Martina Montauti
Title
Prof. PhD
Last Name
Montauti
First name
Martina
Email
martina.montauti@unisg.ch
9 results
Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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Item type:Publication, Cognitive Economy and Product CategorizationIn mediated markets, the categorization of products by mediators is critical to efficient interaction between producers and consumers. As organizational research tends to focus on the consequences of categorization rather than its antecedents, however, we know relatively little about why mediators assign one category label or another to a product. In this study, we argue that two informational properties of labels, specificity and distinctiveness, determine the outcomes of mediators’ categorization decisions. Our analysis of product categorization decisions made by members of an online music community, 2000–2020, supports this argument. We find that a label’s odds of being assigned to a product increase (a) if this label encodes information that is neither too similar nor too different from that which is encoded by a superordinate label, that is, it has moderate specificity; and (b) if it encodes information that differs as much as possible from that which is encoded by horizontally related labels, that is, it has maximal distinctiveness. These findings persist after controlling for other possible determinants of mediators’ categorization decisions, including producers’ claims to labels, products’ typicality, and mediators’ expertise.Type:journal articleJournal:Organization ScienceVolume:35Issue:5Scopus© Citations 2 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Someone Else to Blame: The Effectiveness of Egocentric and Alter-Centric Impression Management Tactics in the US Food Retail IndustryWe investigate the effectiveness of two types of impression management tactics implemented around negative attributes: egocentric (claiming the absence or low presence of a negative attribute in a focal organization) and alter-centric tactics (claiming the greater presence of a negative attribute in an organization’s competitor). We claim that the effectiveness of each tactic depends on the risk of audiences’ skepticism, which stems from the incongruence between the information conveyed in the tactic and audiences’ default expectations about the presence of the attribute among members of a given market segment. Audiences expect a conspicuous presence of the attribute, we propose, the more stakeholders contest a market segment for that very attribute. Thus, we advance that egocentric (alter-centric) tactics are less likely to be effective for contested (uncontested) attributes because the information conveyed in such tactics clashes with audiences’ default expectations, triggering skepticism. We find support for our predictions looking at the impact of nutrient content claims on product sales in the U.S. food retail industry between 2006 and 2015.Type:journal articleJournal:Organization ScienceVolume:34Issue:3Scopus© Citations 6 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Bringing the organization back in: Flexing structural responses to competing logics in budgeting(2020-01) ;Lepori, BenedettoThis paper aims to understand the mechanisms through which organizations, over time, manage competing logics within budgeting practices. We draw insights from new institutional studies in accountingto highlight the importance of practice-level negotiations for managing institutional conflicts, but we complement them with a focus on the organizational embeddedness of hybrid practices from organizational studies in accounting. More specifically, we build on the notion of ‘structured flexibility,’ according to which organizational structures frame and enable negotiations on hybrid practices, as critical to manage complexity in face of changing environmental conditions. We thus show how ‘structured flexibility’ is made possible by a number of characteristics of decision-making that have been widely studied by the behavioral theory of the firm, i.e. the decomposition of decision-making processes, the framing of local negotiations and the search for satisficing solutions. Our findings from a case study of a public university facing the conflict between a professional and a managerial logic shed light on how organizations may actively manage institutional complexity over time and suggest specific interventions to transform complexity into a source of strategic advantage.Type:journal articleJournal:Accounting, Organizations and SocietyVolume:80Scopus© Citations 48 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Anchors in Rough Seas: Understanding Category Spanning as a Source of Market CoordinationPrior research has deemed products that span market categories a source of cognitive and institutional disruption. Portraying spanning products as purely disruptive elements, however, does not consider their large presence in markets and, consequently, the fact that producers and consumers continue to coordinate their activities on established categories despite pervasive spanning. Our paper addresses this gap by focusing on commercial success as an important condition under which spanning products, rather than being a source of disruption, sustain market coordination. From the producer side, an increasing number of commercially successful products spanning a focal category stimulates mimicry. From the consumer side, this mimicry, net of the overall level of spanning observed in the category, improves consensus. We test these arguments by focusing on the styles that map electronic music as the established categories of a market. Empirical analyses lend support to our hypotheses.Type:journal articleJournal:Journal of Management StudiesVolume:56Issue:4Scopus© Citations 9 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Charting the Territory: Recombination as a Source of Uncertainty for Potential EntrantsIn this paper, we conceptualize categories as regions of a cognitive map that structure the market and guide the investment decisions of potential entrants—i.e., of new and established organizations. We advance that, as a category appears altered via incumbents’ acts of recombination, potential entrants face market-specific uncertainty and are discouraged to invest in that category. These negative effects of recombination on market entries are, however, mitigated at increasing values of category status. We test our arguments in the market for electronic music. The analyses of product and organizational entries in music styles between 1978 and 2011 lend support to our arguments.Type:journal articleJournal:Organization ScienceVolume:27Issue:4Scopus© Citations 33 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, European Universities as Complete Organizations? Understanding Identity, Hierarchy and Rationality in Public Organizations(Taylor & Francis, 2014-07-28) ;Seeber, Marco ;Lepori, Benedetto; ;Enders, Jürgende Boer, HarryThis article investigates the form of European universities to determine the extent to which they resemble the characteristics of complete organizations and whether the forms are associated with modernization policy pressure, national institutional frames and organizational characteristics. An