Martin Ruef

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Duke University

While management scholarship has frequently taken an interest in extreme organizational performance, methodologies that draw appropriate inferences from extreme outcomes are a recent development. How can academics and policy-makers learn from exceptional entrepreneurs, leaders, and firms? In this article, we propose that answers to this question hi...

Organizational scholars highlight challenges in reducing inequality within organizations. Due to unanticipated consequences, many programs launched by organizations fail to accomplish these goals. We leverage historical data from the Dutch East India Company to claim that training programs may be an effective tool against inequality when coupled wi...

The institutions and legacies of slavery have again become a core concern for historical sociologists. In this chapter, I summarize influential perspectives on enslavement offered by Marx, Weber, Du Bois, and Patterson, tracing them to conceptions of class, power, race, and social status. I then review sociological scholarship that has largely appe...

We explore the application of evolutionary theory in understanding entrepreneurship. We focus on how evolutionary perspectives can elucidate the nuances of organizational creation, growth, and survival. Central to this approach is the role of environmental conditions as mediators between entrepreneurial strategies and outcomes, underscoring the sig...

The mechanisms governing the composition of formal social groups (e.g., task groups, organizational founding teams) remain poorly understood, owing to (1) a lack of representative sampling from groups found in the general population, (2) a “success” bias among researchers that leads them to consider only those groups that actually emerge and surviv...

Abductive explanations are triggered by organizational anomalies. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian framework for abductive theorizing, where anomalies in an entrepreneurial case generate potential explanations that are placed in dialogue with evidence from a matched sample. We illustrate the usefulness of the abductive framework by applying it...

This study examines the creation of Black communities in the context of the Exoduster movement, the first major migration of African Americans out of the southern and border states. We focus initially on Nicodemus, Kansas, a site with well-preserved archival information, and then turn to census microdata on roughly three-hundred African-American co...

Purpose: Studies of unicorns and gazelles can offer detailed information about the process of enterprise development but are unrepresentative as examples of entrepreneurial success. In presenting a novel method for outlier analysis, this article combines insights from case studies of unusual organizations with explanatory frameworks that management...

This study introduces the concept of micro-segregation as an alternative to ghettoization in order to understand residential patterns in historical Jewish communities. The process of ghetto formation is associated with the spatial separation of a minority group as a result of racial stigma and poverty. It operates at a large scale and posits that g...

This study examines the creation of Black business communities in the context of the Exoduster movement, the first major migration of African Americans out of the southern and border states. To illustrate patterns of Black entrepreneurship, we focus initially on Nicodemus, Kansas, a site with well-preserved archival information. We then turn to cen...

Studies of unicorns and gazelles can offer detailed information about the process of enterprise development but are unrepresentative as examples of entrepreneurial success. In presenting a novel approach to outlier analysis, this article combines insights from case studies of unusual organizations with explanatory frameworks that management scholar...

Full text of review available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00018392211070231

Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rend...

Learning is of paramount importance to organizations, often hinging on the accumulation of experience among workers. The returns from experience, however, are far from certain in large groups, marked by complex interdependencies and composed of a demographically diverse workforce. How do organizations manage to learn and improve their performance u...

Extensive research has investigated the spatial mismatch hypothesis (SMH), considering the consequences of disparities between Black residential locations and opportunities for employment. In this study, we argue that the mixed evidence for the SMH may result from a misspecification in both the historical period and the mechanisms whereby spatial m...

Organizations Evolving offers a unique theoretical framework for understanding organizational emergence, persistence, change, and decline. Synthesizing and integrating six paradigmatic approaches to organization theory, this updated and revised third edition presents an evolutionary view that provides a unified understanding of modern organizations...

Organizations Evolving offers a unique theoretical framework for understanding organizational emergence, persistence, change and decline. This updated and revised third edition presents an evolutionary view that provides a unified understanding of modern organizations and organization theory.

Dazed and confused by the wild hype surrounding “gazelles” and “unicorns,” entrepreneurship researchers have focused on the “black swans” of the entrepreneurial world, even though IPOs and venture capital financing of firms are extremely rare events. Despite the rarity of IPOs and obtaining venture capital, entrepreneurship conferences and journals...

Research Summary This article conceptualizes households as a crucial pool of labor for small entrepreneurs. The household varied historically in its scope (depending on whether bonded workers were included) and work intensity (depending on the authority or coercion exercised by household heads). Drawing on data that enumerate over 100,000 household...

