Suchergebnisse

Why do humans form groups? Why would a brain, preoccupied with predicting the world, make the formation of cultures possible? And how does our socio-historical context shape the way we think? In a world faced with numerous global challenges and burdened by conflicts defined along cultural boundaries, now more than ever we need a comprehensive theory of the role of culture in human cooperation. Cultures persist: not only because they enable coordination and cooperation between otherwise selfinterested individuals, but because they cultivate our minds to make us grasp and sense the world in a particular manner, creating enduring structures of mutual solidarity based on a shared experience of reality. But cultures are not static: they evolve. As we endeavor to predict and classify the spheres of interaction in which we participate, culture falls into place and can be seen to function much like an immune system. If we are to understand the resilience of cultural groups and the evolution of the human mind, we need only look inside ourselves, to our predictive brain and to the immune system regulating the interaction across borders of both cells and cultures. Alongside our natural immune system, humans are endowed with cultural immune systems that bestow individuals and groups alike with resilience and adaptability. This book is a call for the formation of a genuine cultural immunology

Using a study of the relationship between bureaucratic work environments and individual rates of entrepreneurship, I revisit a fundamental premise of sociological approaches to entrepreneurship, namely, that the social context shapes the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity, above and beyond any effects of individual characteristics. Establishing such contextual effects empirically is complicated by the possibility that unobserved individual traits influence both the contexts in which people are observed and their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs. This paper presents the first systematic study of the effects of bureaucracy on entrepreneurship that accounts for such unobserved sorting processes. Analyses of data on labor market attachments and transitions to entrepreneurship in Denmark between 1990 and 1997 show that people who work for large and old firms are less likely to become entrepreneurs, net of a host of observable individual characteristics. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that this negative effect of bureaucracy does not spuriously reflect self-selection by nascent entrepreneurs into different types of firms. An important implication of this finding is that the structure of organizational populations affects the supply of nascent entrepreneurs, as well as the availability of entrepreneurial opportunities.

The demand shifts that have played an important role in driving up wage inequality in the United States during the past quarter century are changes in the world of organizations. However, despite great advances in organizational theory during the same time period, there has been little progress in understanding how organizational processes shaped the evolution of inequality. Most theory and research focuses on processes internal to organizations. The author presents theory and evidence suggesting that progress can be made through greater attention to the consequences of organizational diversity for matching and inequality in the labor market.

Demographic heterogeneity is a central theoretical construct in organizational demography research. The most commonly used measure of demographic heterogeneity is the coefficient of variation. The author critically evaluates the rationale for using this measure and shows that the use of the coefficient of variation raises a number of methodological and interpretive problems. Empirical analyses of turnover suggest that using the coefficient of variation may lead to incorrect conclusions about the effects of demographic heterogeneity.

Prevailing research claims that strong corporate cultures improve firm performance by facilitating internal behavioral consistency. This paper addresses an unexamined implication of this argument by analyzing the effect of strong corporate cultures on the variability of firm performance. This relationship depends on how strong cultures affect organizational learning in response to internal and external change. I hypothesize that strong-culture firms excel at incremental change but encounter difficulties in more volatile environments. Results of analyses of a sample of firms from a broad variety of industries show that in relatively stable environments, strong-culture firms have more reliable (less variable) performance. In volatile environments, however, the reliability benefits of strong cultures disappear.