Administrative Science Quarterly

This ethnographic study of interpretations of stress among hospital social workers reveals concrete ways in which institutional systems take form in the mundane actions and interpretations of individuals embedded in these systems. It also reveals how organizational cultures reflect and reinforce institutional conditions that have been negotiated in the interactions of individuals. Here, the institutional systems of medicine and social work come together in the everyday work of the social workers and result in two patterns of cultural dominance. Within these distinct types of culture emerge two forms of stress experience, including a dominant form, consistent with medical ideology, and a marginalized form, consistent with social work ideology. Some surprising patterns of interpretation emerge, including interpretations of ambiguity and burnout as normal, social, and desirable when the social work ideology is dominant. This institutional analysis of stress has theoretical, practical, and epistemological implications.

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The resource-based view of the firm regards knowledge as one of the most important organizational assets and a key strategic resource that contributes unique value to organizations. The acquisition, absorption and internalization of external knowledge are central to an organization's innovative capabilities. This ability to evaluate, acquire and integrate new knowledge from its environment is referred to as a firm's absorptive capacity (AC). This research in progress paper explores the link between interorganizational Social Networks (SNs) and a firm's Absorptive Capacity (AC). Based on an in-depth literature survey of both concepts, four propositions are proposed that explain the link between AC and SNs. These propositions suggest that SNs are key to a firm's AC. A qualitative research method is proposed to test the set of propositions in the next stage of this research.

In this longitudinal study, we build a theory of a culture of companionate love— feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others—at work, examining the culture’s influence on outcomes for employees and the clients they serve in a long-term care setting. Using measures derived from outside observers, employees, family members, and cultural artifacts, we find that an emotional culture of companionate love at work positively relates to employees’ satisfaction and teamwork and negatively relates to their absenteeism and emotional exhaustion. Employees’ trait positive affectivity (trait PA)—one’s tendency to have a pleasant emotional engagement with one’s environment— moderates the influence of the culture of companionate love, amplifying its positive influence for employees higher in trait PA. We also find a positive association between a culture of companionate love and clients’ outcomes, specifically, better patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer t...

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Hypothesis 2: The stronger the role of the family, the more likely the firm is to strive to protect its socioemotional wealth, such that willingness to give up family control is lowest at the founding-familycontrolled and managed stage, moderate at the non-founding extended-family-owned and managed stage, and highest at the extended-family-owned and professionally managed stage. 109/ASO,

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

This chapter is about how and why institutions matter in political life. More specifically, it is about how the behaviour of political actors is shaped and conditioned by the institutional contexts in which they operate. This perspective and question define the central concerns of the so-called 'new institutionalism' in political analysis.

and three ASQ anonymous referees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts, and Tim Bates, Josef Bruderl, Linda Leighton, and Alfred Nucci for sharing their knowledge of other data sources for entrepreneurship research. We also thank Javier Fernandez Navas and Diane Roden for their research help. We acknowledge the help and support of the National Federation of Independent Business. An earlier version of this paper received the 1992 Best Empirical Paper Award from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. The model developed here explains why some firms survive while other firms with equal economic performance do not. We argue that organizational survival is not strictly a function of economic performance but also depends on a firm's own threshold of performance. We apply this threshold model to the study of new venture survival, in which the threshold is determined by the entrepreneur's human capital characteristics, such as alternative employment opportunities, psychic income from entrepreneurship, and cost of switching to other occupations. Using a sample of 1,547 entrepreneurs of new businesses in the U.S., we find strong support for the model. The findings suggest that firms with low thresholds may choose to continue or survive despite comparatively low performance.' It has been frequently argued that, at least in the long run, well-performing organizations survive while poorly performing ones disappear (Alchian, 1950; Friedman, 1953; Winter, 1964; Williamson, 1991). Penrose (1952: 810) summarized this theoretical view as stating that "positive profits can be treated as the criterion of natural selection-the firms that make profits are selected or 'adopted' by the environment, others are rejected and disappear." This view implies a unidimensional relationship between economic performance (defined as the economic returns to residual claimants) and survival, since the firms most likely to discontinue are those that perform the worst. From this unidimensional model, it follows that economic performance and survival should have the same determinants or predictors. Interestingly, mounting empirical evidence suggests that the determinants of performance and survival may substantially differ (