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____ We would like to thank the editors of the Academy of Management Annals for their support and helpful comments. We also thank the participants in our various topic modeling presentations and reviewers and division organizers (specifically Peer Fiss and Renate Meyer) at the Academy of Management meetings. In addition, we would like to recognize Marc-David Seidel and Christopher Steele from the Interpretive Data Science (IDeaS) group for their role in germinating these ideas, Mike Pfarrer for his comments on a later draft of the paper, and Kara Gehman for her fine-grained edits on next-to-final drafts. Finally, we wish to express our appreciation to our life partners for not only putting up with, but actively discussing this paper as it evolved.

Research Summary Is moderate distinctiveness optimal for performance? Answers to this question have been mixed, with both inverted U and U‐shaped relationships being argued for and found in the literature. I show how nearly identical mechanisms driving the distinctiveness‐performance relationship can yield both U‐shaped and inverted U‐shaped effects due to differences in relative strength, rather than their countervailing nature. Incorporating distinctiveness heterogeneity, I theorize a U‐shaped effect in homogeneous categories that flattens into an inverted U in heterogeneous categories. Results combining a topic model of 69,188 organizational websites with survey data from 2,279 participants in the Dutch creative industries show a U‐shaped effect in homogeneous categories, flattening and then disappearing in more heterogeneous categories. How distinctiveness affects performance thus depends entirely on how distinct others are. Managerial Summary A core strategy recommendation is to be different from competitors. Recent work highlights the notion of optimal distinctiveness—being different enough to escape competition yet similar enough to be legitimate, thus yielding the highest performance. This article challenges the notion that one “optimal” level of distinctiveness exists and focuses on distinctiveness heterogeneity (representing variation in firm positions in a category) as a key contextual factor. Results from a sample of firms in the Dutch creative industries show that either being entirely different or entirely the same to competitors pays off when one's category is very homogeneous. However, being different loses its performance effects entirely when heterogeneity in firm positions is higher. Being different from competitors, therefore, no longer pays when others tend to be different, too.

Public administration scholarship is facing a crisis of legitimacy, as academic research is viewed as both increasingly irrelevant for practice and methodologically underdeveloped. In this study, we put forward a so-called collocation analysis approach, which is a useful tool for studying the meaning of key concepts in public administration and (re)focusing academic research agendas to salient societal problems by identifying how concepts are talked about in different domains. To illustrate our approach, we assess the meaning of red tape in academia, policy-making, and the media. Our dataset consists of 255 academic articles, 2,179 US Congressional Records, and 37,207 US newspaper articles mentioning red tape. We find that red tape has specific connotations in each domain, which limits the extent to which these domains are being bridged. Using the insights from our analysis, we develop a red tape research agenda that aims for more relevant and rigorous knowledge generation and conclude by setting out implications and ways forward for public administration research at large.

The question of how distinctive organizations should strive to be, compared to peers, has seen a resurgence of attention. A central focus in this stream of work has been on identifying optimal distinctiveness—distinctiveness that yields superior performance relative to peers. The resulting recommendation has been that organizations should strive to pursue such optimal distinctiveness. In this paper, we argue that organizations are neither equally motivated nor equally able to pursue optimal distinctiveness and explore the implications of variation in such motivation and ability. We focus on two questions, centered on (1) better understanding the extent to which organizations pursue optimal distinctiveness, for which we offer possible arguments based on four combinations of motivation and ability, and (2) the conditions that shape organizations’ ability and motivation to optimize their distinctiveness. We then offer a number of methodological suggestions that would support further inquiries into these questions and close by delineating a renewed research agenda for optimal distinctiveness.