Performance comparisons, specifically performance relative to aspirations, are central to the Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Firms evaluate their performance in relation to their own prior performance ("historical comparison") and the performance of other organizations ("social comparison") and base subsequent organizational change on this performance feedback. Of the two, social performance comparison has received relatively little theoretical or empirical development. This paper seeks to fill that gap by extending the theoretical conceptualization and empirical specification of the socially-derived performance targets against which organizations compare their performance. Drawing on insights from the social psychology literature, we argue first that organizational decision-makers monitor two sociallyderived performance benchmarks: an upwardly focused "top performance threshold" marking the highest levels of performance in the reference group, and a downwardly anchored "reference group threshold" marking the performance level below which organizations can not consider themselves members of the reference group. Building on these arguments, we also motivate a new, and more complete, way to conceptualize performance comparison. Integrating socially and historically derived sources of performance feedback, we propose the "historically-based social aspiration threshold" (HiBSAT) as an additional aspiration point representing the socially-derived performance threshold closest to the organization's prior performance. In an empirical analysis of German soccer Bundesliga clubs between 1992 and 2004, we find that organizations have both upward and downward socially-derived performance targets, and that performance relative to the HiBSAT is particularly salient in motivating organizational change.

No abstract

In this paper we examine technical and internal organizational contingencies which encourage and discourage the adoption of institutionalized structural elements, namely ISO 9000 standards. The results show that the extent of customized production and a dominant influence of top management on quality control decisions reduce the likelihood of adopting ISO 9000 standards. However, the latter factor changes its influence significantly with greater organizational size and administrative intensity — two entities which increase the pressure to adapt to external expectations.

In this article, we analyse organizational learning that is based on formal organizational rules. Organizational rules provide procedures for problem solving. However, whether rules are useful as media of organizational learning is dependent on properties of the rule system and on the organizational members' experience in dealing with rules and the rule system. For example, a voluminous rule system is usually assumed to impede rule changes that contribute to organizational learning. With regard to experience one can assume that organizational members who have learned how to deal effectively with a rule system should be able to design rules in such a way that, for some time, they do not require further changes. In an empirical analysis of all changes in the rules for personnel policy in a German bank from 1970 to 1989, we show that experience increases the stability of individual rules and the rule system. However, we cannot support the assumption that the volume of the rule system impedes organizational learning. Moreover, we found that the volume of individual rules increases the probability of rule change.

In this article, we argue that in addition to facilitating organizational learning and specialization, an industry cluster related to tradition or to the practice of a craft influences audience expectations through the definition of the prototypical features that define an organizational form. Analyzing the population of northern Bavarian (Franconian) breweries, we show that compliance with a prototype involves multiple dimensions and depends on an organization’s location in geographic space with reference to the center of the industry cluster. Using qualitative interviews, archival data, and a survey of consumers, we provide evidence that as distance from the cluster center increases, organizations are more likely to deviate from the prototype and suffer fewer of the negative consequences that result from such deviations.