Siobhan O'Mahony

Boston University | BU · Strategy and Innovation

The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work w...

Forming entrepreneurial strategy is difficult, as the future value of strategy alternatives is uncertain. To create and capture value, firms are advised to consider and test multiple alternative strategy elements. Yet, how firms generate and test alternatives remains understudied. As entrepreneurial firms lack resources for broad search, they often...

Research Summary Most theories of strategic change focus on how large, established firms recognize or fail to recognize the need for strategic change. Little research examines how early‐stage entrepreneurs decide when and how to change their strategies. With a longitudinal field study of seven entrepreneurial firms developing innovations in energy...

One of the early challenges for any peer production collective is how to govern the growth of new members or contributors. Scope growth was not a topic of concern when scholars were focused on understanding the emergence of peer production collectives as a phenomenon and on identifying the conditions enabling their growing prevalence. But, with the...

When platform leaders change the rules guiding who can access and control a platform, the strategies of those who create value from the platform can be upended. Little research examines how platform participants adapt their strategies when a platform leader changes the rules governing access and control. We trace how participation with a developmen...

Grand challenges are complex problems with far reaching societal implications that lack a clear solution. To make progress, diverse communities often coalesce around an ambitious field goal. However, many field initiatives fall short of their initial goals. When fields mobilize for a grand challenge, what inhibits them from realizing their intended...

Scholars have studied how entrepreneurs acquire resources but have not examined how resources may be bundled with constraints, which can threaten entrepreneurial autonomy. Organizational sponsors, such as incubators and accelerators, provide entrepreneurs with resources, but how do entrepreneurs sustain autonomy while seeking resources and support?...

The ‘variance hypothesis’ predicts that external search breadth leads to innovation outcomes, but people have limited attention for search and cultivating breadth consumes attention. How does individuals’ search breadth affect innovation outcomes? How does individuals’ allocation of attention affect the efficacy of search breadth? We matched survey...

A large literature examines how communities organize for activism, social support, recreation or production goals, but organizational research seldom examines communities where secrecy is paramount. In “dark” communities, individuals connected by a common social identity, norms and practices, work toward collective goals covertly, keeping their per...

The ‘variance hypothesis’ predicts that external search breadth will lead to innovation outcomes, but time for search is fixed and cultivating breadth takes time. How does individuals’ external search breadth affect innovation outcomes? We match survey data with complete patent records, to examine the search behaviors of elite experts at one of the...

Arecognized challenge in innovation scholarship is how to coordinate the efforts of many minds contributing to the design of a single artifact. Much research shows that product concept representations can help coordinate design tasks, but we know little about the practices that make representations more or less effective. We used an inductive appro...

Project forms of organizing are theorized to rely upon horizontal as opposed to vertical lines of authority, but few have examined how this shift affects progression—how people advance in an organization. We argue that progression without hierarchy unfolds when people assume lateral authority over project tasks without managing people. With a longi...

The concept of a community form is drawn upon in many sub-fields of organizational theory. Although there is not much convergence on a level of analysis, there is convergence on a mode of action that is increasingly relevant to a knowledge-based economy marked by porous and shifting organizational boundaries. We argue that communities play an under...

One body of research treats brokers as strategic arbitrageurs extracting advantage from their position, while another body of research paints brokers as relational experts connecting others to foster creativity and innovation. Because both conceptions are static, they fail to capture how brokerage evolves throughout the creative process. With an et...

Although extant theory has illuminated conditions under which organizations mimic each other in form and practice, little research examines how organizations seek to differentiate themselves from conventional forms. Our comparative ethnographic studies examine how the Burning Man and Open Source communities developed organizations to help coordinat...

Post-bureaucratic forms of organizing are theorized to rely upon lateral as opposed to vertical authority, but few have studied how lateral authority operates in practice. With a longitudinal, multi-network study of a mature open source project, we predict what leads individuals to gain lateral authority over collective work. While technical contri...

Our research examines how parties challenging established social systems collaborate with defenders of those systems to achieve mutual goals. With field interviews and observations from four community projects in the open-source movement, we examine how these projects collaborated with firms defending proprietary approaches to software development....

Theorists have argued that network based projects rely upon lateral modes of coordination, but little research examines how the ambiguity that ensues is managed. With an ethnographic study of music producers, we studied how those in the structurally central 'nexus' role integrated contributions from experts without direct authority over them. We fo...

Most research on open source software communities has focused on those that are community founded. More recently, firms have founded their own open source communities. How do sponsored open source communities differ from their autonomous counterparts? With comparative examination of 12 open source projects initiated by corporate sponsors, we identi...

Organizational theorists have built a deep understanding of the conditions affecting knowledge sharing. However, for innovation to occur, knowledge must not just be shared, but also reused, recombined, and accumulated. Such accumulation is not inherent to the innovation process but can be either supported or limited by the context in which it occur...

Little is known about how communities producing collective goods govern themselves. In a multimethod study of one open source software community, we found that members developed a shared basis of formal authority but limited it with democratic mechanisms that enabled experimentation with shifting conceptions of authority over time. When members set...

The concept of ‘open source’ software initially referred to software projects managed by grassroots communities in public forums. Since 1998, the concept has been adapted and diffused to new settings that extend beyond software. While the open source community has maintained control over which software licenses can be considered ‘open source’, litt...

Changes in employment relationships have diminished the degree to which internal labor markets shape careers. Using comparative field studies, we examine how contract workers try to achieve career progression without the benefit of organizational guidance. Authors examine how contract workers manage the career progression paradox: the problem of fi...

Social Forces 82.2 (2003) 843-845 This book, one in the Information Age Series edited by Manuel Castells, provides a comprehensive overview of changes in the structure of employment in Silicon Valley. With careful attention to detail and definition, Benner makes several distinctions that help bring clarity to debates about the nature of contingent...

Prior characterizations of open source projects have been based on the model of a community-founded project. More recently, a second model has emerged, where organizations spinout internally developed code to a public forum. Based on field work on open source projects, we compare the lifecycle differences between these two models. We identify probl...

In the past ten years, the boundaries between public and open science and commercial research efforts have become more porous. Scholars have thus more critically examined ways in which these two institutional regimes intersect. Large open source software projects have also attracted commercial collaborators and now struggle to develop code in an op...

Research on computer mediated communication has examined how a lack of social presenceaffects participation, communication and leadership in online groups, but until recently, has notexamined offline relations or emergent social structures. The few studies examining these issues havenot been integrated with research on open source communities. Onli...

Theorists often speculate why open source and free software project contributors give their work away. Although contributors make their work publicly available, they do not forfeit their rights to it. Community managed software projects protect their work by using several legal and normative tactics, which should not be conflated with a disregard f...

This paper reviews empirical evidence on how telecommunications technologies affect the context of work and organizations at the individual, group, organizational, and inter-organizational level of analysis. Telecommunications is defined broadly to include both networks themselves and applications that enable not only computer-mediated communicatio...