PHDBA 259S-1, MORS Colloquium, Professor Barry Staw. Cheit 110, Wednesdays from 4-5:30 pm (* unless otherwise noted)

Aug. 31 Welcome Get Together
Meet and greet new MORS faculty and students
Sept. 7 Roundtable Discussion
A Roundtable Discussion with Commentators, Cameron Anderson, Jenny Chatman, Jo-Ellen Pozner, Jim Lincoln, and others
“Integrating Micro and Macro Research: Is this still a feasible goal or just a pipe-dream?”
Sept. 14 Elizabeth Mullen
Stanford University
“Responding to Injustice: The Relationship Between Power, Punishment and Compensation.”
Sept. 21 Woody Powell & Kurt Sandholtz
Stanford University
“Amphibious Entrepreneurs and the Emergence of New Organizational Forms.”
Where do novel organizational forms come from? Our claim is that emergence is fundamentally relational; it arises at the intersection of domains. Focusing on the first decade of the biotechnology industry, we analyze how different configurations of business, science, and finance were combined. We contrast two mechanisms for organizing new ventures—recombination and transposition. Based on an in-depth archival examination of 26 firms, we distill the attributes that characterized these companies. Our sample size is too large for intensive case-study methods and too small for regression-based approaches, so we supplement the qualitative evidence with hierarchical clustering analysis, which permits a rigorous cross-case assessment of the elements that cohered into distinct forms. This method generates a typology of four variants of a new-to-the-world organizational model: the dedicated biotech firm (DBF). Three of the forms were created through recombination, as executives recruited from large pharmaceutical corporations mixed practices borrowed from past experience. In contrast, one model was associated with “amphibious” academic scientists who naively imported ideas from scientific invisible colleges into their venture-financed startups, and subsequently transported commercially-derived practices back to the academy. We argue that such transpositions confront a distinctive liability of newness. Practices that seem alien and out of context are more likely to be rejected or prove untenable when introduced into a distant domain. At the same time, they are freighted with generative possibilities precisely because they are pursued on a clean canvas. Such invention “in the wild” can transform social worlds. Our analysis affords insight into the emergence of novel entities.
Sept. 28 Blake Ashforth
Arizona State University
“Ambivalence in Organizations.”
The experience of simultaneously positive and negative orientations toward a person, goal, task, idea, and so on is quite common in organizations, but poorly understood. We explore the nature of ambivalence in organizations, its organizational triggers, and offer an integrative framework of four major responses to highly intense ambivalence (avoidance, domination, compromise, and holism) that is applicable to actors at all levels of analysis. We discuss the positive and negative outcomes associated with each response, and the conditions under which each is most effective and likely. Although ambivalence is uncomfortable for actors, it has the potential to foster growth in the actor as well as highly adaptive and effective behavior.
[PDF]
Oct. 5 Zur Shapira
New York University
“Strategic decision making and the perils of betting to win: Battling aspiration and survival in the Jeopardy! tournament of champions.”
[PDF]
Oct. 12 Keith Murnighan
Northwestern University
“On Greed: Desirability and a Calculative Mindset vs. GUilt and Empathic Perspective Taking.”
Oct. 12 Keith Murnighan
Northwestern University
“On Greed: Desirability and a Calculative Mindset vs. Guilt and Empathic Perspective Taking.”
Oct. 19 Andrew von Nordenflycht
Simon Frasier University
“The Public Corporation—Friend of Foe of Professional Ethics? Ownership and Ethics in Securities Brokerage.”
Oct. 26 Kathleen Eisenhardt
Stanford University
“Rotating Leadership and Collaborative Innovation: Recombination Processes in Symbiotic Relationships”
[PDF]
Nov. 2 No Colloquium
Nov. 9 Don Palmer
Graduate School of Business
University of California, Davis
“Doping in Professional Cycling: Modeling the Use of Banned Performance-Enhancing Substances Among Riders in the 2010 Tour de France.”
[PDF]
Nov. 16 Wendy Berry Mendes
Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
Nov. 23 Thanksgiving Break—No Colloquium
Nov. 30 Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton
Psychology
University of California, Berkeley
Dec. 5 Shane Frederick
Yale
*Cross-listed with the Marketing group—held in F320 from 4:10-5:30pm on Monday, December 5th