Forrest Briscoe

• MIT Sloan School of Management
• Professor at Cornell University

Voluntary genetic testing (GT) leverages low-cost DNA sequencing and other testing methods to provide genetic risk screening for healthy individuals. Given the potential to prevent disease and promote health, some employers now offer GT as an employee benefit (workplace GT, or wGT), but participation remains low. To investigate facilitators and bar...

Though recent waves of large-scale street protests have not directly targeted the business sector, they can still represent a major development in a company’s external environment. Building on the literature on community embeddedness, this study extends activism-as-information theory to understand how and when companies respond to street protests t...

Purpose Genetic wellness programs (GWPs) are a highly innovative workforce wellness product. Recently marketed to U.S. employers by at least 16 vendors, GWPs take advantage of low-cost DNA sequencing to detect genetic risk factors for an increasing array of diseases. The purpose of this research is to understand perceptions, concerns, and barriers...

Despite recognizing potential ramifications for employees who protest in the workplace, researchers rarely explore the career consequences that stem from such instances of workplace protest participation. We integrated research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers to theorize that workplace protest represents a perceived deviation...

Despite recognizing potential ramifications for employees who protest in the workplace, researchers rarely explore the career consequences that stem from such instances of workplace protest participation. We integrated research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers to theorize that workplace protest represents a perceived deviation...

Social activists sometimes engage in a form of workplace activism that involves using their employer organization as an unofficial platform to communicate social issue messages to external stakeholders. This type of activism follows a different logic from that of more-familiar citizen activism, in which citizens directly target society and its inst...

Employees increasingly want their employers to become more responsible corporate citizens. Here is a playbook for how employees can be effective change agents and how leaders can respond to employee activism.

This article offers an annotated bibliography of selected research linking social movements to the study of organizations and management. Social activists frequently target organizations, like corporations and universities, in an attempt to bring about changes related to social issues such as inequality, climate change, and human rights. Such activ...

We report results from a large survey of public attitudes regarding genomic database governance. Prior surveys focused on the context of academic-sponsored biobanks, framing data provision as altruistic donation; our survey is designed to reflect four growing trends: genomic databases are found across many sectors; they are used for more than acade...

Organization design seeks to balance potentially conflicting objectives while achieving a broader mission. EO13769 created a challenge for the president of the Academy of Management in leading through these conflicts, as President Anita McGahan describes: how to be true to her own moral values while leading an organization with well-established des...

This paper argues that organizations tend to be more “open” or “closed” as a function of their members’ political ideologies and that this variation can help explain firms’ responses to social activism. Integrating research on social activism with political psychology, we propose that when firms experience activists’ protests, a liberal-leaning fir...

This paper develops an argument about how contentious changes unfold in organizational fields, focusing on the role of uncertainty – and the networks people use to address uncertainty. We propose that as controversial practice gains traction and spreads, the nature of uncertainty facing organizational decision makers also evolves. This dynamic has...

We develop a new explanation for why some organizations are relatively evenhanded, while others are more disparate, in allocating resources to subunits. Recognizing the central role of chief executive officers (CEOs) in resource allocation, we argue that CEOs’ personal values regarding egalitarianism, as manifested in their political ideologies, wi...

The gender gap in earnings and rewards remains persistent across many professional and managerial work contexts. In these settings, where there are few objective criteria for performance and organizational mechanisms are weak, we propose that personal political values can serve as a powerful influence on whether supervisors reduce or enhance inequa...

Research summary: Why do firms vary so much in their stances toward corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Prior research has emphasized the role of external pressures, as well as CEO preferences, while little attention has been paid to the possibility that CSR may also stem from prevailing beliefs among the body politic of the firm. We introduce t...

