research + cv

Full cv here.

books

Kaplan, Sarah (2019). The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Also published in Italian and Portuguese/Brazilian editions)

Gans, Joshua & Sarah Kaplan, eds. (2017), Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business, Toronto, ON: Dog Ear Publishing.

Foster, Richard N. & Sarah Kaplan (2001). Creative Destruction: Why Companies that are Built to Last Underperform the Market — And How to Successfully Transform Them. New York: Currency (Doubleday) (authors listed alphabetically). (Also published in Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and UK  editions.)

Pratt, Michael G., Sarah Kaplan & Richard Whittington (2020), The Tumult over Transparency: Decoupling Transparency from Replication in Establishing Trustworthy Qualitative Research, Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(1): 1-19.

Management journals are currently responding to challenges raised by the “replication crisis” in experimental social psychology, leading to new standards for transparency. These approaches are spilling over to qualitative research in unhelpful and potentially even dangerous ways. Advocates for transparency in qualitative research mistakenly couple it with replication. Tying transparency tightly to replication is deeply troublesome for qualitative research, where replication misses the point of what the work seeks to accomplish. We suggest that transparency advocates conflate replication with trustworthiness. We challenge this conflation on both ontological and methodological grounds, and we offer alternatives for how to (and how not to) think about trustworthiness in qualitative research. Management journals need to tackle the core issues raised by this tumult over transparency by identifying solutions for enhanced trustworthiness that recognize the unique strengths and considerations of different methodological approaches in our field.

Kaplan, Sarah (2020) Beyond the Business Case for Social Responsibility, Academy of Management Discoveries, 6(1): 1-4.

It has become increasingly common for advocates for various social issues—be they the environment, diversity and inclusion, supply chain workers, other other—to make the business case for pursuing these goals. Even “shared value” approaches insist that the win-win formula always meets the needs of the bottom line first. Recently, however, scholars have called into question the effectiveness of the “business case” justification, and have even suggested that it might do more harm than good. The problems arise because the business case may not actually motivate managers to act, that it may be alienating to those for whom the business case is being made, and it may create moral struggles for the people who feel they must make the business case in order to justify social action. As a result, while the field of strategic management and management more generally has been focused on establishing if, or under what conditions, corporate social responsibility is associated with financial performance, emerging research suggests that this kind of evidence would not necessarily have a positive impact on making change.

Goodman, Rachael & Sarah Kaplan (2019), Work-Life Balance as a Household Negotiation: A New Perspective from Rural India, Academy of Management Discoveries, 5(4): 465-486.

Bringing more women into the formal workforce is an important component of corporate strategies, development efforts, and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, these policies often do not consider the household work that women do to support the survival of their families, making work-for-wages impossible or creating time famines for women who attempt to do both. Thus, for women to engage in work-for-wages, they must find a way to alleviate their work-for-households. Using the analytical lens of household decision-making from anthropology, our analysis of working women in rural India shows that, far from being an individual decision about time allocation, women’s ability to work formal jobs was a family project to reallocate labor. These insights suggest that the focus on the individual in work-life balance literature and policy-making inadequately represents a phenomenon that involves other household members, implicitly or explicitly. It also highlights the need to broaden our definition of “work” to include both the paid and unpaid labor that is vital to people’s survival.

Hannigan, Tim, Richard F. J. Haans, Keyvan Vakili, Hovig Tchalian, Vern L. Glaser, Milo Wang, Sarah Kaplan, and P. Devereaux Jennings (2019), Topic Models in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Big Textual Data, Academy of Management Annals, 13(2): 586-632.

Increasingly, management researchers are using topic modeling, a new method borrowed from computer science, to reveal phenomenon-based constructs and grounded conceptual relationships in textual data. By conceptualizing topic modeling as the process of rendering constructs and conceptual relationships from textual data, we demonstrate how this new method can advance management scholarship without turning topic modeling into a black box of complex computer-driven algorithms. We begin by comparing features of topic modeling to related techniques (content analysis, grounded theorizing, and natural language processing). We then walk through the steps of rendering with topic modeling and apply rendering to management articles that draw on topic modeling. Doing so enables us to identify and discuss how topic modeling has advanced management theory in five areas: detecting novelty and emergence, developing inductive classification systems, understanding online audiences and products, analyzing frames and social movements, and understanding cultural dynamics. We conclude with a review of new topic modeling trends and revisit the role of researcher interpretation in a world of computer-driven textual analysis.

