Publication database

Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the academic reward system and of the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how scientists’ motives to engage in commercial activities differ across fields. Similarly, efforts to understand academics’ choices have focused on three self-interested motives – recognition, challenge, and money – ignoring the potential role of the desire to have an impact on others. Using panel data for a national sample of over 2,000 academics employed at U.S. institutions, we examine how the four motives are related to commercial activity, measured by patenting. We find that all four motives are correlated with patenting, but these relationships differ systematically between the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. These field differences are consistent with differences across fields in the rewards from commercial activities, as well as in the degree of overlap between traditional and commercializable research, which affects the opportunity costs of time spent away from “traditional” work. We discuss potential implications for policy makers, administrators, and managers as well as for future research on the scientific enterprise.

© 2020, INFORMS

Recent work argued that researchers conceptualize ‘social ties’ in four fundamentally different ways –as socially constructed role relations such as friendship or co-authorship; sentiments such as liking or hatred; interactions such as communication or sex; and access to resources or opportunities. We consider where ties (and non-ties) are likely to correspond across these four concepts, and thus assess where we may apply theories based on one network concept (e.g., sentiment ties of liking and disliking) to data representing another (e.g., interaction as logs of phone calls). Then we discuss empirical lenses emerging from computational social science, such as location-aware devices, electronic calendars, wearable sensors, records of electronic messages, phone calls, or online transactions. We ask how these time-stamped event series correspond to the conventional network concepts above and call for a new analytical approach: Directly theorizing and analyzing the structural-temporal interdependencies of interaction events redirects our attention from structural patterns to social processes.

The article deals with necessity as one of the circumstances precluding wrongfulness under customary international law and how it will likely gain relevance in view of the difficulty to quickly attribute malicious cyber operations that threaten important assets of a state. While the necessity doctrine seems fit for purpose, it lacks granularity and is problematic from an international rule-of-law point of view. Taking these pitfalls into account, the article proposes some general principles for a possible special emergency regime for cyberspace.

Citizen Science (CS) projects involve members of the general public as active participants in research. While some advocates hope that CS can increase scientific knowledge production (“productivity view”), others emphasize that it may bridge a perceived gap between science and the broader society (“democratization view”). We discuss how an integration of both views can allow Citizen Science to support complex sustainability transitions in areas such as renewable energy, public health, or environmental conservation. We first identify three pathways through which such impacts can occur: (1) Problem identification and agenda setting; (2) Resource mobilization; and (3) Facilitating socio-technical co-evolution. To realize this potential, however, CS needs to address important challenges that emerge especially in the context of sustainability transitions: Increasing the diversity, level, and intensity of participation; addressing the social as well as technical nature of sustainability problems; and reducing tensions between CS and the traditional institution of academic science. Grounded in a review of academic literature and policy reports as well as a broad range of case examples, this article contributes to scholarship on science, innovation, and sustainability transitions. We also offer insights for actors involved in initiating or institutionalizing Citizen Science efforts, including project organizers, funding agencies, and policy makers.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Diversification into new services and regions increases organizational visibility and survival. While the extant literature has provided insights into the determinants of diversification, it has not considered the relationship between an organization’s strategy to acquire resources and its diversification. We argue that the way in which organizations acquire their resources affects the efficiency of the resource acquisition process, which impacts organizational diversification into new services and geographic regions. More specifically, we propose that a higher number of resource providers and a shorter relationship between the organization and its resource providers make organizations less likely to diversify. We examine the effect of these two determinants—number of providers and relationship duration—on diversification empirically in the context of institutional donors that fund humanitarian organizations, using more than 150,000 donations over 20 years. Our results give support to our arguments; we demonstrate that relying on a large number of resource providers constraints diversification while relying on long-term relationships is positively related to diversification.

With permission of the Academy of Management

The search for external knowledge increases inventive performance. We extend this established view by considering how an inventor’s personality is related to her inventive performance. Focusing on plasticity, a higher-order personality trait comprising openness to new experience as well as extraversion, we propose that plasticity is positively related to inventive performance. This effect can be decomposed in a direct effect (plasticity => performance) and an indirect mediated effect via its association to search behavior (plasticity => external search => performance). We test our theoretical predictions in a model of moderated mediation relying on a sample of 1,327 industrial inventors. A positive direct effect of plasticity on inventive performance can be identified across all inventors. The overall positive effect of external search, however, is more pronounced for inventors characterized by low levels of plasticity.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Many organizations employ algorithms that learn from their members and then shape the way these individuals learn. Nevertheless, decades of research on organizational learning suggests that imperfect learning algorithms could sustain suboptimal beliefs that trap organizations indefinitely. To study potential algorithmic learning traps, we solve the underexplored theoretical properties of the March 1991 mutual learning model and demonstrate the conditions under which individuals should trust learning algorithms' recommendations. Our results show that the received wisdom regarding the benefit of slow learning and diversity does not hold when algorithms cannot identity accurate beliefs but follow the majority. The presence of non- discerning or even manipulated algorithms suggests that individuals should learn fast instead of slow to reduce the chance that algorithms learn the wrong, misleading lessons that would otherwise diffuse and contaminate everyone. Our exploitation of the March model generates novel insights that are increasingly relevant, thus promoting the model's generalization and making its beauty more robust.

With permission of the Academy of Management ​​​​

Broker behavior is a consequential, largely-uncharted topic; an exciting arena for future research. We know that success is associated with access to the brokerage opportunities provided by structural holes, but networks don’t act. What are the behaviors by which people convert structural hole opportunities into success? The symposium offers a propitious occasion to address some broad questions for the emerging behavioral generation of research on network brokerage: How much does the first generation of research on network structure and performance inform research on more (and less) productive broker behavior, and does it matter? What research methods have been more (and less) useful for exploring network broker behavior and why? With respect to what aspects of broker behavior, are we making more (or less) progress and why?

With permission of the Academy of Management

We develop a novel method that integrates techniques from machine learning with canonical concepts from network analysis in order to examine how the meaning of leadership has evolved over time. Using articles in Harvard Business Review from 1990 through 2019, we induce yearly semantic networks comprised of roles structurally equivalent to the role of leader. Such roles, from which leader derives meaning, vary in content from coach and colleague to commander and dictator. Yearly shifts in the structural equivalence of leader to clusters of thematically-linked roles reveals a decline in the degree to which leadership is associated with consultative activities and a corresponding rise in the extent to which a leader is understood to occupy a hierarchical position. Our analyses further reveal that the role of leader comes to eclipse the role of manager, measured through changes in pagerank centrality as well as betweenness centrality over the course of our panel. Implications for new research on leadership, culture, and networks are discussed."

With permission of the Academy of Management