For the first time, this volume of the Academy of Management Annals features two articles that we paired together to present complementary perspectives on a common theme. [Schad, Lewis, Raisch, and Smith (2016)][1] review research on paradox theory in management science, and [Putnam, Fairhurst, and

Organizations are frequent targets for social activists aiming to influence society by first altering organizational policies and practices. Reflecting a steady rise in research on this topic, we review recent literature and advance an insider-outsider framework to help explicate the diverse mechanisms and pathways involved. Our framework distingui...

Expressions of support for diversity are nearly ubiquitous among contemporary law firms and corporations. Organizations back these rhetorical commitments with dedicated diversity staff and various diversity and inclusion initiatives. Yet, the goal of proportionate representation for people of color and women remains unrealized. Members of historica...

The mobility of individual managers has long presented a problem for firms in knowledge-intensive industries. Shifting to more complex work often reduces the importance of a single individual’s knowledge for the firm’s exchange relationships because complex work requires inputs from a broader set of the firm’s members. Although complex work decreas...

This paper examines how social activist tactics affect the diffusion of social-responsibility practices. Studying collegiate adoptions of a controversial supplier-sanction practice championed by anti-sweatshop activists, we compare how non-targeted organizations are influenced by different types of practice adoptions in their environment. Drawing o...

Technologies such as knowledge-sharing systems open up access to knowledge that was previously unavailable to organizational members, but they may also disrupt or alter established social structures. In this research, we investigate how technology use and collaboration together shape value creation outcomes in a large law firm. Drawing on qualitati...

This article begins a systematic conceptualization and measurement of partner careers in professional service firms. Taking a relational approach, we identify two strategies for investing in social networks—inheritance and rainmaking strategies—that help build partner careers by generating client revenue. We study how investments in these networkin...

We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, con...

In an effort to comprehend activism toward corporations, scholars have proposed the concept of corporate opportunity structure, or the attributes of individual firms that make them more (or less) attractive as activist targets. We theorize that the personal values of the firm's elite decision makers constitute a key element of this corporate opport...

We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships, focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, co...

We examine the role of a practice’s opacity (versus transparency) in the interorganizational diffusion of organizational practices. Though the opacity of a practice is typically thought to impede diffusion, a political-cultural approach to institutions suggests that opacity can sometimes play a positive role. Given that adoption decisions are embed...

One of the great paradoxes of inequality in organizations is that even when organizations introduce new programs designed to help employees in traditionally disadvantaged groups succeed, employees who use these programs often suffer negative career consequences. This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature by investigating how local...

This paper examines how organizational members overcome relational inertia and contribute to integration and value creation following an acquisition, through an analysis of a large law firm’s acquisition of two smaller firms. When merging law firm partners share clients with one another, both within and across the boundaries of the formerly separat...

Using job-spell data based on an original survey of Information Technology (IT) degree graduates from five U.S. universities, the authors investigate the link between contracting and a set of job characteristics (accommodating flexible work hours, total work hours, and working from home) associated with work-life needs. Compared with regular employ...

How do workers build careers across organizations? We propose that increased worker mobility means that workers may now build their careers using interorganizational career ladders, working in certain kinds of organizations earlier in a career and in other kinds of organizations later in the career. We develop a matching framework that predicts suc...

Diversity affinity groups can be defined as groups of employees within an organization who share a common identity, defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or shared extra-organizational values or interests. Such groups may be more or less formally organized, and their relationship with management may vary from being adv...

We examined which IT workers take jobs as independent contractors. Contracting offers less job security and less employer-provided training than regular employment. We base our predictions of which workers contract on how their preferences and resources match such jobs. Using career history data, we found that the likelihood of contracting increase...

This paper seeks to understand how contentious practices spread from initial targets of activism to become accepted by organizations in the mainstream. Using a dataset on the diffusion of domestic partner benefits in the Fortune 500 from 1990 to 2005, we show that widespread adoption among mainstream firms was triggered by the prior adoptions of co...

Introduction There is a frequent refrain from scholars and practitioners alike that the professions are becoming ever more bureaucratized. If true, what does this trend imply for professional careers? Several volumes have been devoted to the implications of bureaucratization in general, nearly all of which see it negatively from the point of view o...