Kang, Sonia K. & Sarah Kaplan (2019) Working toward gender diversity and inclusion in medicine: lessons from management, The Lancet, 393(10171): 579-586.

Women’s representation in science and medicine has slowly increased over the past few decades. However, this rise in numbers of women, or gender diversity, has not been matched by a rise in gender inclusion. Despite increasing representation, women still encounter bias and discrimination when compared with men in these fields across a variety of outcomes, including treatment at school and work, hiring, compensation, evaluation, and promotion. Individual and systemic biases create unwelcome environments for women, particularly for those who additionally identify with other traditionally devalued groups (eg, women of colour). This Review draws on several decades of research in the field of management and its cognate disciplines to identify five myths that continue to perpetuate gender bias and five strategies for improving not only the number of women in medicine, but also their lived experiences, capacity to aspire, and opportunity to succeed. We argue for a move away from a singular focus on interventions aimed at targeting individual attitudes and behaviour to more comprehensive interventions that address structural and systemic changes.

Fernandez-Mateo, Isabel & Sarah Kaplan (2018), Gender and Organization Science, Organization Science, 29(6): 1229–1236.

Gendered processes and outcomes are pervasive in organizational life. They shape how individuals perceive their career prospects, which types of opportunities they pursue, how they get work done within organizations, and how they balance this work with the rest of their life. Organizations themselves also shape and are shaped by gender dynamics, from the ways they design jobs and performance evaluation systems to the assumptions managers make about individuals’ preferences and motivations. This virtual special issue collects together 14 papers published in Organization Science that challenge common understandings about the sources of gender differences in career outcomes, the effects of balancing work–life obligations, and the ways that gender dynamics play out in teams and organizations. An important insight that emerges from a comparison of these studies is that demand effects are often confused for supply effects. What looks like a supply problem—we think that women choose not to aspire to top positions or to jobs in top paying fields—might actually be a demand problem—organizations or jobs look unappealing to women because of past histories of not hiring or promoting women into leadership roles or of making work–life balance appear to be impossible. These studies suggest that essentialist explanations that attribute gendered outcomes to inherent characteristics or choices of women might be too simplistic or inaccurate. Instead, future research would benefit from examining the complex interactions between supply-side and demand-side drivers of gender inequality.

Kaplan, Sarah, Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Jonathan Milde (2017). Symbiont Practices in Boundary Spanning: Bridging the Cognitive and Political Divides of Interdisciplinary Research, Academy of Management Journal. vol. 60 no. 4 1387-1414.

Organizing for interdisciplinary research must overcome two challenges to collaboration: the cognitive incommensurability of knowledge and the political economy of research based in the disciplines. Researchers may not engage in interdisciplinarity because they would have to invest in new knowledge unrelated to their discipline or risk losing career-related rewards. Our field study of a university interdisciplinary research center shows that boundary spanning occurred as students interacted with scientific instruments in a symbiotic relationship through what we call symbiont practices: matching disciplinary language and methods with the experimental possibilities of instruments, developing co-specialization between students and instruments, and engaging disciplinary actors to design experiments using instruments. Instruments engendered incipient interdisciplinary possibilities, but they required the students – engaging in symbiont practices – to actualize that potential. Simultaneously, students required instruments in order to be classified, staffed on projects and placed in jobs. These practices resolved both the cognitive and economic challenges of boundary spanning by mobilizing material resources that were costly (cognitively and politically) for actors on either side of the disciplinary divide to engage. In conceptualizing interdisciplinary research as occurring through symbiont practices, we develop a sociomaterial perspective on boundary spanning.

Jarzabkowski, Paula, Sarah Kaplan, David Seidl & Richard Whittington (2016). On the Risk of Studying Practices in Isolation: Linking What, Who and How in Strategy Research. Strategic Organization. 14(3) 248-259.

