapters, they all point to a similar conclusion: candidate choice processes are shaped by attributes of both candidates and choosers, and a neglect of chooser attributes misses important stratification in the choice process.