This paper develops a model of how organizations influence the temporal flexibility of professional service workers. The model starts by identifying a key source of temporal inflexibility for these workers: an inability to hand clients off among one other. Hand-offs are impeded by high levels of client-to-worker specificity, stemming from three com...

To assess the level and determinants of African-American physicians' employment in health maintenance organizations (HMOs), particularly early in their careers. We analyzed data from the 1991 and 1996 Young Physicians Surveys to assess racial differences in the likelihood of HMO employment (n = 3,705). Using multinomial logistic regression, we eval...

Temporal flexibility and careers: The role of large-scale organizations for physicians. Forrest Briscoe Briscoe This study investigates how employment in large-scale organizations affects the work lives of practicing physicians. Well-established theory associates larger organizations with bureaucratic constraint, loss of workplace control, and diss...

The past two decades have witnessed a transformation in the corporate human resource (HR) function – moving away from a role of balancing multiple interests toward a narrower focus on business objectives – yet we know little about how this change occurred. This study finds that the functional backgrounds of senior HR managers played an important ro...

This thesis contributes to theory and research at the intersection of professions, labor markets, and careers. To do so, it draws on longitudinal and cross-sectional data on physicians in different organizational arrangements. Physicians have been migrating into larger medical practice organizations over the past three decades, creating a valuable...

for providing valuable comments. We are also grateful to participants in the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) seminar and the Harvard Work, Organizations and Markets (WOM) seminar. The data are available from the authors on request.

The following report outlines some of the initial findings from the preliminary data. Please note that this report is based on data collected so far. Additional surveys and continued analysis will lead to more thorough analysis in the future. Our analysis of the survey is organized in the following mannec General Environment Management, Air Emissio...

The implicit social contract between large companies and their employees has been recently revised to emphasize workforce flexibility and the financial responsibility of individual employees for their own employment and benefits-related decisions. The most recent aspect of this social contract to be significantly changed is health care benefits. On...

This article covers the strategic, organizational, and operational decisions involved in one automobile manufacturer's efforts to balance its goals of productivity and high quality with the more elusive goal of environmental responsibility. The case material is based on the real-life experiences of Honda of America's two manufacturing plants in Eas...

Many large U.S. companies have transformed their procurement of health benefits in the 1990s by combining the principles of managed competition with other business tactics to create a business-savvy hybrid of the private sector's own design, often referred to as "value purchasing." Until recently, few policymakers or health care observers believed...

Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA) is undergoing a major transformation in the post-Cold War era. As total aid supply has stagnated in the 1990s, Japan has emerged as the new top ODA donor. Taking the leadership in this area, Japan has recently joined the international community in shifting from provision of traditional "hardware" infra...

DuPont, the world's dominant CFC producer, played a key role in the development of the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. We argue that DuPont's pursuit of its economic interests, along with the political impact of the discovery of an ozone hole and the threat of domestic regulation, shaped the international regulatory regime for ozon...

Many corporations now recognize the importance of establishing a "proactive" environmental strategy. This article develops a framework for environmental strategy implementation based on case studies of three firms: Volvo, Polaroid, and Proctor & Gamble. The degree to which each firm's environmental strategy focuses on market or nonmarket areas refl...

Large organizations often escalate their commitments to mega-project development, even after evidence becomes available of adverse environmental consequences or lack of economic feasibility. This escalation of commitment transcends both sectorial and national boundaries. Preeminent examples include controversial nuclear projects in the United State...

This paper adapts status-based conformity theory to the study of careers. I develop the notion that middle-status conformity shapes individual willingness to pursue professionally deviant career activities in organizations. Further, I propose that an individual's social status and labor market position can combine to predict deviant action. These i...

Thesis (B.A., Honors in Environmental Science & Public Policy)--Harvard University, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61).