This article challenges the recent focus on practices as stand-alone phenomena, as exemplified by the so-called “Practice-Based View of Strategy” proposed by Bromiley and Rau. While the goal of “Practice-Based View of Strategy” points to the potential for standard practices to generate performance differentials (in contrast to the resource-based view), it marginalizes well-known insights from practice theory more widely. In particular, by limiting its focus to practices, that is, “what” practices are used, it underplays the implications of “who” is engaged in the practices and “how” the practices are carried out. In examining practices in isolation, the “Practice-Based View of Strategy” carries the serious risk of misattributing performance differentials. In this article, we offer an integrative practice perspective on strategy and performance that should aid scholars in generating more precise and contextually sensitive theories about the enactment and impact of practices as well as about critical factors shaping differences in practice outcomes.

Jarzabkowski, Paula, Sarah Kaplan, David Seidl & Richard Whittington (2016). If you aren’t talking about practices, don’t call it a practice-based view: Rejoinder to Bromiley and Rau. Strategic Organization. 14(3) 270-274.

In this debate about the value of introducing a supposed “practice-based view of strategy,” we respond to Bromiley and Rau’s defense of their approach. Coming from a background of two decades of research on strategy-as-practice, we focus on two major concerns about their initiative. The first is that the very use of the term “practice” would seem to obfuscate more than elucidate, especially given their definition of “practice” which strongly deviates from that already established in the social sciences generally. The second is that, by applying the term “practice” to strategy specifically, it becomes incumbent upon Bromiley and Rau to engage with and build upon the extensive practice-related strategy research that has gone before them.

Arora, Ashish, Michelle Gittelman, Sarah Kaplan, John Lynch, Will Mitchell, & Nicolaj Siggelkow (2016). Question-Focused Innovations in Research Methods. Strategic Management Journal, 37(1), 3-9.

This special issue is devoted to exploring new methods for addressing questions in strategic management. This introduction synthesizes the collective contribution of the articles for strategy research. The articles draw on methods from other fields, extending and adapting them to address strategy questions. The innovations provide new, different, or more nuanced measures and findings as compared to prior research. We conclude by discussing more general implications for scholarship in strategic management.

Kaplan, Sarah & Keyvan Vakili (2015). The double-edged sword of recombination in breakthrough innovation. Strategic Management Journal. 36: 1435-1457.

We explore the double-edged sword of recombination in generating breakthrough innovation: recombination of distant or diverse knowledge is needed because knowledge in a narrow domain might trigger myopia; but, recombination can be counterproductive when local search is needed to identify anomalies. We take into account how creativity shapes both the cognitive novelty of the idea and the subsequent realization of economic value. We develop a text-based measure of novel ideas in patents using topic modeling to identify those patents that originate new topics in a body of knowledge. In our study of nanotechnology patents, we find that, counter to theories of recombination, patents that originate new topics are more likely to be associated with local search, while economic value is the product of broader recombinations as well as novelty.

See summary for practitioners here 

Jarzabkowski, Paula & Sarah Kaplan (2015). Strategy Tools-in-Use: A Framework for Understanding ‘Technologies of Rationality’ in Practice. Strategic Management Journal. 36(4) 537-558.

In response to critiques of strategy tools as unhelpful or potentially dangerous for organizations, we suggest casting a sociological eye on how tools are actually mobilized by strategy makers. In conceptualizing strategy tools as tools-in-use, we offer a framework for examining the ways that the affordances of strategy tools and the agency of strategy makers interact to shape how and when tools are selected and applied. Further, rather than evaluating the ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ use of tools, we highlight the variety of outcomes that result, not just for organizations but also for the tools and the individuals who use them. We illustrate this framework with a vignette and propose an agenda and methodological approaches for further scholarship on the use of strategy tools.

Kaplan, Sarah (2015). Truce Breaking and Remaking: The CEO’s Role in Changing Organizational Routines. Advances in Strategic Management (Cognition and Strategy), Vol. 32, 1-45.

