Nelson, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This research was funded in part by a grant from the Center for Innovation Management Studies of Lehigh University. This paper considers the role of design, as the emergent arrangement of concrete details that embodies a new idea, in mediating between innovations and established institutional fields as entrepreneurs attempt to introduce change. Analysis of Thomas Edison's system of electric lighting offers insights into how the grounded details of an innovation's design shape its acceptance and ultimate impact. The notion of robust design is introduced to explain how Edison's design strategy enabled his organization to gain acceptance for an innovation that would ultimately displace the existing institutions of the gas industry. By examining the principles through which design allows entrepreneurs to exploit the established institutions while simultaneously retaining the flexibility to displace them, this analysis highlights the value of robust design strategies in innovation efforts, including the phonograph, the online service provider, and the digital video recorder.s The pursuit of innovation increasingly drives organizations inrapidly changing environments, where risks are high and missteps have serious consequences (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Drucker, 1999). Introducing change into otherwise stable social systems is a risky endeavor, but this is exactly what entrepreneurs with potentially significant innovations must attempt to do. To be accepted, entrepreneurs must locate their ideas within the set of existing understandings and actions that constitute the institutional environment yet set their innovations apart from what already exists. Recent research has highlighted the social embeddedness of such economic actions as innovation and entrepreneurship, in which value and significance are shaped as much by cultural as economic influences (Granovetter, 1985; Dacin, 1997; Dacin, Ventresca, and Beal, 1999; Lounsbury and Glynn, 2000; Ventresca et al., 2000). One cultural determinant of an innovation's value is how well the public, as both individuals and organizations, comprehends what the new idea is and how to respond to it. And it is the concrete details of the innovation's design that provide the basis for this comprehension, as well as for new understandings and actions to emerge, which then, in turn, change the existing institutional context.When innovations meet institutions, two social forces collide, one accounting for the stability of social systems and the other for change. These moments provide opportunities to observe the shifts in collective understanding and action that throw the otherwise static institutional background into stark relief (Czarniawska-Joerges and Sev6n, 1996). Because the changes that accompany innovations often occur over years and even decades, historical cases can provide the necessary distance to observe how an innovation both emerges from and reshapes its institutional environ...
While few critics writing on readers and hypertext have focused on the affective pleasures of reading hypertext fiction or interactive narratives like Myst, those who assess the experience of reading them tend to assume interactive texts should be either immersive or engaging. This study uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion and engagement in both conventional and new media. After examining how readers' experiences of these two different aesthetics may be enhanced or diminished by interface design, options for navigation, and other features, the essay concludes by looking beyond immersion and engagement to "flow, " a state in which readers are both immersed and engaged.
Women's reluctance to negotiate aggressively on their own behalf has long been thought to account for the striking disparities between the salaries earned by men versus women. Extensive research has documented women occupying a low-wage "sticky floor," encountering mid-level career bottlenecks, or being confined by a glass ceiling. In numerous studies, women have undervalued themselves, responded to stereotypes on women's lack of aggressiveness, or placed greater value on interpersonal relationships even in negotiating salaries. However, this study found that, contrary to most studies on women's and men's propensity to negotiate, women negotiated as aggressively as did their male colleagues. Not only did more women than men negotiate aggressively for a reward, but women relied on heuristics usually seen as misleading in decision-making to make demands in their favor. This study focuses on women's and men's reliance on availability, anchoring, and framing-staples of understanding negotiating behavior independent of sex-in requesting rewards, linked notably to perceptions of the value of their highest-earned salaries and to their job performance compared to their workplace colleagues'. When faced with situational ambiguity and an absence of targets in negotiating a first offer or reward, women may improve their negotiating skills through training that uses priming, availability, or counterfactual thinking.
Increasingly, schools and colleges of business focus on the quality of their students' writing, reflecting complaints from business and industry about the quality of writing of entry-level employees. These concerns about student writing have led to some changes in the curricula and admittance of students into graduate programs, including analytical writing essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). However, research also suggests that reading content and frequency may exert more significant impacts on students' writing than writing instruction and frequency. This study surveyed a cohort of MBA students on their regular reading content and sampled their writing. We then used algorithm-based software to assess the syntactic complexity of both reading content and writing samples. Our findings reveal strong correlations between students' most common reading content and their writing on widely-used measures of writing sophistication: mean sentence length and mean clause length. Several mechanisms may account for the dramatic influence exerted by reading content on mature students' writing-including synchrony, priming, and implicit learning. But, irrespective of these mechanisms, undergraduate and graduate programs in business should emphasize ongoing reading of syntactically complex content both during and after students' schooling to address the sophistication of their writing.
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