Administrative Science Quarterly

This paper develops grounded theory on how receiving respect at work enables individuals to engage in positive identity transformation and the resulting personal and work-related outcomes. A company that employs inmates at a state prison to perform professional business-to-business marketing services provided a unique context for data collection. Our data indicate that inmates experienced respect in two distinct ways, generalized and particularized, which initiated an identity decoupling process that allowed them to distinguish between their inmate identity and their desired future selves and to construct transitional identities that facilitated positive change. The social context of the organization provided opportunities for personal and social identities to be claimed, respected, and granted, producing social validation and enabling individuals to feel secure in their transitional identities. We find that security in personal identities produces primarily performance-related outcomes, whereas security in the company identity produces primarily well-being-related outcomes. Further, these two types of security together foster an integration of seemingly incompatible identities—”identity holism”—as employees progress toward becoming their desired selves. Our work suggests that organizations can play a generative role in improving the lives of their members through respect-based processes.

In this paper, we study the way that nascent occupations constructing an occupational mandate invoke not only skills and expertise or a new technology to distinguish themselves from other occupations, but also their values. We studied service design, an emerging occupation whose practitioners aim to understand customers and help organizations develop new or improved services and customer experiences, translate those into feasible solutions, and implement them. Practitioners enacted their values in their daily work activities through a set of material practices, such as shadowing customers or front-line staff, conducting interviews in the service context, or creating “journey maps” of a service user’s experience. The role of values in the construction of an occupational mandate is particularly salient for occupations such as service design, which cannot solely rely on skills and technical expertise as sources of differentiation. We show how service designers differentiated themselves from other competing occupations by highlighting how their values make their work practices unique. Both values and work practices, what service designers call their ethos, were essential to enable service designers to define the proper conduct and modes of thinking characteristic of their occupational mandate.

In an analysis of data on employment in the 48 contiguous United States from 1978 to 2008, we examine the connection between organizational demography and rising income inequality at the state level. Drawing on research on social comparisons and firm boundaries, we argue that large firms are susceptible to their employees making social comparisons about wages and that firms undertake strategies, such as wage compression, to help ameliorate their damaging effects. We argue that wage compression affects the distribution of wages throughout the broader labor market and that, consequently, state levels of income inequality will increase as fewer individuals in a state are employed by large firms. We hypothesize that the negative relationship between large-firm employment and income inequality will weaken when large employers are more racially diverse and their workers are dispersed across a greater number of establishments. Our results show that as the number of workers in a state employed by large firms declines, income inequality in that state increases. When these firms are more racially diverse, however, the negative relationship between large-firm employment and income inequality weakens. These results point to the importance of considering how corporate demography influences the dispersion of wages in a labor market.

In this paper, we examine when members of underrepresented groups choose to support each other, using the context of the funding of female founders via donation-based crowdfunding. Building on theories of choice homophily, we develop the concept of activist choice homophily, in which the basis of attraction between two individuals is not merely similarity between them, but rather perceptions of shared structural barriers stemming from a common social identity based on group membership. We differentiate activist choice homophily from homophily based on the similarity between individuals (“interpersonal choice homophily”), as well as from “induced homophily,” which reflects the likelihood that those in a particular social category will affiliate and form networks. Using lab experiments and field data, we show that activist choice homophily provides an explanation for why women are more likely to succeed at crowdfunding than men and why women are most successful in industries in which they are least represented.

Using two longitudinal panel datasets of Chinese manufacturing firms, we assess whether state ownership benefits or impedes firms’ innovation. We show that state ownership in an emerging economy enables a firm to obtain crucial R&D resources but makes the firm less efficient in using those resources to generate innovation, and we find that a minority state ownership is an optimal structure for innovation development in this context. Moreover, the inefficiency of state ownership in transforming R&D input into innovation output decreases when industrial competition is high, as well as for start-up firms. Our findings integrate the efficiency logic (agency theory), which views state ownership as detrimental to innovation, and institutional logic, which notes that governments in emerging economies have critical influences on regulatory policies and control over scarce resources. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on state ownership and firm innovation in emerging economies.