Demographic and ecological theories yieldmixed evidence as to whether ethnic enclaves are a benefit or a hindrance to the status attainment of residents and entrepreneurs. This article provides one possible theoretical resolution by separating the positive effects that may emanate among co-ethnic neighbors from the negative effects that may resultw...

This article reviews the7 academic contributions of Olav Sorenson, recipient of the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. His work has advanced scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurship and innovation are strongly embedded in socially and spatially bounded relationships. Based on meticulous empirical studies using a broad range of...

Dazed and confused by the wild hype surrounding gazelles and unicorns, entrepreneurship researchers have focused on the black swans of the entrepreneurial world, even though IPOs and venture capital financing of firms are extremely rare events. Despite their rarity, entrepreneurship conferences and journals have been filled with papers on various a...

Principal-agent problems plagued early modern corporations. The existing literature emphasizes the potential benefits provided by private trade in aligning the interests of company agents to those of their principals. We contribute to this line of work by analyzing the organizational and social mechanisms that may help address principal-agent probl...

As a synthesis of organization theory and historiography, the field of organizational history is mature enough to contribute to wider theoretical and historiographical debates and is sufficiently developed for a theoretical consideration of its subject matter. In this introduction to the Special Topic Forum on History and Organization Studies, we t...

In the United States, the last fifty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of formal associations in residential neighborhoods, including homeowners associations, condo associations, crime watch groups, tenant associations, and special-interest neighborhood coalitions. Despite their prevalence and growing role in neighborhood governance, the...

Using the 1979-2010 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, our study tracks the earnings of individual entrepreneurs from the beginning of their careers, examining the effects of labor markets on their earnings trajectory. Results show that unfavorable labor markets pull in individuals who are otherwise ill-prepared to start their own...

Standard measures of residential segregation tend to equate spatial with social proximity. This assumption has been increasingly subject to critique among demographers and ethnographers and becomes especially problematic in historical settings. In the late nineteenth-century United States, standard measures suggest a counterintuitive pattern: south...

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed a growing body of scholarship that investigates the social context, processes, and consequences of entrepreneurship. Despite -- or, perhaps, because of -- the conceptual vagueness around the definition of the entrepreneur, this topic has attracted attention from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars and has b...

Organizational ecology is a research paradigm that explains organizational outcomes in terms of the demographic composition – size and distribution – of organizational populations. The perspective was introduced in 1977 by Michael Hannan and John Freeman who argued that the then-dominant emphasis on adaptation among individual organizations needed...

How organizations are classified and evaluated has become a central theme in the sociology of organizations. Despite the abundance of recent theory and empirical analysis on the topic, far less attention has been paid to policy-oriented fields, such as higher education, where the practical need for social scientific classification has generated int...

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as Blacks and whites alike l...

How do novel or aberrant social arrangements become new realities? What are the processes by which new kinds of organizations, products, and phenomena become “real” enough to be recognized as elements of classifications systems, be it with a positive or negative valence? The goal of this symposium is to bring together a diverse set of scholars to b...

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike l...

The literature on social capital and entrepreneurship often explores individual benefits of social capital, such as the role of personal networks in promoting self-employment. In this article, we instead examine social capital's public good aspects, arguing that the benefits of social trust and organization memberships accrue not just to the indivi...

In the U.S. South, a free labor market rapidly-although, in some cases, only nominally-replaced the plantation system of slave labor in the years following the American Civil War. Drawing on data comprising 75,099 transactions in the antebellum period, as well as 1,378 labor contracts in the postbellum era, I examine how the valuation of black labo...

This paper probes the conditions under which we might expect an entrepreneurial middle class of independent shopkeepers, merchants, professionals, and small manufacturers to expand or decline with capitalist development. We highlight the predictions offered by structural and Marxist accounts of middle class formation and apply them critically to fo...

Recent surveys show that more than half of American entrepreneurs share ownership in their business startups rather than going it alone, and experts in international entrepreneurship have likewise noted the importance of groups in securing microcredit and advancing entrepreneurial initiatives in the developing world. Yet the media and many scholars...

When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1993, the university was a thriving site of organizational research. The department of sociology served as a sort of epicenter, with workshops on organizational ecology (led by Mike Hannan), organizations in the world polity (John Meyer and Francisco “Chiqui” Ramirez), and healthcare organizations (Dick Sco...

