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- 2022
- Working Paper
Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leading: An Actionable Systems Theory of Change and Development
By: Michael Beer
This paper presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes...
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- July 2022
- Article
What Do I Make of the Rest of My Life? Global and Quotidian Life Construal across the Retirement Transition
By: Jeff Steiner and Teresa M. Amabile
Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Measuring the Tolerance of the State: Theory and Application to Protest
By: Veli Andirin, Yusuf Neggers, Mehdi Shadmehr and Jesse M. Shapiro
We develop a measure of a regime's tolerance for an action by its citizens. We ground our measure in an economic model and apply it to the setting of political protest. In the model, a regime anticipating a protest can take a costly action to repress it. We define the...
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- March 2022
- Article
Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps
By: Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth
Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the interest rate but also implicit restrictions on types of investment. We...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Key Success Factors in Environmental Entrepreneurship: The Case of Wilderness Safaris
By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Woods and Herman B. Leonard
Book abstract: This volume is the culmination of many discussions among the editors over the years, especially at the Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference, related to the growth and institutionalization of environmental and social...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Fiscal Development under Colonial and Sovereign Rule
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
This chapter explores differences in the making of a ‘modern’ fiscal state under colonial and sovereign rule. Focusing on African and Asian colonies (1820–1970) and their respective European metropoles, it argues that while the introduction of ‘modern’...
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Keywords:
Fiscal Modernization;
Colonial Rule;
Economic History;
Sovereign Finance;
History;
Taxation;
Africa;
Asia
- 2021
- Working Paper
A Systems Psychodynamic Perspective on the Persistence of Racial Inequality at Work
By: Sanaz Mobasseri, Wiliam Kahn and Robin Ely
This paper uses systems psychodynamic concepts to develop a theory about the persistence of racial inequality in U.S. companies, treating White men as the dominant group and Black people as an illustrative subordinate group. We theorize that this persistence is rooted...
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- December 2021
- Article
The Evolutionary Nature of Breakthrough Innovation: An Empirical Investigation of Firm Search Strategies
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
Breakthrough innovation has been an important topic of study for generations of scholars. Previous research in this domain has focused on exploring the way breakthroughs emerge from cumulative combination and recombination of prior technologies and knowledge components...
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- November 2021
- Article
Corporate Strategy and the Theory of the Firm in the Digital Age
By: Markus Menz, Sven Kunisch, Julian Birkinshaw, David J. Collis, Nicolai J. Foss, Robert E. Hoskisson and John Prescott
The purpose of this article is to reinvigorate research in the intersection of corporate strategy and the theory of the firm in light of the rapid advancement of digital technologies. Using the theory of the firm as an interpretive lens, we focus our analysis on the...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Channeled Attention and Stable Errors
We develop a framework for assessing when a person will notice that a theory she has about the world is wrong, premised on the idea that people neglect information that they view (through the lens of their misconceptions) to be irrelevant. Focusing on the question of...
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- September 2021
- Article
Shaking Things Up: Disruptive Events and Inequality
By: Letian Zhang
This paper develops a theory of how disruptive events could reduce racial and gender inequality in organizations. Despite pressure from regulators and advocates, racial and gender inequality in the workplace remains high. I theorize that because such inequality is...
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- Article
Towards the Unification and Robustness of Perturbation and Gradient Based Explanations
By: Sushant Agarwal, Shahin Jabbari, Chirag Agarwal, Sohini Upadhyay, Steven Wu and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As machine learning black boxes are increasingly being deployed in critical domains such as healthcare and criminal justice, there has been a growing emphasis on developing techniques for explaining these black boxes in a post hoc manner. In this work, we analyze two...
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- May 2021
- Case
The International Space Station, Principal-Agent Problems, and NASA's Quest to Keep Humans in Space
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang
In building the International Space Station (ISS), NASA opened the door to the development of a robust in-space economy in low-Earth Orbit, and yet the decision to build the station, and continue to extend its lifetime, placed a huge burden on NASA’s Human Spaceflight...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Fiscal Development under Colonial and Sovereign Rule
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
This paper explores differences in the making of a ‘modern’ fiscal state under colonial and sovereign rule. Focusing on African and Asian colonies (1820–1970) and their respective European metropoles, it argues that while the introduction of ‘modern’ taxes was part of...
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Keywords:
Economic History;
Fiscal Modernization;
Colonial Rule;
Sovereign Finance;
History;
Taxation;
Africa;
Asia
- April 2021
- Article
The Effects of Quota Frequency: Sales Performance and Product Focus
By: Doug J. Chung, Das Narayandas and Dongkyu Chang
This study investigates the comprehensive and multidimensional effects of quota (goal) frequency on sales force performance. We develop a theory of salespeople’s behavior—aggregate effort and the product type focus—in response to the temporal length of a sales-quota...
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- February 2021
- Background Note
Jobs to Be Done: A Toolbox
By: Derek C. M. van Bever, Bob Moesta, Iuliana Mogosanu, Shaye Roseman and Katie Zandbergen
The Jobs to Be Done methodology is both a theory and a practical approach for understanding customer behavior and why people make the choices they make. Many practitioners, whether they work for startups or incumbent businesses, find Jobs to Be Done useful because it...
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- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Technical Note
Strategy and Strategic Thinking
This note gives managers a concrete perspective on what ‘a strategy’ really is, what makes a decision ‘strategic,’ and what ‘strategic thinking’ means. It also gives them practical frameworks to assess whether some set of decisions is really a strategy and how to...
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- January 2021
- Case
The FIRE Savings Calculator
By: Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton
This case follows Carol Muñoz, a member of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) lifestyle movement. At the age of 45, Carol is considering retiring and living off the $1 million she has accumulated. Using Monte Carlo simulation, Carol forecasts the...
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- Winter 2021
- Article
Dealmaking Disrupted: The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation
By: James K. Sebenius, Ben Cook, David A. Lax, Isaac Silberberg and Paul Levy
While social media has had profound effects in many realms, the theory and practice of negotiation have remained relatively untouched by this potent phenomenon. In this article, we survey existing research in this area and develop a broader framework for understanding...
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