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Chapter 1 should have left you with an understanding that innovation is absolutely central to the functioning of the modern economy and a key strategic concern for companies. In this chapter, we will examine why innovation is also inherently difficult. We will begin with a very material understanding of this challenge, as Abernathy lays out how the nature of the production process that enables short-term competitiveness can be anathema to the development of innovation. To nuance what Abernathy calls the Productivity Dilemma, we then move on to March’s analysis of how different modes of organizational learning and managerial decision-making can lead to a similar trade-off between short-term and long-term competitiveness. Finally, we emphasize the ways that innovation is made still more difficult by its inherent uncertainty.
Having looked at how firms develop innovations and bring them to market, and the role of entrepreneurs and states in shaping those processes, we turn now to the question of what innovations do to society. Innovations, after all, do not just concern the firms that create them. We begin at the most macro of macroscopic levels with Perez’s paper on technology bubbles, asking how societies are transformed through successive waves of technological revolution and what happens as those waves flood over society. Staying at the macroscopic perspective with Zuboff’s paper on Big Other, we look at how technological change transforms capitalist dynamics and ushers in both new logics of accumulation and new forms of exploitation. Then, we move to the question that the popular press tends to phrase as “Will robots take our jobs?” as we look at the history and future of workplace automation with Autor’s paper and Bessen’s analysis of the conditions that lead to widespread, as opposed to highly concentrated, societal gains from technology.
It would be remiss to have a discussion of innovation without addressing the role that entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship can play in it. To begin that discussion, we turn first to Schumpeter’s early work and its enthusiastic (almost theatrical) celebration of the entrepreneur and Baumol’s historical analysis of what it is about our current economic system that leads entrepreneurship to take particularly productive forms and not the unproductive and destructive forms that might have dominated earlier epochs. Then, we problematize. With Gans et al., we explore what conditions might contribute to entrepreneurship spurring Schumpeter’s gale of Creative Destruction and think about why any rational entrepreneur would even attempt to do so. To close the chapter, Nightingale & Coad lay bare the counterintuitive argument that entrepreneurs, for all the bravado and cultural celebration, typically really don’t do that much. Much of what most people believe to be true about entrepreneurs, it turns out, is just a result of survivorship biases and other methodological problems.
As innovation changes society, so too does it change organizations and work. In some ways, the same questions arise: What kind of work will we be doing, and what work will disappear or be changed? How does technology make it possible to increase worker productivity, possibly through ever more exploitative means? At what timescales should we expect technologies to impact industries, professions, and workers in different ways? But these are, in a way, “just” societal questions writ small. We should not leave them behind when we turn our attention to organizations. They should stay with you, but you also want to be asking additional ones. In this chapter, we raise some of these additional ones and ask how technologies change how we work and organize. The paper by Bodrozic and Adler looks at the longue durée and takes an incredibly broad view, showing how management concepts evolve in response to the possibilities and problematics of (Neo-Schumpeterian) technological revolutions. Beane’s paper does almost the opposite. It looks very closely at how a very specific technology influences how people learn in organizations, highlighting all the variation and nuance and complexity that plays out at the micro-level of organizations. To close, we turn to Dell’Acqua et al.’s very recent working paper and its examination of artificial intelligence and how that particular technology might influence work and organizing as we know them.
So far, we have looked at the challenges of generating new innovations, but that is of course not the end of the story. To bring about, or defend against, Creative Destruction, the product innovations that firms develop need to get into the market or otherwise diffuse. In the first reading, we look at how diffusion tends to happen and how, from a company’s perspective, high-tech products might follow slightly different dynamics and call for substantively different strategies. Then, we address the question of when to enter an industry and bring a product to market, exploring the advantages that firms can try to capture by being a “first mover,” and the disadvantages that they will have to grapple with along the way. Third, we explore what it means to bring innovative products to the market when those products are not yet understandable to their users, and why markets for new technologies sometimes behave in very peculiar ways.
We propose a novel pricing factor for currency returns motivated by the market microstructure literature. Our factor aggregates order flow data to provide a measure of buying and selling pressure related to conventional currency trading strategies. It successfully prices the cross-section of currency returns sorted on the basis of forward discount and momentum. The association between our factor and currency returns differs according to the customer segment of the foreign exchange market. In particular, it appears that financial customers are risk-takers in the market, while nonfinancial customers serve as liquidity providers.
This paper studies how investor heterogeneity impacts equilibrium debt maturity. The optimal issuance strategy combines long- and short-term debts. A long-term debt contains default risk but hedges against intermediate downturns. A short-term debt provides repayment commitment but requires being rolled over and becomes risky during downturns. Issuing multiple debt maturities spreads the cost of these risky claims to investors most willing to hold risk at different points in time. The model predicts that debt maturity is more dispersed with lower financing costs and more investment opportunities when debt ownership is spread among many different types of investors.
This study examines the impact of organizational gossip on workplace outcomes, including affective organizational commitment, loneliness, and turnover intention, with a focus on differences between the public and private sectors. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combines qualitative and quantitative data from surveys conducted with Turkish citizen partners and in-depth interviews with employees in both sectors. The findings reveal that positive gossip enhances social bonds and commitment, while negative gossip leads to loneliness and increased turnover intention, especially in the private sector where job insecurity is higher. The study introduces an integrated framework linking gossip dynamics to organizational processes. Practical implications suggest that managers should address negative gossip while promoting positive gossip to strengthen workplace relationships. This study highlights the dual role of gossip in shaping employee experiences and retention strategies.
