Why do scientists withhold information from colleagues, violating the professional norm of sharing? Norm violations are usually attributed to individual interests that lead scientists to reject professional norms. In contrast, we take the view that norm violations can occur when professional norms are valued but it is difficult to ascertain the appropriate course of professional conduct. This view suggests that scientists may look to cues from their professional reference groups to resolve sociological ambivalence arising from conflicting role expectations. We analyze a data set of 1,251 geneticists and other life scientists from 100 U.S. universities and find that beyond individual-level explanations, information withholding is influenced by the behaviors of peers as well as the attitudes of superiors in the profession. We discuss the implications for the professions literature, theories of organizational learning, and knowledge management initiatives in firms.
Little is known about the factors that influence regulatory-agency decision making. We posit that regulatory agencies are influenced by the firms they regulate, but not exclusively via dyadic exchanges as is traditionally argued in the regulatory capture and business-government literatures. Instead, regulatory decisions are indirectly shaped via third-party actors who shield agencies from legitimacy threats. Focusing empirically on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's approval of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we find that product assessments by powerful stakeholders and peer agencies influence product approval and that their effects vary under different threats. We also discuss the implications of these findings for businessgovernment relations, nonmarket strategy, and organization theory.
Although studies underscore the importance of creating a coherent collective identity in order to legitimate a new market category, strategy and entrepreneurship research is divided on whether and to what degree an entrepreneur will engage in collective action to promote the identity. To reconcile the inconsistency, we introduce the concept of entrepreneurial shared fate—the belief of a focal venture that it and its competitors are bound together by a sense of belongingness and equally experience similar consequences—and explore how external threats can influence the degree of shared fate. We conceptually distinguish between communal and individual threats and propose that communal threats will increase, whereas individual threats will decrease, shared fate. We also explore boundary conditions that strengthen and weaken the main effects of perceived communal and individual threats on collective identity promotion. Empirically, we examine venture identity framing in response to forest-conservation activism in the U.S. wood pellet market. Implications for research on new market categories, collective identity, optimal distinctiveness, and forest management are discussed.
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