Okay, welcome everybody to the next episode of The Academy of Management origin series. I'm excited to be part of this renewed season as we ramp up again with interviewing authors of some of the sort of Cutting Edge ideas that are being put out there in Academy of Management Review. And this paper that we're going to discuss today, as I was reflecting on it, has it all. It's got really good examples, it's got multiple kinds of theorizing, it's got some cross-disciplinary incorporation of ideas from other disciplines, and really tackles something I think most of us see often and almost all the time, but maybe don't pay as much attention to it as we might have liked. So, the paper's title is Getting Away with It or Not: The Social Control of Organizational Deviance. And to talk about this paper, we've got the three co-authors with us: Alessandro P. Piza, Patrick Bergerman, and Wesley Helms. And so, I'm going to just start off just by asking the three of

you to briefly introduce yourselves and correct any of my mistaken pronunciations if that's the case, and then we'll get into some of what this paper's about and the backstory to writing this paper. So Alexandra, let's start with you. All right, thank you, Greg. So my name is Alexandro Piaza. I am currently an assistant professor of strategy at the Jones School of Business at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Broadly, my work is in organizational theory, where I have looked at topics like social evaluations, stigma, social control, and social movement. Awesome, thank you. What about you, Patrick? Uh, my name is Patrick Bergman. I'm an assistant professor in organization and management at the University of California, Irvine. Uh, and my research, it kind of is at the border, or the cross-linkages between organizational theory and sociology, and my main topic of focus is whistleblowing and social control. Thank you. Awesome. Where what about you? Yeah, I'm West Helms. I am an associate professor of strategic management at Brock University within the

Goodman School of Business. Uh, yeah, I mean, my research is definitely OT and sort of focused upon stigma and largely how marginalized populations strategize to uh, to succeed. Awesome, thank you. Um, so before we dive into the paper and I ask for a little bit of an essence of what the paper's about, tell us about the connection between the three of you. You're obviously in different parts of the country at this point in time. What's the backstory to how you connected? I think I was the social connector here, wasn't I? Yeah, so I think I have been active in sort of the stigma and misconduct space for a while now, and actually W and I met, I think, within the context of the stigma PDW at AOM in what we maybe now a decade ago, I want to say. Anyway, a very long time, whereas Patrick and I met when we were both at Columbia, I as a doctoral student and Patrick doing a postdoc, also almost a decade ago. Also almost a decade ago, boy. So yeah, so I think this was born out of

conversations that we had over the years, and probably also like a little bit of frustration that I had with the kind of Mantra that is often given in Silicon Valley of like, you know, move fast and break things, right? That is often given as something you must do really right, whereas my stance was always, well, if you do, you know, very bad things can happen to you or not, right? Or sometimes good things can happen. And so, I think that was in many ways the rationale that brought us to explore this specific topic, at least on my end of thanks. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, it's good to recognize that, number one, Academy of management conferences and the people we meet can often lead to fruitful things, even if it's quite a long way down the line. And just to, you know, I think you're tackling a very, very interesting topic here. So, just a reminder to our listeners, the title of the paper is Getting Away with It or Not in

parenthesis the social control of organizational deviance. So, there's quite a lot in that title. Getting away with it or not, um, which you've sort of started to allude to, Alessandro, and then you use this term social control of organizational deviance, which is sort of drawing on a long, rich literature. Um, so give us a little bit of a sense of um, just what this paper is about at a high level without going through all the nuance detail, but just um, at a high level what the paper's about. You guys want to give it a shot, or should I go ahead, Alessandro? All right, fine. So, I guess um, you know, we know that organizations routinely break laws and norms, right, and often they are celebrated for doing so, right? So, we kind of saw the headlines that were often in the press about Uber, right, around Airbnb, and how they essentially like flouted kind of the existing legal and normative environment, right? And so, there is a sense that doing so can pay off.

Right, but at the same time, we know that this is ultimately deviant and counternormative behavior, right? And so, this tends to be often associated with, you know, various social control agents like stepping in, like, you know, government actors, competitors, regulators, and the like, and occasionally punishing organizations, if you will, right? So, I guess what motivated me personally in thinking about this was how can organizations, if you will, walk this tightrope, right, of kind of going beyond what the legal environment allows for, often trying to innovate and do new things in the process, right, right, while at the same time navigating the possibility they could be sanctioned and sometimes even sanctioned out of existence, right, shut down. Um, to me, that is truly the essence of the paper. I don't know if you guys want to chime in and say more. Well, I'd love to hear just in terms of your own particular backgrounds, what are some of the connections between sort of the stuff you might have studied in the past, the sort of disciplinary backgrounds that you come

from and and how it infuses into this paper and how the questions become interesting. I think each of us can speak to this, right? So, because we all bring something to the paper. So, in the past, I studied primarily stigma, stigma, and scandals, right? And so, for example, I have studied the sex abuse scandal in the US Catholic Church. I have studied the stigma targeting nuclear power. I have studied the stigma targeting abortion clinics more recently, right? And I feel I have brought all of these things to the paper. W and Patrick, well, it's okay if I go, Patrick? Yeah, of course. Uh, yeah, no, I'm so. I mean, my background is very similar to Alessandro's. Uh, is, you know, I studied practices that were considered deviant and succeeded otherwise in spite of it, in spite of, you know, being called illegal, in spite of being counternormative and evil. Uh, know practices like mixed martial arts. Um, and I just was sort of, I've always been

