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Scaling Without Hierarchhy: Governing Collective Action Across Jurisdictional Boundaries
Devin Stein
Abstract: Organizations are increasingly confronting situations which require coordinated action among multiple independent actors with no clear hierarchy or formal authority. Although strategy research has extensively studied coordination through hierarchy and bilateral arrangements, the field has yet to understand how organizations scale collective action when ownership is highly fragmented across many interdependent stakeholders. We use Ostrom’s design principles to enrich foundational theories of property rights and organizational governance, arguing that a “scale penalty” exists where collective action performance declines with increases in the number of autonomous participants. We hypothesize that this penalty can be at least partly mitigated by clearly aligning incentives through connecting benefits directly to contributions, as well as using specialized “trilateral” governance arrangements to manage coordination in the absence of centralized control. We empirically test our theory using an original longitudinal dataset of wildfire incidents across the U.S. from 2007 – 2021. Results support our theory, and our findings have important implications for improving adaptability and collaborative resource deployment in increasingly complex managerial environments.
Cross-Level Stakeholder Alignment in Brazil’s Fight Against AIDS
Maria Minniti, Zachary Rodriguez, Devin Stein
Abstract: We investigate how the autonomy and alignment of stakeholders’ actions nested within different institutional levels--ranging from local to global--influences the outcomes of large-scale public-private collaborations. Exploiting the management of Brazil's AIDS epidemic from 1996 to 2016 as a natural experiment, we analyze health outcomes across municipalities following an initiative aimed at combating the AIDS epidemic. Our findings suggest that the beneficial impact of increased access to critical HIV/AIDS medication was stronger when local stakeholders had greater agency, and their values were more aligned with the national institutional change driving the initiative. We contribute to the study of public-private collaborations by demonstrating how the cross-level congruence of stakeholders improves outcomes by modifying local institutions in ways conducive to the more effective local implementation of a global initiative. Our findings also show that the mechanisms driving stronger impact include a more efficient use of local resources and complementary local investments. Our study has important implications for advancing our understanding of value creation in hybrid forms of organizing and of how organizations create public value across nested institutional levels.
In the Mix: Organizational Effectiveness and Complex Social Issues
Devin Stein, Maria Minniti, Roger Koppl
Abstract: Public, private, and nonprofit organizations all face the challenges but also the opportunities presented by social issues. The complexity of social issues, however, often exceeds the capacities of any individual organization. Our study of California’s wildfire industry reveals that organizational impact is shaped by the “organizational mix,” the set of organizations addressing that social issue in a given area. The organizational mix determines the environment in which organizations operate. Our findings emphasize especially the importance of size, diversity, and cross-level support between organizations in the mix. For managers, this implies that organizational strategies should evolve through context-specific experimentation and adaptation based on the organization's embedded comparative strength. Embracing this experimentation can unlock efficiencies and offer new opportunities for better organizational performance and improved social impact.
Know Thy Neighbor: Community Organizing and Knowledge Spillovers
Devin Stein
Abstract: Entrepreneurship scholars have been paying increasing attention to the use of self-organizing communities as an organizational form that enables many diverse stakeholders to collectively act to create public value. Self-organizing is a process that unites multiple actors towards a shared objective through collective action, and is both costly and knowledge intensive. Despite evidence that this form of organizing can create considerable value, however, most communities do not self-organize. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an exploratory analysis of why some communities self-organize in response to collective problems and others do not. We argue that the regional environment shapes the expected costs and benefits of self-organizing. Specifically, more salient problems and fewer existing organizations create additional demand for self-organizing, whereas support from organizations operating at higher hierarchical levels and proximity to other community initiatives that can be replicated lower the costs associated with self-organizing. We test our theory with an original longitudinal dataset of community-level fire prevention initiatives in California from 2002 – 2018. Results suggest that communities are more likely to self-organize when a problem is more salient, when there are fewer civic organizations that can function as a substitute for collective action, when there are more layers of organizations that support collective action, and when they can replicate the actions of other communities. These findings, though only a start to understanding how communities self-organize, have important implications for identifying sustainable local solutions to complex social issues.
Enabling Systemic Search Through Interorganizational Hybridity
Roger Koppl, Devin Stein, Maria Minniti
Abstract: We expand upon existing conceptions of interorganizational hybridity by arguing that when social problems are complex, the multitude of tasks needed to address them can be identified only through search by a heterogeneous set of searchers. In the context of complex social issues, organizations are the searchers who identify the tasks for which they have an “embedded comparative advantage,” thereby contributing to determining an appropriate partition of tasks. The set of organizations acting on the problem and the partition of tasks across them constitutes the organizational mix. The organizational mix creates interorganizational hybridity because it includes organizations of different types. Our theory of the organizational mix moves beyond hybridity in one or a few organizations to system-wide interorganizational hybridity. It also broadens the unit of analysis from social enterprises to include for-profit, non-profit, and public organizational forms arrayed in a hierarchy that supports multi-level system processes.