Mmbaga, N., Lashley, K., Williams, D. & Pollock, T.G. “Hurts so good: Stigma balancing in the payday loan industry” Under Third Review at Organization Science

Abstract: Prior research on industry core stigma has examined stigma primarily as either a constraint to manage or an opportunity to leverage, but not how industries navigate the ongoing tension when stigma simultaneously creates both effects. We conducted an inductive field study of the payday lending industry to explore how stigmatized industries navigate constraints from engaging in stigmatized practices while accessing market opportunities from serving vulnerable populations. We combined grounded theory, process, and participant observation techniques to understand how this dynamic unfolded over three decades and the mechanisms driving the process. We develop a three-phase process model of stigma balancing—political and moral justification, cosmetic transformation, and constructing alternatives—showing how the industry used an evolving portfolio of leveraging and mitigating mechanisms to access market opportunities even as their stigmatized practices drew increasingly negative attention from multiple audiences. The effectiveness of stigma balancing required the industry to respond to growing audience intolerance while ensuring market access. This process of stigma balancing reveals that stigma is neither exclusively an opportunity to leverage nor a constraint to eliminate, but an ongoing tension requiring continuous management.

Kang, J., DesJardine, M. & Pollock, T.G. “Crossing the line: When activist affiliations help or harm directors’ careers” Under First Review at Organization Science

Abstract: When an accomplished individual makes a visible career choice that breaks from the norms of an elite community, does the labor market punish them, reward them, or take no notice at all? Research on corporate governance assumes punishment, holding that directors who depart from elite norms are quietly “settled up” as they are relegated to less prestigious boards. We revisit this assumption through exploring the career consequences of directors who represent activist hedge funds (AHFs), whose campaigns openly rebuke incumbent boards. Using a matched sample of AHF-sponsored and conventionally elected directors, we find the director labor market responds to AHF sponsorship not through uniform penalties, but through attributional judgments triggered by sponsor behavior, director credentials, and unusually strong—or weak—performance outcomes. Thus, the same choice can read as contamination, endorsement, or noise, depending on the context and situation. With this, we recast elite sanctioning as selective, attributional, and threshold-based, showing that whether crossing an elite boundary helps or harms a career depends on the sponsor, the director, and the outcome.

Kim, T. & Pollock, T.G. “From obscurity to celebrity: Behavioral coverage, media attention, and audience resonance” Under First Review at American Sociological Review

Abstract: We draw on the celebrity and resonance literatures to explore how unknown actors’ consistent behaviors, the media coverage they receive, and the timing of their actions affect their ability to gain celebrity. We argue that behavioral consistency helps audiences resolve interpretive puzzle of who an unknown actor is, generating the emotional resonance that produces celebrity, and the media coverage offers an alternative pathway to this interpretive closure. We explore these dynamics in the context of a celebrity certification contest, using American Idol datato explore how competitors’ song and costume choices are consistent with their initial musical genre affect their advancement in the competition, and how this depends on the media coverage they receive when it occurs. We find that the more a performer exhibited category consistency, the more successful they were in generating positive emotional attention from the audience that enhanced their advancement, and thus their celebrity. However, media visibility attenuates, and can even reverse, the effect of consistency, but only during the early phase of audiences’ exposure to the actor. Our study contributes to understanding of celebrity’s antecedents, how consistent behavior can enhance celebrity, and the importance of temporal considerations in assessing category consistency and nonconformity.

Jung, J., Pollock, T.G., Smith, A.D., & Rindova, V.P. “Cooking under pressure: Sensemaking frames, agency and decision making under uncertainty during the pandemic crisis”

Abstract: Entrepreneurs navigating prolonged uncertainty need to interpret shifting environments and decide when and how to act. Prior research emphasizes that entrepreneurs frame their situations as opportunities or threats, shaping their strategic actions. Recent research has suggested a similar distinction in explaining how firms act under uncertainty, but has drawn it with regard to entrepreneurs’ agency, defined as the willingness and ability to act despite uncertainty. We bring the two perspectives together through an inductive, longitudinal multi-case study of 14 restaurateurs responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore how sensemaking frames and entrepreneurs’ agency interact to drive different actions. Our findings reveal that even entrepreneurs employing similar sensemaking frames may act differently—ranging from taking bold strategic moves early on to cautious operational adjustments to taking no action at all—depending on their agentic stance. Also, entrepreneurs continuously recalibrate their sensemaking frames and agentic stances as uncertainty unfolds, environmental cues evolve, resources shift, and prior actions provide feedback. These ongoing changes shape their strategic or tactical actions over time. Thus, our study contributes to research on sensemaking, agency and strategic decision making under uncertainty by demonstrating how the interplay between cognitive interpretation and agentic enactment dynamically influences entrepreneurial responses under prolonged uncertainty.

Pollock, T.G., Beorchia, A., Crook, T.R. & Samba, C. “Sound and fury, signifying little? A meta-analysis assessing whether status is an accurate firm performance signal”

Abstract: Our knowledge about how status uniquely relates to firm performance is limited because scholars have not yet theorized or explored how differences in the way this social evaluation creates value can shape these outcomes. Building on theory explaining how status creates value, we meta-analyze and compare its relationship with accounting returns, market returns, and growth. We find that status has positive and similarly-sized relationships with accounting and market returns, but is not related with growth. We also find that reputation and status have super-additive, complementary firm performance effects. These results are stable across a variety of measurement and sampling distinctions.

