New Papers and an Introduction to Data Visualization
Cake, trees, and cutting-edge GIF graphics
Welcome to the new week, everyone. If you’re like me, you’re ready for spring. Evidently it’s been the coldest winter in the U.S. in for at least a decade, but there’s hope on the horizon. The first crocuses pushed up through the leaf litter this weekend here in St. Louis, so the first magnolia blooms are likely not far behind. Today we share with you four forthcoming papers from authors across three continents and multiple fields. The topic range is a nice representation of our breadth, including work-life balance, social movements and innovation, strategic problem formulation, and contract framing and supplier learning. So check out these and other new papers in our Articles in Advance and Just Accepted pages.
Following the papers is another guest column by the illustrious John-Paul (JP) Ferguson, who is kicking off an intermittent series on the visualization of data and results. He will be tackling a variety of issues on this in the future, and would love your input on which to take on first. As you’ll see, JP has a unique background that allows him to approach visualization from multiple viewpoints. We hope you enjoy all this content at the start of your week!
-Lamar
Newly Accepted Papers:
Kate P. Zipay, Jessica Rodell
Amid increasing work demands and a growing emphasis on leisure, employees are striving to thrive without sacrificing free time. One approach is rethinking how they spend leisure. This research explores a blended option of work and leisure, adopting an agentic and future-oriented perspective on the work–nonwork interface, examining leisure-work synergizing as a unique practice. The study asks, “How and why might blending work into leisure (i.e., leisure–work synergizing) fuel thriving, and why might it not?” Findings suggest that integrating work into leisure to build competencies inspires thriving through self-assurance, especially for those who prefer blending work and life. Rather than focusing on passive spillover, this research highlights intentional, synergistic practices, elevating leisure’s relevance to work. Blending work into leisure time to pursue something “not quite leisure and not quite work” can have surprising benefits for experiencing thriving at work.
How Social Movements Catalyze Firm Innovation
Kate Odziemkowska, Yiying Zhu
How do firms respond to environmental activism? This study reveals that activist pressure on firms over climate issues spurs an increase in climate-related innovation, often aimed at safeguarding financial performance. However, when firms collaborate with environmental activists, they achieve more novel climate-related innovations that leverage previously unexplored knowledge. By engaging with activists, firms not only address external criticisms but also learn new solutions to combat climate change, expanding their innovative capabilities in tackling environmental challenges.
Contract Frames and Supplier Learning
Yi Zheng, Qiong Wang, Xiaoyan Wang, Zhilin Yang
The way contracts are written—emphasizing either opportunities for growth ("promotion-focused") or risk avoidance ("prevention-focused")—shapes how suppliers behave. Specifically, how does contract framing—whether promotion- or prevention-focused—affect supplier learning activities (exploration and exploitation) in buyer-supplier relationships, and what are the implications for organizational outcomes and contract design? We find that promotion-focused contract framing encourages suppliers to explore new ideas and innovate, while prevention-focused contract framing reduces suppliers’ exploitation learning activities (e.g., refining existing processes). Additionally, we find that the composition and clustering of contract framing within a portfolio affect supplier learning activities. These results underscore the critical role of contract framing in shaping supplier behavior and, ultimately, the success of buyer-supplier relationships.
Chan Hyung Park, Markus Baer, Jackson Nickerson
How do you solve some of the more challenging problems your organization faces? Research indicates that big-picture, abstract thinking helps managers explore underlying causes more flexibly, but it can also lead to overlooking key symptoms that do not fit existing frameworks but are the building blocks for managers to build theories about causes. Drawing on construal level theory, we propose a construal level shift model. The model proposes that managers benefit from first adopting concrete thinking when framing strategic problems to identify all relevant symptoms and then adopting abstract thinking to combine these symptoms flexibly to theorize more comprehensively about the underlying causes. We find support for the model across three studies.
Visualize Your Data and Results!