This paper reports on the “CEO’s-eye-view” of the 1990 commercial real estate crisis at Citibank using unique data from CEO John Reed’s private archives. This qualitative analysis sheds light on questions that have perennially plagued executives and intrigued scholars: How do organizations change routines in order to overcome inertia in the face of radical change in the environment? And, specifically, what is the role of the CEO in this process? Inertial behavior in such circumstances has been attributed to ingrained routines that are based on cognitive and motivational truces. Routines are performed because organizational participants find them to cohere to a particular cognitive frame about what should be done (the cognitive dimension) and to resolve conflicts about what gets rewarded or sanctioned (the motivational dimension). The notion of a “truce” explains how routines are “routinely” activated. Routines are inertial because the dissolution of the truce would be inconsistent with frames held by organizational participants and fraught with the risk of unleashing unmanageable conflict among interests in the organization. Thus, the challenge for the CEO in making intended change is both to break the existing truce and to remake a new one. In this study, I uncover how the existing organizational truce led to the crisis at Citibank, why Reed’s initial attempts to respond failed, and how he ultimately found ways to break out of the old truce and establish new routines that helped the bank survive. These findings offer insight into the cognitive and motivational microfoundations of macro theories about organizational response to radical change.

Kaplan, Sarah (2015). Mixing qualitative and quantitative research methods, a chapter for the Handbook of Innovative Qualitative Research Methods: Pathways to Cool Ideas and Interesting Papers, K. Elsbach and R. Kramer, eds.

This chapter offers several models of ways that scholars can usefully integrate qualitative and quantitative research in both single works and broader research programs: using qualitative methods to identify constructs or hypotheses that can subsequently be examined in quantitative studies; using quantitative studies to identify patterns that can be explored in qualitative work; and, quantification of qualitative data. Through this analysis, I call into question existing characterizations of the relationships among the two types of research and offer a more nuanced portrayal of the links between them. I suggest that the advantage of mixed methods studies is that they recognize the value of iterating between that which can be counted and that which cannot in order to generate richer insights about the phenomena of interest.

Kaplan, Sarah & Wanda Orlikowski (2013). Temporal Work in Strategy Making. Organization Science, 24(4), 965-995.

This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible and acceptable, otherwise breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change.

Version for practitioners in Sloan Management Review here

Eggers, JP & Sarah Kaplan (2013). Cognition & Capabilities: A Multi-Level Perspective. Academy of Management Annals, Vol. 7, 295-340.

Research on managerial cognition and on organizational capabilities has essentially developed in two parallel tracks. We know much from the Resource Based View about the relationship between capabilities and organizational performance. Separately, managerial cognition scholars have shown how interpretations of the environment shape organizational responses. Only recently have scholars begun to link the two sets of insights. These new links suggest that routines and capabilities are based in particular understandings about how things should be done, that the value of these capabilities is subject to interpretation, and that even the presence of capabilities may be useless without managerial interpretations of their match to the environment. This review organizes these emerging insights in a multi-level cognitive model of capability development and deployment. The model focuses on the recursive processes of constructing routines (capability building blocks), assembling routines into capabilities, and matching capabilities to perceived opportunities. To date, scholars have focused most attention on the organizational-level process of matching. Emerging research on the microfoundations of routines contributes to the micro-level of analysis. The lack of research on capability assembly leaves the field without a bridge connecting the macro and micro levels. The model offers suggestions for research directions to address these challenges.

Kaplan, Sarah & Joanna Radin (2011). Bounding an Emerging Technology: Para-Scientific Media and the Drexler-Smalley Debate about Nanotechnology. Social Studies of Science 41(4), 457-486.