Existing research has primarily examined coping strategies for dirty work while giving less attention to employees’ satisfaction. Much of this work has considered the phenomenon from an identity perspective, despite its underlying connections to job demands and resources. Drawing on the Job Demand-Resource (JD-R) model, this study investigates the relationship between dirty work and employee satisfaction, with emotional exhaustion as a mediating variable and self-consciousness as a moderator. Data collected from 234 participants in dirty work occupations with a 4-week time lag show that dirty work is positively associated with emotional exhaustion, which negatively impacts job, career, and life satisfaction. The findings further indicate that employees with higher self-consciousness report greater emotional exhaustion, while those with lower self-consciousness experience less emotional exhaustion. These results provide theoretical contributions to the dirty work literature and offer practical implications for mitigating emotional exhaustion in these roles.
To explain why nurses intend to stay or leave their organizations after perceiving a psychological contract breach (PCB), we investigated whether perceived organizational support (POS) among nurses moderates the relationship between PCB and turnover intention (TI). We used a survey methodology targeting currently employed nurses. After controlling for nursing unit, POS accentuated the positive relationship between PCB and TI. The study contributes to literature by demonstrating (1) the impact of PCB on TI and (2) that POS explains why the strength of the positive relationship between PCB and TI varies among individuals. Results highlight the importance of fulfilling obligations and promises made by supervisors and managers to nurses. The findings suggest that when nurses with high POS perceive PCBs, the consequences may be more detrimental.
Workplace bullying is a persistent issue despite extensive research, with most studies focusing on targets rather than managerial perspectives. This study explores how New Zealand managers conceptualize workplace bullying, shedding light on cultural and organizational influences. While bullying affects roughly one in 10 New Zealand workers, definitions remain inconsistent, complicating prevention and response efforts. This research investigates whether managers distinguish bullying from other forms of conflict and aggression, and how their views align with regulatory definitions such as those from WorkSafe New Zealand. A randomized Qualtrics panel of 316 managers completed an anonymous online survey, including open-ended questions. Responses were analysed using six-phase thematic analysis, enabling candid reflection and rich insights into bullying behaviours, impacts, and organizational dynamics. The findings highlight the importance of understanding bullying within its communication context and suggest that clearer, less stigmatized definitions may support more effective reporting and intervention by managers.
Workplace exclusion – often subtle and difficult to detect – significantly contributes to employee disengagement and turnover, costing US organizations over $1 trillion annually. This study examines how exclusionary behaviors (EBs) influence turnover intentions (TOIs) through disruption of psychological needs, using Rock’s SCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) and self-determination theory. A two-wave survey of full-time US employees (N = 277) assessed EB, SCARF-based need satisfaction, and TOI. Partial least squares structural equation modeling revealed that EB significantly undermines all five SCARF domains, but only fairness and status mediated the EB–TOI link. Certainty, autonomy, and relatedness did not have significant effects. These findings suggest turnover risk intensifies when employees feel unfairly treated or socially devalued, rather than merely disempowered or disconnected. The study advances theoretical integration between SCARF and SDT and offers practical guidance for managers seeking to reduce attrition by fostering inclusive, respectful, and psychologically safe workplace environments.
Using high-frequency disagreement data from the investor social network StockTwits, we find that greater unsophisticated disagreement facilitates informed buying and selling. During periods of overvaluation, the facilitating effect of disagreement on trading is dampened for informed buyers but is amplified for informed sellers. These findings are unexplained by sentiment, news, and retail order flow, and they remain when we measure disagreement overnight and disagreement of technical investors, which alleviates the concern that disagreement and informed trading respond to a common shock. These findings suggest that informed traders respond meaningfully but differently to valuation changes induced by unsophisticated disagreement.
This study explores the impact of market-seeking internationalization, including exporting, industry linkages with foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) at home (e.g., being a supplier), and market-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI) on the digital transformation of large manufacturing firms from an emerging economy. I revisit the springboard perspective, arguing that serving international customers contributes to emerging market firms gaining dynamic capabilities and eventually leads to the adoption of digital technologies. A four-step mediation analysis, as well as path analysis using structural equation modeling, is employed to test the hypotheses. The results show that dynamic capabilities mediate the relationship between internationalization and digital transformation for exporting and market-seeking FDI, while industry linkages with foreign MNEs at home directly lead to digital transformation. With strategic asset-seeking FDI being controlled, our findings highlight that capability upgrading is not only about acquiring knowledge from outward internationalization but also through the endogenous growth path of learning by doing and knowledge acquisition from inward internationalization.
We construct a measure (fLMA) of the extent to which neighboring firms hire similar types of workers, based on the similarity between the labor profile of a firm and that of its locality. We show that a firm’s innovation is positively related to fLMA. The enhanced labor mobility induced by higher fLMA is an important channel for this positive relation. This relation is stronger when firms have increased outside job opportunities for employees, increased knowledge spillovers via coworkership, and more employee stock options. Innovation is higher when intellectual property ownership is with employers, not employees. This effect increases in fLMA.