Grégoire CROIDIEU

This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

"Existing category research tends to divorce categories from place. When considered at all, place is often relegated to the contextual background. We see at least three important elements of place that can inform our understanding of categories: first, categories are rooted in the materiality of place; second, those who inhabit a place often share a collective identity that can impart meaning to categories; third, places influence the collective action that underlies category processes. Accordingly, we call for categories “to be put in their place” in category research, by attending to the materialities, collective identities, and collective action present in place. We present an integrative framework for future research that links place, categories, and organizational outcomes, and suggest mechanisms that link these constructs."

Given innovation's chaotic nature, organizations struggle to make decisions when managing innovation. Both academics and practitioners hope artificial intelligence can solve this problem and provide a solution to support and rationalize innovation processes. The literature on this topic, however, is fragmented. The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature to guide future research. We build on the garbage can model, as our findings reveal that the rationalizing influences of AI on innovation management as a decision-making process is varied. Our results reveal four main influences that pave the way for future research: AI augmenting rationality, AI augmenting creativity, AI renewing the organizing of innovation, and AI triggering new challenges. Taken together, these findings suggest AI is not a tool that uniformly optimizes innovation management and decision-making but rather, is best understood as a multifaceted solution, with intended and unintended rationalizing influences, in search of problems to solve.

In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an illustrative overview of how food has been approached in organization studies. We focus on the organizing of food, that is the organizational efforts that leverage, shape and transform food. Against this backdrop, we distinguish the agency of organizations and the agency of food and explore their intersection. We argue that the ‘biomateriality’ of food, i.e. its biomaterial qualities, plays a distinctive role in shaping and affecting organizing and organizations. To do so, we present a conceptual framework for analysing food organizing, which highlights the biomateriality of food and its agentic effects on organizational efforts. Thus, we provide researchers with an analytical toolkit to disentangle the different agents (people, organizations, food itself) and the associated processes and mechanisms that play a role in food organizing. We use this analytical toolkit to introduce the different articles in the special issue and put forward some lines of future research.

Given the investment of public resources for supporting entrepreneurial growth, it is important to know whether such programs truly benefit innovative ventures. While prior research has indicated some benefits for growth outcomes, there is no clear consensus about the conditions for program effectiveness. We attribute this to the complex set of selection and treatment mechanisms associated with how programs navigate interlocking tradeoffs to maximize outcomes with their limited resources. To circumvent these challenges, policymakers often default to a “picking winners” approach based on past performance indicators. We develop and implement a carefully designed empirical strategy to determine whether this approach leads innovative ventures to achieve growth milestones and properly accounts for various observed and unobserved selection issues. We analyze data from the Small Business Development Center (SBDC), a government-sponsored program in the United States. Using a potential outcomes framework to investigate over 1,700 ventures that enrolled in SBDC advisory services from 2011 to 2016, we observe that treatment design is more crucial than selection for innovative firms to achieve growth. We found that treatment time and a client's willingness to learn collaboratively from their advisors are vital indicators of growth. Since treatment effectiveness is driven by support allocation, programs that desire to boost innovation outcomes must at a minimum formally prioritize innovation criteria to ensure these businesses receive sufficient support to address their growth objectives. Beyond this, we demonstrate that support effectiveness additionally depends on a willingness of participants to learn collaboratively by socializing their growth objectives with their advisors. Since even winners need to learn, programs must wrestle with the selection tradeoffs more acutely early on to ensure that the most promising clients can receive lengthier learning opportunities for growth.

In this study, we show that institutional influences are stronger than technical ones in predicting the cross-national diffusion of standards on disaster preparedness. We examine the adoption of the first global disaster risk reduction standard, the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), in 186 countries from 2005-2015. Although practical accounts emphasize the technical benefits of the framework in mitigating potential harm and damage, surprisingly, these explanations do little to explain country-level adoption – even when a nation has recently experienced a disaster. Thus, we test and find strong support for an alternative explanation, which draws on the influence of organizational sociology: that institutional influences are the primary driver diffusion of global standards. Specifically, the enduring effects of historical legacies play a particularly important role in adoption. Taken together, our results suggest that preparedness against natural disasters is a culturally mediated practice. A practical implication of our work is that many of the countries most in need of disaster preparedness may, at present, be the least prepared."

Many actors claim to be experts of specialized knowledge, but for this expertise to be perceived as legitimate, other actors in the field must recognize them as authorities. Using an automated topic-model analysis of historical texts associated with the U.S. amateur radio operator movement between 1899 and 1927, we propose a process model for lay-expertise legitimation as an alternative to professionalization. While the professionalization account depends on specialized work, credentialing, and restrictive jurisdictional control by powerful field actors, our model emphasizes four mechanisms leading to lay-expert recognition: building an advanced collective competence, operating in an unrestricted public space, providing transformational social contributions, and expanding an original collective role identity. Our analysis shows how field expertise can be achieved outside of professional spaces by non-professionalized actors who master activities as a labor of love. Our work also reveals that lay-expertise recognition depends on the interplay between collective identities and collective competence among non-professional actors, and it addresses the shifting power dynamics when professional and non-professional actors coexist and strive for expertise recognition.

We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.