‘Nanotechnology’ is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, determining what nanotechnology means, whose research counts as nanotechnology, and who gets to speak on behalf of nanotechnology is a highly political process involving constant negotiation with significant implications for funding, legislation, and citizen support. In this paper, we deconstruct a high-profile moment of controversy about nanotechnology’s possibilities: a debate between K. Eric Drexler and Richard Smalley published as a ‘point-counterpoint feature’ in 2003 in Chemical & Engineering News. Rather than treat the debate as a stand-alone episode of scientific controversy, we seek to understand the forces that enabled it to be seen as such an episode. We introduce the term ‘para-scientific’ media to make explicit how certain forms of publication intervene in the dissemination of technical knowledge as it travels beyond its supposed site of production. The existence of para-scientific media is predicated on intimate association with formalized channels of scientific publication, but they also seek to engage other cultures of expertise. Through this lens, we show that Drexler and Smalley were not only independent entrepreneurs enrolling Chemical and Engineering News as a site of boundary work; members of the para-scientific media actively enrolled Drexler and Smalley as part of a broader effort to simplify a complex set of uncertainties about nanotechnology’s potential into two polarized views. In this case study, we examine received accounts of the debate, describe the boundary work undertaken by Drexler and Smalley to shape the path of nanotechnology’s emergence, and unpack the boundary work of the para-scientific media to create polarizing controversy that attracted audiences and influenced policy and scientific research agendas. Members of the para-scientific media have been influential in bounding nanotechnology as a field-in-tension by structuring irreconcilable dichotomies out of an ambiguous set of uncertainties. We conclude with thoughts about the implications of this case study for studies of science communication, institutional entrepreneurship and the ethics of emerging technologies.

Kaplan, Sarah (2011). Cognition and Strategy: Reflections on Two Decades of Progress and a Look to the Future. Journal of Management Studies. 48(3) 665-695.

This review of cognition in strategic management research takes as its starting point the appreciation of the seminal paper – “Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers” – by Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller on cognitive categorization of competition published in the Journal of Management Studies only 20 years ago. In this paper, I reflect on the context in which their paper emerged, the impact it has had, and the future paths that research on cognition in strategy might take. In doing so, I highlight the challenges associated with establishing cognition as a legitimate factor in strategic management (alongside the traditional explanations of capabilities and incentives) and of showing the causal relationship between cognition and strategic outcomes. Subsequent work in cognition explored the dynamic relationship between cognition, capabilities and incentives and, in process models of framing, linked cognition with political action. Rather than managerial cognition becoming its own independent field, cognitive concepts have diffused throughout work in many different managerial fields, leading to a proliferation of terms, concepts and approaches. I conclude by exploring some of the paths that research in cognition and strategy is taking in the present day – particularly those involving studies of the construction of markets and categories, each of which are themes that the work by Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller brought to our attention.

Listen to “Talking about Organizations” podcast about this piece and cognition and strategy in general.

Kaplan, Sarah (2011). Strategy & PowerPoint: The Epistemic Culture and Machinery of Strategy Making. Organization Science 22(2), 320-346.

PowerPoint has come to dominate organizational life in general and strategy making in particular. The technology is lauded by its proponents as a powerful tool for communication and excoriated by its critics as dangerously simplifying. This study takes a deeper look into how PowerPoint is mobilized in strategy making through an ethnographic study inside one organization. It treats PowerPoint as a technology embedded in the discursive practices of strategic knowledge production and suggests that these practices make up the epistemic or knowledge culture of the organization. Conceptualizing culture as composed of practices foregrounds the “machineries” of knowing. Results from a genre analysis of PowerPoint use suggest that it should not be characterized simply as effective or ineffective as current PowerPoint controversies do. Instead, I show how the affordances of PowerPoint enabled the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in an uncertain environment, creating spaces for discussion, making recombinations possible, allowing for adjustments as ideas evolved and providing access to a wide range of actors. These affordances also facilitated cartographic efforts to draw boundaries around the scope of a strategy by certifying certain ideas and allowing document owners to include or exclude certain slides or participants. These discursive practices –collaboration and cartography – are part of the “epistemic machinery” of strategy culture. This analysis demonstrates that strategy making is not only about analysis of industry structure, competitive positioning or resources as assumed in content-based strategy research but also about the production and use of PowerPoint documents that embody these ideas.

BBC Radio interview in which this work is featured: “PowerPointless”

Jarzabkowski, Paula & Sarah Kaplan (2010). Taking Strategy-as-Practice Across the Atlantic. Advances in Strategic Management (Globalization of Strategy Research), 27, 51-71.