* The initial inspiration for this historical review arose during a professional development workshop at the 2007 Academy of Management (AOM) conference in Philadelphia, in which I addressed the past and future of research on entrepreneurial teams. I would like to thank Howard Aldrich, Hans Landström, and Franz Lohrke for their helpful feedback on...

In this article, we examine how issues of multi-category membership (hybridity) were handled during the evolution of one of the first general systems of industrial classification in the United States, the credit rating schema of R. G. Dun and Company. Drawing on a repeated cross-sectional study of credit evaluations during the postbellum period (18...

Drawing on archival materials from the Roman Republic and US antebellum South, this paper challenges the distinction between research on 'modern' and 'pre-modern' management thought, where the former commonly entails a critical analysis of management thinking within a social context and the latter offers documentation of past knowledge and practice...

Under conditions of uncertainty, we predict that development will be tied to the idiosyncrasy of organizational forms represented within local regions. Our investigation applies this theory to data on 342 counties and 43,352 businesses in the U.S. South during Reconstruction, finding support for the thesis that organizational idiosyncrasy generally...

While early work on the topic of entrepreneurship tended to portray entrepreneurs as heroic individuals (e.g., see Raines & Leathers, 2000, on Schumpeter’s description), more recent perspectives have come to recognize that new business activity is often initiated by groups of startup owners. Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new generat...

Purpose – Drawing from social psychology and economics, I propose several mechanisms that may affect ownership stakes among entrepreneurs, including norms of distributive justice, negotiation constraints, and network constraints. The processes are explored empirically for a representative dataset of entrepreneurial teams.Methodology/Approach – Betw...

Drawing on archival materials from the Roman Republic and U.S. antebellum South, we question narratives that place the origins of administrative theory in industrial society. Distinctive political challenges in these two historical cases led to divergent management ideologies, despite a common economic basis in agricultural enterprise employing sla...

An extensive literature in organizational theory discusses how established organizations shape and maintain their boundaries but offers little guidance as to how organizational boundaries emerge in the first place. This paper examines boundary formation in business startups using a nationally representative dataset of U.S. nascent entrepreneurs. We...

The sociology of entrepreneurship is a blossoming field of research, but its scholarly contribution has been critiqued for its lack of coherence and intellectual distance from the sociological mainstream. In this article, we critically examine the theoretical presuppositions of the field, trace its historical origins, and attempt to situate the soc...

Karl Mannheim was born in Budapest, Hungary, but developed his academic career in Germany (in Heidelberg and Frankfurt) and England (at the London School of Economics). He was the earliest proponent of the sociology of knowledge , a branch of theory concerned with the influence of social context on our way of perceiving, interpreting, and forming c...

Although recent public attention has focused on boom-and-bust cycles in industries and financial markets, organizational theorists have made only limited contributions to our understanding of this issue. In this chapter, I argue that a distinctive strategic insight into the mechanisms generating boom-and-bust cycles arises from a focus on entrepren...

"Howard Aldrich and Martin Ruef’s tour de force shows us how the evolutionary approach can explain change not only in organizational populations, but within sectors and within organizations. Aldrich and Ruef display an astonishing command of the management literature, using vivid illustrations from cutting edge research to show how the processes of...

Organizational theory and entrepreneurship literatureare used to develop a process-based model of organizational founding. Motivatedby the scarcity of empirical findings in the entrepreneurship literature, thisstudy proposes an analytical motivation for sorting founding events into asmaller number of start-up stages. The process of organizational f...

Entrepreneurs have long been assumed to be more risk-tolerant than the general population. In this article, we analyze the financial risk propensity of business founders using a unique, representative dataset of nascent entrepreneurs in the United States. We deploy two models of entrepreneurial behavior: a strategic model of risk tolerance, based o...

This article addresses factors affecting the disappearance of organizational forms, particularly in regard to arguments derived from organizational ecology and the literature on social movements. These perspectives are used to explain the disappearance of the Southern plantation in the decades following the American Civil War. Findings suggest that...

Examines how achieved and attributed characteristicsof entrepreneurs affect the composition of founding teams, and how thesecharacteristics are affected by the social context of the entrepreneurialenterprise. Limitations of previous studies are identified: their lack ofgeneralizable findings and their "success bias." To avoid theselimitations, the...

