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AbstractIn this open‐ended interview study of software entrepreneurs in an area known as 'Silicon Prairie' in the Midwest of the US, the authors examine the problems of managing strategic change in fast‐paced technological environments.

Managers emphasize that when commercializing new technologies:
the process of selling their strategic visions is the preeminent concern;
technological standards and organizational exemplars are used as competitive benchmarks;
competitive advantage is associated with creating new product categories and the selling of technological visions;
visions must be distinctive;
organizational 'credibility' or 'reputation' needs to be created and/or captured;
stakeholders need to 'buy into' their visions and establish a competitive consensus;
competitive communities may form with the cognitive first mover (visionary) as central player;
technology is the fundamental driver of market structure and techno logical instab il itykhange;
knowledge is important in defining the strategic assets leading to competitive success: the knowledge of users' tasks? technology? and of the varying perceptions of market participants;
traditional management tasks are all focused upon creating and supporting commercial legitimacy within highly illstructured market domains; and
software development managers attempt to establish marketdomain boundaries for competitive advantage, rather than maintain pre‐existing competitive boundaries (as in more mature markets).

This special issue of Organization Science taps into the burgeoning work on managerial and organizational cognition. In the last 15 years, there has been a decided "cognitive turn" within organizational studies as researchers increasingly explore the relationships among mind, management, and organization. The early groundwork established by the Carnegie School of organizational theory, the success of modern cognitive science, and the recent diffusion of social constructionism within organizational studies have all contributed to this growing interest in cognitive research. Researchers are now exploring the cognitive underpinnings of such diverse organizational phenomena as job attitudes, performance appraisals, managerial decision making, environmental sensemaking, organizational learning, and interorganizational belief systems. Few areas of contemporary organizational science remain untouched by a cognitive agenda. In this short paper, we introduce the special issue by discussing the issue's focus and highlighting several key questions that constantly recur within the cognitivist agenda illustrated by these papers.

We examine the blending of informational and political forces in organizational categorizations in the context of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. By law, corporate boards are required to provide shareholders with annual justifications for their CEO pay allocations that contain an explicit performance comparison with a set of peer companies that are selected by the board. We collected and analyzed information on the industry membership of chosen peers from a 1993 sample of 280 members of the Standard and Poor's (S&P) 500. Our results suggest that boards anchor their comparability judgments within a firm's primary industry, thus supporting the argument that boards' peer definitions center around commonsense industry categories. At the same time, however, we found that boards selectively define peers in self-protective ways, such that peer definitions are expanded beyond industry boundaries when firms perform poorly, industries perform well, CEOs are paid highly, and when shareholders are powerful and active.

In this paper we develop and test predictions regarding the impact of CEO status on the economic outcomes of top management team members. Using a unique data set incorporating Financial World's widely publicized CEO of the Year contest, we found that non-CEO top management team members received higher pay when they worked for a high-status CEO. However, star CEOs themselves retained most of the compensation benefits. We also show that there is a "burden of celebrity" in that the above relationships were contingent on how well a firm performs. Last, we found that, when compared with the subordinates of less-celebrated CEOs, members of top management teams who worked for star CEOs were more likely to become CEOs themselves through internal or external promotions.

Although the benefits of high status are well documented, in this research we explore the potential hazards associated with high status that have increasingly been implicated in recent studies. Organizational research suggests two such hazards: (1) opportunistic behaviors by elites that eventually lead to sanctions and (2) the targeting of elites by various audiences such that they are held more accountable than their lower-status counterparts for similar offenses. Our objective was to disentangle these two explanations in the context of an organizational scandal involving the Members of the British Parliament (MPs) whose annual expense claims were unexpectedly exposed in a well-known 2009 scandal. We find that high-status MPs were not more likely to abuse the expense system than were lower-status MPs, but they were more likely to be targeted by the press and voters for their inappropriate expense claims. As a consequence, high-status MPs were significantly more likely than non-elite MPs to exit Parliament when they had high levels of inappropriate expense claims. Elite MPs who were not implicated in the scandal, however, were far more likely to remain in Parliament than their lower-status counterparts. Our results also suggest that media coverage of the expense incident by British newspapers played a significant role in shaping social reactions to the scandal.