An increasingly large group of scholars in Europe have begun to take a practice lens to understanding problems of strategy in organizations. Strategy-as-practice research is premised on the notion that all social life is constituted within practices, and that practices and practitioners are essential subjects of study. Applying this lens to strategy foregrounds the mundane, everyday work involved in doing strategy. In doing so, it expands our definition of the salient outcomes to be studied in strategic management and provides new perspectives on the mechanisms for producing such outcomes. As strategy-as-practice scholars, we have been puzzled about how much more slowly the ideas in this burgeoning field have travelled from their home in Europe to the U.S. than have other ideas in strategic management travelled from the U.S. to Europe. In this chapter, we contribute some thoughts about the development of the strategy-as-practice field and its travels in academia.

Kaplan, Sarah & Fiona Murray (2010). Entrepreneurship and the Construction of Value in Biotechnology. Research on the Sociology of Organizations (Technology and Organization: Essays in Honour of Joan Woodward), 29, 107-147.

Through our historical analysis of the evolution of biotechnology, we show that highly varied interpretations of the value embodied in biotechnology existed. Across three eras (1973-1986 and 1988-2000 and 2003-present), entrepreneurs constructed different economic logics for biotechnology, often in highly contested settings against multiple entrepreneurial adversaries. We also find that an economic logic was not easily stabilized; biotechnology’s evolution was arrested by moments when the stabilized constellations fell apart (in 1987-1989 and again in 2001-2002) and new logics were constructed. We argue that such breakdowns may occur when evidence fails to meet critical tests or when different interpretations of value are in conflict. These breakdowns create new opportunities for other entrepreneurs to construct alternative economic logics. By exploring these processes of contestation, (temporary) stabilization and subsequent breakdowns, we contribute first to the entrepreneurship literature by expanding the definition of the entrepreneurial act. We find that the entrepreneur creating a new firm to commercialize a technology, while being a Schumpeterian opportunity seeker, is also acting as an institutional entrepreneur, constructing the economic logics and institutional setups as they build their organizations. Not only does this perspective redefine the role of Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, it also opens up the discussion of entrepreneurship to a whole set of different entrepreneurial actors who may not be creating firms but who are seeking to shape the economic logic and institutions which will govern the system of exchange.

Eggers, JP. & Sarah Kaplan (2009). Cognition and Renewal: Comparing CEO and Organizational Effects on Incumbent Adaptation to Technical Change.Organization Science, 20(2), 461-477.

We investigate the conditions under which managerial cognition affects the timing of incumbent entry into a radical new technological market. We address this question using a longitudinal study of communications technology firms entering the fiber optics product market. Using a hazard rate model, we investigate the relevance of cognition based on the direction of CEO attention. We find that attention towards the emerging technology and the affected industry is associated with faster entry, and attention to existing technologies is associated with slower progress. Second, we assess the extent to which the effect of cognition is dependent upon the levels of relevant organizational factors and find that CEO attention to the emerging technology may amplify the effects of industry orientation. Managerial cognition is important in understanding organizational outcomes, and considering both the direction of cognition and its interaction with organizational factors provides a more nuanced view of entry behavior. These results contribute to the literatures on incumbent response to technical change and new product development by suggesting that context-specific managerial cognition has a separate and important influence on the degree and direction of strategic renewal. We argue that managerial cognition is therefore a dynamic managerial capability that can shape adaptation by established firms.

Kaplan, Sarah (2008). Framing Contests: Making Strategy Under Uncertainty. Organization Science. 19(5), 729–752.

