While scholars have provided increasingly well-developed theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of institutional entrepreneurs and other purposeful actors in bringing about change in organizational fields, much less attention has been paid to the role of unorganized, non-strategic...

Many technology studies have conceptualized transitions between technological generations as a series of S-curve performance improvements over time. Surprisingly, the interregnum between successive technological generations has received little attention. To understand what happens in the...

While the notion of reputation has attracted much scholarly interest, few studies have addressed the strategic issue of reputational multiplicity and managing the interactions among different types of reputations. We suggest that an organization can have several stakeholder-specific reputations...

Research has shown that management practices are adapted and ‘made to fit’ the specific context into which they are adopted. Less attention has been paid to how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence the adaptation process. How do organizations manage the tension between...

Studies on institutional change generally pertain to the agency-structure paradox or the ability of institutional entrepreneurs to spearhead change despite constraints. In many complex fields, however, change also needs cooperation from numerous dispersed actors. This presents the additional...

Research within the Resource-based View and the Dynamic Capabilities View, while providing seminal insights into firm success and failure, has typically tended to focus on internal resource development rather than external resource acquisition. The growing tendency of firms to acquire resources...

Firms introducing disruptive innovations into multisided ecosystems may confront the disruptor’s dilemma – they must gain the support of the very incumbents they disrupt. We examine how these firms may address this dilemma through a longitudinal study of TiVo, a company that pioneered the...

We extend research on the diffusion of corporate practices by providing a framework for studying practice variation during diffusion processes. Specifically, we theorize how population-level mechanisms of diffusion link with organizational-level mechanisms of implementation that lead to the...