David G. Sirmon’s research while affiliated with Trinity Washington University and other places

Entities such as the natural environment and future human generations, among others, broadly qualify as stakeholders, albeit non-traditional ones. Yet due to ambiguous identification and inconsistent representation by human proxies, non-traditional stakeholders' interests are often disregarded by organizations. Said differently, despite theoretically qualifying as stakeholders, non-traditional stakeholders suffer low legitimacy, power, and urgency-that is, low salience. However, recent advances in the concept of personhood alongside developments in agentic technologies provide the basis for non-traditional stakeholders to gain salience and secure their "own voice" at the table. Herein, we refer to non-traditional stakeholders with some level of acknowledged personhood coupled with some degree of agentic technology representation as synthetic stakeholders. We theoretically examine how variation in the acknowledged personhood of a non-traditional stakeholder (based on the aspects of recognition and boundedness) as well as variation in the technological design scope of its agentic representative (based on the aspects of participation and permissibility) affect the synthetic stakeholder's salience. We further discuss how these dimensions impact stakeholder management and organizational governance more broadly.

Scholars often simplify the treatment of capability development and utilization by focusing on individual-, process-, or structural-level factors independently. However, by following a microfoundation perspective to the treatment of capabilities this chapter endeavors to consider these levels collectively. In doing so, the chapter connects well-known managerial processes, such as resource orchestration, with novel yet increasing salient factors of agentic technologies (which act as another individual-level factor that constrains, complements, or substitutes for human agency) and identity-based community (which acts as another structural-level factor that conditionally provides the firm resources to promote its ideology-centric utility function). The integration of these three factors within the microfoundation literature promotes the investigation of research questions relevant to contemporary organizations. The chapter contextualizes potential questions in each section, including separate treatments of each factor as well as their collective consideration.

Understanding why some firms outperform others is central to strategy research. The resource-based view (RBV) suggests that competitive advantages arise due to possessing strategic resources (i.e., assets that are valuable, rare, nonsubstitutable, and inimitable), and researchers have extended this logic to explain performance differences. However, RBV is relatively silent about the actions managers could use to create or capitalize on a resource-based advantage. Enriching RBV, the resource orchestration framework describes specific managerial actions that use such resources to realize performance gains. After reviewing the conceptual evolution of these two literature streams as well as related streams, we use meta-analytic structural equation modeling to aggregate evidence from 255 samples involving 111,614 observations to answer outstanding research questions regarding the strategic resources–actions–performance pathway. The results show strong complementarity and interdependence between their logics. Additional inquiry drawing on their complementarity is a clear path toward enhancing scholars’ understanding of how and why some firms outperform others. We build on our findings to lay a foundation for such inquiry, including a call for theorizing centered on the interdependence of resources and actions, as well as new theoretical terrain that can help resource-based inquiry continue to evolve.

Organizations are increasingly deploying technologies that have the ability to parse through large amounts of data, acquire skills and knowledge, and operate autonomously. These technologies diverge from prior technologies in their capacity to exercise intentionality over protocol development and/or action selection in the practice of organizational routines, thereby affecting organizations in new and distinct ways. In this article, we categorize four forms of conjoined agency between humans and technologies: conjoined agency with assisting technologies, conjoined agency with arresting technologies, conjoined agency with augmenting technologies, and conjoined agency with automating technologies. We then theorize on the different ways in which these forms of conjoined agency impact a routine's change at a particular moment in time as well as a routine's responsiveness to feedback over time. In doing so, we elaborate on how organizations may evolve in varied and diverse ways based on the form(s) of conjoined agency they deploy in their organizational design choices.

Context-emergent turnover theory (CETT) focuses on the contextual factors that influence the turnover-firm performance relationship, yet to date, has not investigated how particular firms weather the detrimental effects of loss more effectively than others. We build on the CETT literature by theorizing that different human resource bundling strategies are central contextual factors that impact human resource exit. Specifically, we argue that bundling human resources prior to exit in greater concentrations deflects some harmful effects of turnover. Pre-exit bundling ensures that remaining professionals post-exit retain both the capacity necessary to meet job demands and the critical tacit knowledge of firm routines that maintain effectiveness. Our study examines the loss of professionals in a panel of the largest U.S.-based law firms. We find general support for our theory. Results show that losing professionals when the pre-exit bundling had produced greater service-, hiring-, and geographic-concentration lessens the negative effects of loss. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.