Barbara S. Lawrence

Research Summary : This multicompany qualitative field study combines strategy process and strategy‐as‐practice perspectives to show how innovators successfully gain adoption for their autonomous innovations by reframing the meaning and potential of the associated internal resources to create fit with their organization's strategy. Mapping the five steps involved in the resource reframing process onto the different parts of the Bower‐Burgelman process model of strategic change shows that innovators can shape the strategic context for their autonomous innovations before external market validation is available. These findings confirm the unique potential and importance of different forms of discourse in shaping the strategic innovation process. Managerial Summary : How do innovators from lower levels of an organization gain approval for their innovations especially when their ideas do not readily fit their organization's strategy? To explore this question, we conducted 138 interviews with innovators and their decision makers in 14 firms based in Silicon Valley. We find that successful innovators shape a story supporting their innovation by rethinking their firm's current and potential resources. They then use this story to convince decision makers that their innovation creates unique competitive advantage. Contrary to conventional wisdom, decision makers approved such innovations even without external validation, solely based on the innovators' success in depicting their reorganization of the firm's resources.

When people are asked about their career decisions, they often invoke the influence of they. They may include family or teachers, but it repeatedly includes some amorphous group of generalized others. This article describes my inquiries into the question: Who is they? Initial studies examined individuals’ perceptions of career timetables within organizations. The results suggested that individuals experience their social context as an intricate territory informed by self-perceptions, shared perceptions, and actual distributions. However, these studies assumed they equalled the employee population. Later work showed that in large organizations this assumption is unwarranted. Each individual acquires his or her own non-random version of social context: an organizational reference group. These individual-level reference groups and the neighborhoods in which they cluster are distinctive because they include distant associations defined only by awareness. Both concepts offer opportunities for exploring the social structure that emerges between individuals’ informal social networks and the organization.

Scholars have engaged in studies of careers, individuals’ work experiences over time, since the early 20th century. Although much has been written about the need for interdisciplinary research, limited work exists. This article presents a comparative technique that facilitates interdisciplinary thinking. Using data from a large organization, three stories are applied to the associations between social context and career outcomes: a different disciplines story, a multiple disciplines story and an interdisciplinary story. The results suggest that the best career satisfaction outcome results from the multiple disciplines story, whereas the best performance and salary outcomes result from the interdisciplinary story.

Faultline theory proposes that when the distributions of individuals’ attributes in groups are aligned, they create homogeneous subgroups, characterized by within-group similarities and between-group differences. As homogeneity increases, these differences are increasingly likely to acquire meaning to subgroup members and thus to influence behavior. Although the face validity of faultlines is appealing, empirical methods have been difficult. The most commonly used, Fau and FLS, have several limitations, for instance difficulty with integrating nominal, categorical, and continuous variables. This article proposes latent class cluster analysis (LCCA) as an additional analytical tool. After reviewing the literature involving interdependent attributes, the most common faultline measures are described and compared with LCCA. A study of faultlines in a large organization is presented. LCCA induces a five-class model of organizational faultlines. A comparison of work-related communication contacts indicates that subjects have more within-subgroup than between-subgroup contacts, supporting the criterion-related validity of the faultline solution.