Research highlights 

A recently co-authored article based on Shell’s strategic innovation has been published in http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00246301

At the 2011 Meeting of the Academy of the Academy of Management in San Antonio, Texas, Sunyoung Lee presented “Transfer is tricky: Taking social practice from headquarters to subsidiaries”, co-authored with Mike Barnett, Donal Crilly (LBS), and Don Siegel (SUNY-Albany), as part of a symposium entitled, “Corporate sustainability in emerging economies.”  The symposium was selected from amongst a group of several finalists for the 2011 Emerald Best International Symposium Award.

The trading of carbon credits burgeoned in the last 15 year, accompanied by efforts to develop market institutions and intermediaries along the emerging value chain for ‘carbon’.  We examine the emerging global field of carbon markets between 1994 and 2010, linking infrastructure developments with evidence on keywords from public discourse and the changing constellation of institutional actors who inhabit this social world.  We report findings based on a dataset coded from fifteen years of press articles and a series of original interviews with elite actors across the value chain.  We make use of an innovative discourse-based method for analysis as well as standard tools for qualitative content coding.  We identify four distinct periods in these early years of carbon markets, marked by the entry of different kinds of institutional actors and by contests between field frames that emphasize the ‘economics’ of carbon and the ‘environmental’ aspects of carbon.   We discuss these episodes and the field-level indicators in the context of theories of nascent markets, how markets form, and empirical approaches for studying contested activity fields.

Grace Augustine and Marc J. Ventresca, Carbon Market’ Keywords: Tracking Field Dynamics and Ferment in Discourse, 1994-2010    Working paper, Said Business School and an invited paper presentation at the Annual Meetings of the Academy of Management, August 2011, San Antonio, TX. (available from the authors).

Experience with forest management interventions has shown that the design, strategic context and implementation of projects at the local level are key determinants of intervention success.  This article reports on an exploratory comparative analysis of 12 REDD+ projects in the Madre de Dios watershed of Amazonia Peru. Using a framework drawn from innovation strategy, we focus on the founding and organizational strategies of the different initiatives. We suggest that decision makers should continue to encourage the ‘bottom-up’ construction of strategy to encourage innovation and flexibility, and we argue for more research on governance of the emerging ecosystem services value chain.

See original article:   Hayek, F., M.J. Ventresca, J. Scriven, and A. Castro. 2011.  “Regime- and market-building REDD+:  Evidence from Ecosystem Services Markets in Peruvian Amazon.  Environmental Science and Policy 25(4).

In a recent research article, we focus on the dynamics of institutional capacity in the face of managerial innovations that challenge mission values.  The study draws from Selznick’s institutionalism and the idea of inhabited institutions, to make a general case for renewed attention to the “mundane administrative arrangements” that underlie organizational capacity.  The paper reports on the impact of Enrollment Management (EM) in over 1200 U.S. liberal arts colleges over thirty years, examining how this ‘rational’, ‘efficient’ innovation puts core mission values in tension with everyday policies and practices.  We further identify organizational and environmental conditions that make such venerable organizations more or less susceptible to adoption of such rational management practices.

Reference this paper as: Kraatz, M., M.J. Ventresca, and L. Deng.  2010.  ‘Precarious Values and Mundane Innovations: The Diffusion of Enrollment Management in U.S. Higher Education 1970-2005’.  Academy of Management Journal, 53 (6): 1521-1545.

In a paper forthcoming in Strategic Management Journal, Mike Barnett and Rob Salomon (NYU) find a curvilinear relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, suggesting that for firms to gain favourable financial returns from social performance, they must first develop a history of strong social performance that provides them adequate "stakeholder influence capacity".  A draft of the paper is available here:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=1860985

In a recent Academy of Management Review article by Corley and Gioia (AMR, 2011, 36:1), assessing contributions to theory building during the last two decades, Emeritus Associate Fellow Janine Nahapiet's co-authored article on social capital was ranked equal first.  This is further endorsement of the significance of this article that has also been independently identified as the second most cited paper in Economics and Management published in the decade following its publication and the fifth most influential paper in strategy published in the last 26 years. 

The article is: Nahapiet, J and Ghoshal, S (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23: 242-266.

In a forthcoming article titled "Rational Learning and Information Sampling:
On the ‘Naivety’ Assumption in Sampling Explanations of Judgment Biases"
co-authored with Gaël Le Mens of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Jerker Denrell expands his research on how judgment biases can impact strategic decision making.  This article will appear in Psychological Review.