original data set of twenty-six universities from eight countries was used. Specialist universities have a stronger identity, whereas the level of hierarchy and rationality is clearly associated with the intensity of modernization policies. At the same time, evidence suggests limitations for universities to become complete, as mechanisms allowing the development of some dimensions seemingly constrain the capability to develop others.Type:journal articleJournal:Public Management ReviewVolume:17Issue:10Scopus© Citations 161 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Budgetary allocation and organizational characteristics of higher education institutions: a review of existing studies and a framework for future research(Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2012-10-18) ;Lepori, Benedetto ;Usher, JohnBudgeting—i.e. the decision on the level of expenditures and on the repartition of resources among organizational subunits—can be conceived as a critical organizational process, which is closely related to key choices concerning strategic priorities and to resources acquisition strategies. Overall, it is increasingly being recognized as one of the central places where steering and governance take place, and where higher education institutions are supposed to take initiative. Accordingly, this paper pursues two aims: first, it provides a review of existing studies about budgeting in higher education, according to the literature on changes in its organizational characteristics, and with a focus on approaches from Organizational Theory and Sociology. Second, it identifies some future directions of research, thus easing the integration of these two bodies of literature. This integration may help in providing researchers with a deeper understanding of the current functioning of budgeting processes, their variations across higher education institutions and countries, as well as their implications for organizational behavior.Type:journal articleJournal:Higher EducationVolume:65Issue:1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, The Role of Cognitive Opportunity Structures in Market Contestation(2022) ;Diestre, LuisBy adopting a behavioral perspective on stakeholder activism, our proposal investigates the biases that the cognitive structure of a market may induce into the stakeholders’ propensity to attack a specific segment of that market. We claim that whether stakeholders perceive a focal segment to exhibit a disproportionate level of negative attributes, and therefore decide that it deserves to become a target of contestation, crucially depends on the benchmark that is used to compare with the focal segment. We test our theory in the US food retail industry and examine the extent of contestation in 35 food categories between 2006 and 2015. Our preliminary results support the argument that contestation emerges as the result of a boundedly rather than perfectly rational decision making process.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Sub-theme 45: Market Spaces, Agency, and Creative Rationality(2024-07-04); ;Patvardhan, ShubhaPorac, JosephThe prevailing paradigm of managerial choice and decision-making – from both the objectivist behavioral school and the interpretivist sensemaking perspectives – is of a decision-making process laden with cognitive myopia and biases due to bounded rationality (Simon, 1947; Cyert & March, 1963); and post-hoc meaning-making due to retrospective sensemaking (Weick, 1979). Over the years, scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with this prevailing paradigm as it casts managers as backward-looking (Gavetti et. al., 2012) and predominantly “passive” with regards to the environment (Farjoun, 2008) – a concern shared by fields like psychology as well (Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013). Our view is that whereas prevailing perspectives capture default/average managerial behavior, they do not account for the type of forward-looking processes associated with leadership (March, 2009). Perhaps as a consequence, in the past decade, scholars have initiated studies on the origins of great (Gavetti & Porac, 2018), shaping-oriented (Pontikes & Rindova, 2020), value-creating (Felin & Zenger, 2017), and novel strategies (Cattani, Deichmann, & Ferriani, 2022). These efforts have shed light on a wide range of forward-looking cognitive processes–problem formulation (Bharadwaj, Mahoney, & Nickerson, 2022), theorizing (Felin & Zenger, 2017), ideals (Schilling, 2018), imagination (e.g., Patvardhan and Ramachandran, 2020; Beckert, 2022; Thompson & Byrne, 2022; Rindova & Martins, 2022), design-thinking (Liedtka, 2000; Rindova & Martins, 2021) and so on. Collectively, the above insights on the constructive aspects of managerial agency point to a fundamental shift in the kind of rationality associated with decision-making – from formal rationality that is inevitably bounded (Simon, 1955) and “adaptive” rationality (Gigernzer, 2001), to creative rationality (Forest, 2009; Patvardhan, 2014; Rindova & Martins, 2021). By creative rationality, we refer to a general approach to decision-making where the criterion for rationality is novelty, rather than efficiency (“formal rationality”) or adaptation (“adaptive rationality”). Whereas in formal rationality, decision-makers evaluate given alternatives by analyzing and comparing expected outcomes and make choices that align with prevailing norms; In creative rationality, decision-makers actively generate new alternatives, often disrupting the prevailing logic, enabling unconventional and transformative solutions. We invite scholars studying forward-looking phenomena (innovation, creativity, market creation, industry formation, entrepreneurship, design thinking, and so on) across domains (e.g., organization theory, organizational behavior, strategic management, entrepreneurship), and theoretical perspectives (e.g., evolutionary theory, behavioral school, sensemaking) to submit original paper proposals that throw light on elements of a framework of creative rationality – including the ontology, motivation, heuristics, cognition, and emotion, associated with such a form of rationality. Related questions include: Cognitive Processes: What cognitive processes underlie activities such as path creation, opportunity creation, design thinking, creativity, and innovation? How do individuals think, reason, and problem-solve when embracing creative rationality? Motivation for Novelty: What motivates individuals and organizations to pursue novelty and engage in creative and innovative endeavors? Sources of Novelty: Where do novel ideas come from? What are the sources of novelty that fuel creative rationality? Heuristics: What heuristics or mental shortcuts are involved in the generation of creative and innovative solutions? How do decision-makers navigate the complexity of creative processes? Emotional Processes: What emotional factors are associated with innovation and creation? How do emotions impact the decision-making process in the pursuit of novelty? Risk Assessment: How do innovators understand and assess risk when venturing into uncharted territory? What strategies do they employ to manage uncertainty while pursuing creative rationality?Type:conference contribution