JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. This study focuses on the impact of sex, race, and social networks, to analyze the hiring process in a midsized high-technology organization, using information on all 35,229 applicants in a 10-year period . For gender, the process is entirely meritocratic: age and education account for all sex differences. But even without taking into account the two meritocratic variables, there are small if no differences between men and women at all stages in the hiring process. For ethnic minorities, the process is partly meritocratic but partly reliant upon social networks. Once referral method is taken into account, all race effects disappear. In hiring, ethnic minorities are thus disadvantaged in the processes that take place before the organization is contacted. They lack access to or utilize less well the social networks that lead to high success in getting hired.

Do laterally diversifying firms outlast new startups? Or does organizational inertia give the advantage to startups? We explore these questions here using the experiences of American automobil e manufa cturers from 1885 through 1981. We advance and test an integrative model that allows the organizational effects of entry mode to vary across the firm's life cycle. We also compare the life chances of laterally diversifying firms by industry of origin, including especially bicycle, carriage and engine manufacturers. Findings show the potentially integrative value of an evolutionary approach to strategy..\ Ecological theories base these predictions on the form of the organization as well as specific characteristics such as age. size and location in a competitive system (see Singh and Lumsden. 1990). Of course. survival is not the only organizational-level performance variable relevant to strategy theory and research. However. its use does mitigate many of the problems often associated with organizational-level outcome variables (see the discussions of this matter in Carroll, 1993. and.

and seminar participants at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley. We also thank Christine Oliver and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts.This study examines whether board interlock ties facilitate second-order imitation, in which firms imitate an underlying decision process that can be adapted to multiple policy domains, rather than imitating specific policies of tied-to firms (first-order imitation). Longitudinal analyses of archival data for a large sample of Forbes/Fortune 500 companies, as well as analyses of survey data on mimetic processes among these firms, show that network ties to firms that use imitation to determine a particular policy can prompt use of imitation by the focal firm in determining both that policy and a different policy. Firms that have board network ties to firms in other industries that imitate their competitors' business strategy are likely to imitate their own competitors' business strategy, as well as their competitors' acquisition activity and compensation policy. Thus, the findings reveal network effects that are not visible with extant perspectives on interorganizational imitation. We discuss implications for institutional theory and research on interorganizational networks.-A long tradition of research in organization theory has examined the diffusion of technology, policy, and strategy through social networks (Burt, 1987; Mizruchi, 1996). One of the most important propositions in this literature is that, under conditions of uncertainty, social influence processes will lead firms to imitate the individual policy decisions of other firms to which they are connected by social network ties (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983;Galaskiewicz, 1985). Empirical studies in the board interlocks literature, in particular, have examined how overlapping board memberships between firms may facilitate the imitation of particular organizational structures, such as the multidivisional form, or individual policy decisions, such as the adoption of poison pills (e.g., Davis, 1991; Palmer, Jennings, and Zhou, 1993; Haunschild, 1993; Westphal and Zajac, 1997). Prior research may have underestimated the magnitude of network effects, however, by restricting its focus to first-order imitation, or the act of imitating the content of a particular policy decision, such as the level of spending on research and development (R&D). Second-order imitation, or the imitation of an underlying decision process or script that can be adapted to multiple policy domains (e.g., business strategy, compensation policy, acquisition activity, etc.), has been ignored in the interlocks literature, despite a body of literature on second-order effects.In general, second-order phenomena are characterized by an underlying process mechanism that can explain multiple discrete first-order effects (e.g., Bartunek and Moch, 1987;Farmer et al., 1997). In the organizational behavior literature, for instance, researchers have invoked the notion of secondorder change to describe...

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This study examined relationships among remote work, demographic dissimilarity, social network centrality, and the use and effectiveness of impression management behaviors. In our findings, a higher proportion of time spent working remotely from supervisors increased the frequency of supervisor-and job-focused impression management, but reduced social network centrality decreased job-focused impression management. Social network centrality moderated the relationships between jobfocused impression management and both remote work and sex dissimilarity. Sex dissimilarity intensified a negative association between job-focused impression management and performance appraisal. Both sex dissimilarity and network centrality enhanced the positive association between supervisor-focused impression management and performance appraisal.Work arrangements in organizations are increasingly characterized by remote work, demographic diversity, and mobility. Creating and maintaining a positive workplace identity amidst this welter of new work arrangements may prove problematic. Increased remoteness from and demographic dissimilarity to other organization members, as well as changes in social network position attendant on these new arrangements, may diminish employees' organizational visibility, enhancing their extant baseline motivation to manage impressions. In addition, these factors may limit social interaction and interpersonal understanding, thereby reducing the perceived opportunity to manage impressions effectively. In this paper, we make explicit the link between remote work, demographic dissimilarity, social network centrality, and employees' motivation and perceived opportunity to manage impressions. We discuss the often-competing pressures between the motivation and perceived opportunity to manage impressions and empirically examine the relationship between these three situational influences and impression management. We also explore how demographic dissimilarity and social network centrality relate to the effectiveness of impression management by examining subsequent performance appraisal.Motivation and opportunity have both been widely acknowledged as critical determinants of individuals' impression management behavior (Jones & Pittman, 1982;Leary & Kowalski, 1990;Liden & Mitchell, 1988). While the importance of "impression motivation" has been explicated in the existing literature, the notion of "impression opportunity" has not been as clearly articulated, nor has its relationship to motivation been explicitly examined (see Jones & Pittman, 1982;Liden & Mitchell, 1988). Various elements of this notion of impression opportunity have been identified in previous models of impression management, including the perceived risks in engaging in impression management behaviors (Liden & Mitchell, 1988); the perceived probability of those behaviors being successful (Jones & Pittman, 1982;Liden & Mitchell, 1988); the appropriateness of those behaviors (Jones & Pittman, 1982); and the probable costs and benefits of those behaviors ...