I develop a model of framing contests to elucidate how cognitive frames influence organizational strategy making. Using ethnographic techniques to study the day-to-day practices of strategy making in one firm, I examine the ways actors attempted to transform their own cognitive frames of a situation into predominant frames through a series of interactions. Frames are the means by which managers make sense of ambiguous information from their environments. Actors each had cognitive frames about the direction the market was taking and about what kinds of solutions would be appropriate. Where frames about a strategic choice were not congruent, actors engaged in highly political framing practices to make their frames resonate and to mobilize action in their favor. Those actors who most skillfully engaged in these practices shaped the frame which prevailed in the organization. This framing perspective suggests that frames are not only instrumental tools for the ex post justification of actions taken through power but rather are an ex ante part of the political process that produces decisions. Uncertainty opens up the possibility for new actors to gain power, and contesting frames is a way of changing the power structures in the organization. A principal contribution of the framing contests model is to locate a middle ground between cognitive and political models of strategy making, one in which frames are both constraints and resources and outcomes can be shaped by purposeful action and interaction to make meaning.

Kaplan, Sarah (2008). Cognition, Capabilities and Incentives: Assessing Firm Response to the Fiber-Optic Revolution. Academy of Management Journal. 51(4), 672-695.

This study examines the relationships between CEO cognition, organizational capabilities and organizational incentives in shaping firm strategy during the fiber-optic revolution. I test for their association with subsequent investment in optical technologies using longitudinal data from 71 communications firms. Results show that each is separately important in shaping outcomes, and their alignment towards the adoption of a new technology will lead to the greatest levels of change. In addition, cognition can compensate when organizational-level factors are lacking. Considering cognition, capabilities and incentives together contributes to a more contingent view of conditions under which CEO cognition matters for firm strategy.

Kaplan, Sarah & Mary Tripsas (2008). Thinking about Technology: Applying a Cognitive Lens to Technical Change. Research Policy, 37(5), 790-805.

We apply a cognitive lens to understanding technology trajectories across the life cycle by developing a coevolutionary model of technological frames and technology. Applying that model to each stage of the technology life cycle, we identify conditions under which a cognitive lens might change the expected technological outcome predicted by purely economic or organizational models. We also show that interactions of producers, users and institutions shape the development of collective frames around the meaning of new technologies. We thus deepen our understanding of sources of variation in the era of ferment, conditions under which a dominant design may be achieved, the underlying architecture of the era of incremental change and the dynamics associated with discontinuities.

Kaplan, Sarah & Rebecca Henderson (2005). Inertia and Incentives: Bridging Organizational Economics and Organizational Theory. Organization Science, 16(5), 509-521.

Organizational theorists have long acknowledged the importance of the formal and informal incentives facing a firm’s employees, stressing that the political economy of a firm plays a major role in shaping organizational life and firm behavior. Yet the detailed study of incentive systems has traditionally been left in the hands of (organizational) economists, with most organizational theorists focusing their attention on critical problems in culture, network structure, framing and so on – in essence, the social context in which economics and incentive systems are embedded. We argue that this separation of domains is problematic. The economics literature, for example, is unable to explain why organizations should find it difficult to change incentive structures in the face of environmental change, while the organizational literature focuses heavily on the role of inertia as sources of organizational rigidity. Drawing on recent research on incentives in organizational economics and on cognition in organizational theory, we build a framework for the analysis of incentives that highlights the ways in which incentives and cognition – while being analytically distinct concepts – are phenomenologically deeply intertwined. We suggest that incentives and cognition coevolve so that organizational competencies or routines are as much about building knowledge of “what should be rewarded” as they are about “what should be done.” We argue that this recognition has important implications for our understanding of organizational inertia in the face of environmental change and that it opens up important new areas for further research.

Kaplan, Sarah, Fiona Murray & Rebecca M. Henderson (2003). Discontinuities and Senior Management: Assessing the Role of Recognition in Pharmaceutical Firm Response to Biotechnology. Industrial and Corporate Change, 12(4), 203-233.

Despite an increasing emphasis on the role of senior management cognition in shaping organizational action, there have been few attempts to link top management mental models to strategic choice in the face of discontinuous innovation. This paper uses 23 years of data covering 15 major pharmaceutical firms to explore the degree to which each firm’s response to the revolution in biotechnology was shaped by the senior team’s recognition of biotechnology’s importance. Controlling for a number of important alternative explanations, we show that recognition may be an important predictor of action, suggesting that cognition at the most senior level may play a critical role in shaping established firms’ response to discontinuities.