Code and conduct in French cuisine: Impact of code changes on external evaluations

We study the effects of organizational code‐preserving and code‐violating changes on external evaluations by third parties—an essential but under‐studied strategic outcome. We define code‐preserving changes as a variation in the firm's product range that preserves the social code within which the firm positions its offering. By contrast, a code‐violating change corresponds to a variation in the product range that breaks with past codes and embraces another social code. Our analyses of French haute cuisine restaurants show that code‐preserving changes and code‐violating changes have positive effects on external evaluations. Both effects decline with prior evaluations received by the organization, but only the effect of code‐violating changes is reduced with age. Moreover, external evaluations improve when restaurants undertake more code‐preserving changes than their direct competitors but decline when they make more code‐violating changes than competitors. These results enable us to derive implications for research on strategic change, strategic groups, and strategic social positioning. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Information flows and crashes in dynamic social networks

We develop a dynamic model of information transmission and aggregation in social networks in which continued membership in the network is contingent on the accuracy of opinions. Agents have opinions about a state of the world and form links to others in a directed fashion probabilistically. Agents update their opinions by averaging those of their connections, weighted by how long their connections have been in the system. Agents survive or die based on how far their opinions are from the true state. In contrast to the results in the extant literature on DeGroot learning, we show through simulations that for some parameterizations the model cycles stochastically between periods of high connectivity, in which agents arrive at a consensus opinion close to the state, and periods of low connectivity, in which agents’ opinions are widely dispersed.

     

Toggling with Taylor: A Different Approach to Reading a Management Text*

ABSTRACT This paper identifies influential, but previously unrecognized, subtexts in the writings of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Working with analytical methods developed from reader‐response theories of literary criticism, we look at the words of the text as we share the standard meaning‐making of the management community, as well as through the words of the text searching out the worldview that emerges from our particular reading of the subtext. We have described our approach to reading as ‘toggling’: that is, switching between reading text ‘rhetorically’ and reading it ‘philosophically’. We conclude that reader identification with textual voices may appear in philosophical as well as rhetorical reading outcomes – that Taylor's text may inveigle readers into accepting a moral worldview wrapped up in a seemingly rational argument – and that ‘toggling’ would empower management theory readers.