Han, J-H, Paruchuri, S. & Pollock, T.G. “The (un)usual suspects: Status, nonconformity, and misconduct spillovers to bystanders”

Abstract: Organizational misconduct can create negative and positive spillovers to uninvolved bystander firms. We argue that the perpetrators’ and bystanders’ status and celebrity, and their distinctive sociocognitive content, influence the direction and magnitudes of misconduct spillovers by creating perceptions that the routines associated with the misconduct are systemic or isolated to the perpetrator. Bystanders’ status and celebrity create their own interpretive frames, further shaping spillovers by enhancing or reducing interpretive uncertainty depending on their congruence or incongruence with the perpetrator’s interpretive frame, and on which actor possesses which asset. Our findings based on 24,765 corporate data breach pairs in 2018 showed that bystanders’ status amplified the positive spillover from celebrity firms’ data breaches, while their celebrity attenuated the negative spillover from high-status firms’ breaches and amplified the positive spillover from celebrity firms’ breaches. We contribute to research on misconduct spillovers by offering a generalizable framework that incorporates both positive and negative spillovers, and informs the range to which spillovers occur. We contribute to the social evaluations literature by showing how actor dyads’ social approval asset combinations can generate frame (in)congruence that affects outcomes in different ways.

Deng, S., Zhang, M., Guo, N. & Pollock, T.G. “Shaking up the Matthew effect: How the Black Lives Matter movement reshaped status-based inequality among Black actors”

Abstract: Status generates cumulative advantage through self-reinforcing evaluative processes, a process known as the Matthew effect. Yet the status literature has largely treated these advantages as unconditionally durable rather than contingent on the social conditions that sustain them. We argue that major social events, such as major social movements, may weaken status-based inequality within disadvantaged groups by reducing evaluators’ reliance on status as a proxy for quality and expanding attention to previously overlooked individuals. Using a matched sample of Black and White movie actors from 2016 to 2023, we find that BLM reduced the returns to professional status among Black actors, with low-status actors capturing more new career opportunities than high status Black actors. The movement also compressed gender-based inequality within the group, as Black female actors experienced greater gains than Black male actors. Demonstrating that the Matthew effect is socially contingent rather than unconditionally durable, we discuss the implications of our findings for research on status, social movements and markets, and inequality.

Graffin, S.D. & Pollock, T.G. “The paradox of privilege: The countervailing influences of status and reputation on organizational accountability”

Abstract: Organizations are governed through a variety of formal and informal mechanisms that exert legal, political, and social control. These mechanisms create accountability in different ways. In this chapter, we focus on how two powerful social evaluations—reputation and status—can both increase and decrease organizational accountability through social control. Both reputation and status are built over time, but they accrue through different mechanisms that affect how they create value, their ongoing relationships with changes in firm performance, and their resilience to negative shocks. As a result, they can vary in the extent to which they increase or decrease organizations’ accountability to the audiences granting these different forms of social approval. Reputation is built through audiences’ rational assessments of a firm’s observable behavioral and performance patterns over time. Thus, its value derives from the “merit” of its actions. The longer and more consistent the organization’s performance, the more entrenched the reputation becomes. However, reputations are also updated when performance shifts occur, and significant performance declines or expectancy violations can result in reputation’s rapid deterioration. Status reflects an organization’s relative standing in a broader social order. It is rationally assessed by the social standing of others with whom it has relationships, and the extent to which it reflects the social order’s, or hierarchy’s, values. Thus, its value emanates from the “privilege” generated by its position in the hierarchy. Status also builds over time, in part, although not wholly, through performance; but once achieved, status positions also harden in ways that reputation does not, and can become decoupled from performance. Thus, performance changes have less effect on status than on reputation. However, to the extent that organizations engage in actions that violate the status hierarchy’s values, the expectancy violation can result in status loss. Because high-reputation and high-status organizations are expected to generate positive outcomes, they are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt when smaller negative expectancy violations occur, effectively reducing their accountability. However, high-reputation organizations are somewhat less immune than high-status organizations, although the risks to high-reputation firms are lower when they also possess high status. Conversely, when the expectancy violations are significant, they are more likely to be held to account. Further, whereas high-reputation firms are likely to be held accountable for both capability and character violations, high-status firms will be more affected by character than capability violations, and these differences will become greater the longer the organization has been deemed high status. This has implications for how firms manage their social evaluations, and the extent to which they serve as effective governance mechanisms.

Xu , J., Pollock, T.G., Lee, P.M. & Zhu, Q. “No news is good news (for startups): Local newspaper  closures and the persistence of venture capital investments in startups”

 Abstract: We examine how local newspaper closures affect venture capitalists’ likelihood of continuing to invest in startups. We argue that local newspapers act as informal monitors of startups by uncovering and aggregating geographically specific information that may not be captured in financial statements or standard management reports. When local newspapers near startups close, the information loss slows down VCs’ belief updating, making them more likely to continue investing in these startups. This effect is stronger when VC firms are geographically distant and when startups are at earlier stages, and weaker when startups have directors affiliated with VC firms who can substitute for lost local information through direct monitoring. Using a comprehensive dataset spanning 2005 to 2022, we find support for all hypotheses. Furthermore, our results are robust to instrumental variable analyses using the staggered expansion of Craigslist and to difference‑in‑differences specifications. Overall, the findings highlight the governance role of local media in private capital markets and show that local information vacuums can materially distort VC investment decisions.