-J.P. Ferguson
...In which an editor bites off more than he can chew
Recently, the editorial team at Organization Science polled readers of this Substack about topics you’d like to see addressed. The title of this post, exclamation point and all, was a top choice. At our editorial meeting during AOM in Chicago, I offered to write on this.
And I have been writing, on and off, for a month. The problem, perhaps obvious in retrospect, is that this is too big a topic for a single post! Rather than bin the idea, I pitched that we should do a series of posts. This would let us take different parts of the subject more seriously, learn which topics are most interesting to our readers, hear suggestions, and generally keep those clicks and engagement rolling in.
Why am I writing this? I’m never going to write a book about data visualization, because Kieran Healy already wrote a good one, and I can’t claim to be a wizard at visualization in R or Python. If you ask my past or present graduate students, they’ll tell you I’m still hopelessly stuck in Stata. (Or they would tell you that, if they could stop staring at the horizon, slowly shaking their heads, and sighing in exasperation.)
I do have some credentials to helm such a series, though. Rarely among social scientists, I’ve also been involved in publishing, on and off, for more than thirty years. I started out rolling glue onto column-inches and reading wide-eyed articles about new desktop-publishing software like QuarkXPress. (Such a shame, we thought, that Quark was only available on the Macintosh, since Apple was clearly going to go out of business soon!) I submitted my first article to a journal by mailing three hard copies and pre-stamped envelopes to their offices. A quarter-century ago I was the managing editor of a journal on the production side, and had to learn about topics like leading, kerning, and halftoning the hard way.
My point is that, in addition modern data visualization, I’ve experienced how print publishing shaped the use of graphics in our field, and I can talk about the strange influences it still has today.
For our field’s approach to graphics is weird right now. No one blinks if you put four tables chock full of model results in your article, but if you plot and compare effects and put your tables in an appendix, some people think you're hiding something. The irony is that the traditional results table hides so much. Some people can look at a few main effects and interaction terms in a non-linear model and extrapolate to heterogeneous effects across a sample; but I think I’m reasonably smart, and I’m definitely not one of them.
How did the table of regression results get so entrenched? The biggest reason is the dead weight of inertia: you can always play it safe by aping the articles you cite. But those older articles were heavily constrained by the demands of print publication, especially by the dictum that your whole article—text, figures, tables, appendices, and all—should fill 30 or fewer typed pages. Today, almost none of us read the bound editions of journals, Organization Science included. I feel a twinge of guilt even printing something I’m going to read once then probably bin. Meanwhile, the online appendix is well on its way to becoming a de facto requirement for many articles.1 We can indulge our graphomania with endless results and robustness checks in such appendices, where the curious reader can consult them, and meanwhile we can reduce the walls of tables in our articles. This prompts the question: what should we include instead?
I give it away in the title: graphics. Wherever possible, we should try to show our readers the important results.
This will not be a series about the fundamentals of data visualization. Sources for this have exploded in recent years, and the technological state of the art is a fast-moving target. Rather than focus on the grammar of graphics, as it were, I hope to concentrate on how we use the graphics we create. What should we display, and why? Is there room for new and different visualizations that can replace some of our defaults? What are the norms for graphics in a journal like Organization Science, and how should those change?
I have a few posts in this series sketched out:
I’ve listed them as a poll because I’d really like to hear from you, our readers, about what you’d like to see next. Wherever possible, I want to highlight examples we have published that suggest ways we can go forward. I also reserve the right to suggest improvements to graphics we’ve published—always with the understanding that we still found the article’s contribution worth publishing!
I look forward to having a conversation about this. If your graduate education was anything like mine, you were never really taught how to make or think about data visualization. My impression is that this journal’s readers and contributors collectively hold a vast reservoir of knowledge about the subject, but that said knowledge stagnates in a thousand pools of working groups and research labs. Let’s open the flood gates!
I recently submitted a manuscript where I specified that results using alternative matching thresholds were available on request. Reviewer 3 had no hesitation writing, “Report the results from alternative match thresholds in the online appendix. No need for ‘results available on request’ anymore.”
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