Over the last twenty-five years, research in organizational ecology has given rise to a proliferation of mechanisms that seek to explain processes of decline and resurgence in mature industries. In this article, I consider four of these mechanisms--including arguments concerning competitive intensity, temporal heterogeneity, population inertia, and...

This study examines the legacy of American slavery at the individual, intragenerational level by analyzing life-history data from roughly 1,400 ex-slaves and free blacks covering the antebellum and postbellum periods. We test a model of durable inequality that considers the potentially vicious circle created by status persistence across institution...

Social Forces 81.3 (2003) 1069-1071 Like other recent overviews of organizational sociology, Changing Organizations is both an attempt to integrate ideas from a diverse set of theories reflecting on processes of organizational change and an (implicit) intellectual biography of the author. Knoke provides a brief introduction to five macro-level fram...

High rates of dissolution and bankruptcy among organizational startups have stimulated social scientific interest in the causes of disbanding for both business firms and NPOs (nonprofit organizations). While recent quantitative analyses have primarily addressed liabilities associated with organizational age and operational scale, some sociologists...

How does the tendency of entrepreneurs to engage in innovation relate to their structural and cultural embeddedness? Using micro-data on entrepreneurial teams and the organizational innovations they attempt to develop, this article presents a predictive model of creative action to address this question. Capacity for creative action is seen to be a...

Since Simmel’s early work on forms of association, the processes guiding group composition have commanded considerable attention in structural sociology, but have not led to a general methodology for examining compositional properties. By introducing a structural event approach, this study offers a new technique that is not restricted to analysis o...

Since the 1930s, management consultants have become increasingly visible purveyors of know-how, norms, and even identities for formal organizations. Despite their now central role in the diffusion of managerial recipes, little attention has been paid to the social process that legitimated the management consulting profession in the business and not...

Few large institutions have changed as fully and dramatically as the U.S. healthcare system since World War II. Compared to the 1930s, healthcare now incorporates a variety of new technologies, service-delivery arrangements, financing mechanisms, and underlying sets of organizing principles. This book examines the transformations that have occurred...

This article introduces a new ecological approach to the study of form emergence based on the notion of an organizational community—a bounded set of forms with related identities. Applying the approach to 48 organizational forms in the health care sector, this study suggests that the development of novel forms is affected by the positioning of thei...

Social scientists have evidenced a long-standing interest in the cultural construction of ontologies—symbolic systems of categorization and meaning—but have yet to develop a widely recognized method for the empirical analysis of this process. Analyzing textual data from the area of health services research, this article illustrates a general framew...

Recent research on entrepreneurship by sociologists has focused on subsec- tors of the discipline rather than on entrepreneurship as a class. This review draws insights from diverse literatures to develop a sociological perspective on entrepreneurship as a whole. Until recently, the supply-side perspective, which focuses on the individual traits of...

Using data on 143 hospital organizations, this article examines the antecedents and effects of two forms of organizational legitimacy (managerial and technical) over a 46-year period. Results show that both the managerial and technical forms provide notable improvements in organizational survival chances but that the strength of each effect varies...

To draw together insights from three perspectives (health economics, organizational ecology, and institutional theory) in order to clarify the factors that influence entries of providers into healthcare markets. A model centered on the concept of an organizational field is advanced as the level of analysis best suited to examining the assortment an...

This paper proposes an empirical framework for evaluating the relative structural inertia hypothesis, a central assumption of organizational ecology theories. In stark contrast to the tenets of strategic management, the relative inertia thesis claims that organizations are typically unable to match structural changes to their competitive environmen...

Building on the work of Noam Chomsky (1963), this paper presents a hierarchy of grammars and associated computational automata in order to inform social theory construction and method. A detailed exposition of linguistic forms within the grammar hierarchy reveals clear analogues with common social scientific paradigms. Two of these paradigms (which...

The individual choice between conformity and innovation within task-oriented collectivities is presented as a social dilemma. Adaptive, network-embedded actors are seen to modify their propensities to conform or innovate retrospectively, based on performance differences between the individual and task group levels. A computational framework, based...

We examine consequences of team stability and change on the time new ventures take to achieve various organizing milestones. We propose two competing hypotheses: 1) Stable teams indicate greater coordination and positively contribute to achieving certain founding events and 2) Teams that experience membership turnover take strategic steps to improv...

Submitted to the Department of Sociology. Copyright by the author. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1999.