Management and Marketing - Research Publications
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ItemOrganizational and Epistemic Change: The Growth of the Art Investment Industry(Academy of Management, 2013-01)This case shows how an emergent knowledge community is necessary to support and legitimate the efforts of entrepreneurs in new areas of financial investment, due to strong, institutionalized expectations about the rational evaluation and monitoring of financial assets. Using the concept of epistemic cultures to complement an organizational field narrative, this paper examines the development of artwork as a recognizable financial investment category. Despite a long history of attention to art investment, the legitimacy of art as an asset is still emerging. Legitimacy questions have decreased since the 1960s due to the growth of an epistemic culture around art investing, facilitated by new market actors who met the need of professional investors for transparency and accountability. Technical knowledge about art investments came from economists, art price service providers, art market analysts, and others. We also see the development of a more practical knowledge about how best to structure the investment and to profit from art investment. The growth of knowledge – through a series of experiments and failures – around the properties and optimal structure of art investments was just as important for the emergence of the industry as having investors who were willing to enter the new area.
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ItemWhips, Chains and Books on Campus: How Organizations Legitimate Their Stigmatized Practices(Academy of Management, 2017-08)This paper explores how emergent organizations with core stigma and taboo practices work to gain widespread acceptance, extending work on organizational legitimacy and highlighting the growing number of purpose-driven organizations. We focus on emergent organizations because little is known about how they become established in the first place. We examine the intersection of core stigma and strategies in emergent, purpose-driven organizations through the provocative case of official university student organizations focused on kink and kinky sexuality. From examination of these organizations’ historical emergence and university-sanctioned constitutions, we posit that (1) due process and impersonal evaluation processes enable recognition of taboo topics, particularly if official sanction is focused on organizational structure and roles and (2) organizations leverage credible social discourses, such as individual rights, to emphasize issues both pertinent to sanctioning organizations and mainstream throughout society. This research is timely given the explosion of emergent organizations today with socially taboo purposes.