fascinated as to, you know, uh, as to how those processes sort of unveil themselves over time, um, and the other sort of thing that's really sort of become apparent is, is when I was an undergrad. I, I worked, uh, thinking maybe of going to LA Law School within, in, within the Attorney General's office, uh, which profoundly shaped the way that I viewed, uh, the court system and, uh, the justice system in general, in their capacity to, to punish firms, and how and why they chose to punish firms, uh, that deeply shaped my, my perspective, uh, and has always shaped my perspective in organizational theory. Go for it, Patrick, there. And, and for me, I would say the bulk of my work is focused on understanding responses to deviant. So, you know, what happens when, when, when deviant occurs, and so, you know, topic topics such as, as my work on whistleblowing, it's really looking at how do people respond, right? And, and so this, this project, you know, this was a really interesting opportunity for me to, to

keep thinking about these same topics, but also to expand more at the organizational level. So, not individuals doing, you know, acting and acting deviant in some way, but also organizations. And you, what's thetically awesome? So, um, um, it's sort of you've pulled together or or or or at least you've referred to in your the answer your prior question that um, certainly alesandro and you, where you've prior to this been embedded in or or gotten sort of focused on sort of these specific instances of stigma deviant um, and and how they might or might not be punished, whether it's mixed martial arts or the Catholic church and and so on um. And now, what prompted you to sort of say, Well, we need to step back and think about this across multiple different instances and abstract up to the level of writing theory as opposed to going down and trying to understand these things at a more um uh empirical or or grounded in the data level um. What was sort of the motivation for now saying

Okay, it's time for an AMR paper or a conceptual paper on this topic. Um, I think on my end, the timing felt right because I felt, you know, I had been tackling a number of empirical projects in this domain for a number of years when work began on this page. And I actually, you know, traced back in our shared folder, and I saw that we began discussing this sometime in 2019. So, you know, these processes, these papers have a little bit of a maturation period, if you will, right? So, but for me, you know, writing Theory, you know, felt right not only because I had never written an AMR piece before, and I really wanted to give it a shot, but also because at that point, it was a way for me to try and go beyond, like, the specifics of the various empirical settings that I had looked at, which at that point were already quite varied, and kind of figure out, like, well, you know, can I really distill this right and turn it into something that is more

structured that kind of goes beyond the empirical setting, and that hopefully, you know, other people can use then irrespective of what their setting, um, may be like. So what, so what, what did the process look like? It sounded, Alexandre, like you were the broker, um, and, uh, the sort of filling the structural hole, if you will, um, in this team, and, um, uh, what, what did it look like? Did you just reach out and say, I think we should write a theory paper on this? Were you, were you, were you throwing ideas around at a conference? I mean, what, what did the actual connection process look like that led to this then being a project that the three of you were working on? You guys got to help me out here because I, I'm not sure exactly how it's, I, with that, I do actually have a recollection of it. I mean, it was actually like the prior Boston. I mean, for my vantage point, was, was Alexander and I had lunch at, in Italy, in Boston. That's right, and we just, we kind of had a gripe session. We're

just like you know you know ultimately like you know like there's no theory that really takes a deviant perspective of it. I think honestly like at least from my vant because I think we all three of us like Don Black's work Donald Black's work and I think that that at least for me that was the The Catalyst. It was like oh you've read Donald Black's work and and as soon as I heard that I was like oh so Donald black is a is a legal scholar out of I think the university Virginia who um has done a lot of work on social control tends to treat as a dependent variable but just very different way of looking at um uh social control at the individual level because he talks about collectives and groups and it was just for me that was a catalyst that was that's my memory of when I got thinking about we need to you know maybe write a theory paper on this. The two very important things I just want to double click on what you've said there because I think they're important for our

listeners, number one, a gripe session with other scholars can often lead to useful insights, especially if you feel yourself getting worked up about this. If you get a sense there's something that hasn't been worked out properly or doesn't make sense or hasn't had enough attention, um, I think paying attention to both those emotions and the insights that come from that kind of gripe session can be very valuable. And the second is uncovering someone else's POS, often from another domain or writing in another area where there's some kind of, uh, it sort of speaks to you, and you find other people who that person's work speaks to can often be, I think, quite a productive launching-off point. And so, I was obviously not aware of Donald Black's work or of your connection with prior to this, but that does make a lot of sense to me. So, very interesting. May I add to this? Yeah, go ahead. Also, you know, the importance of putting together a great team because, you know, I recall now that you know as

soon as you know West and in West and I had kind of zeroed in on the idea that this may take kind of a social control direction. I then seem to recall that it was me who reached out to Patrick, right, essentially thinking at the time, Well, this is sort of the best social control expert person that I know, right? And so if we really want to do this, then we're gonna need someone like him on board. And so I think at that point, despite having known each other for a very long time, we haven't really worked much together at all at that point. And so I just felt like, you know, there was some complementary knowledge there that could really be leveraged to its maximum effect. And Patrick, do you have a... Is your background associated more with a sociology background? Did you do a PhD in sociology? Because it's evident that there's someone in this paper that knows the legacy of the literature here. You're going back to, I think, 1910 at

one stage in the paper and has built up this long sort of evolution of ideas around social control. Um, yeah, it's Ross 1910 as and so. Um, is that your background? Yes, so my PhD is in sociology. Uh, and then for my own recollection of how I got involved. I mean, it's similar to what Alessandro said. We met at a, I forget what city we were in at the time. Um, but, or what place we were, but I, it was wonderful because I was in the fortunate position of, you know, I'd wanted to collaborate with Alessandro for a while. And he came to me not only wanting to collaborate, but with the question already formed, right? He already had the question. And so, of course, you know, it was a natural fit with my interest as well. So, it's very easy for me to say yes. It's a really interesting question, you know, with someone I want to work on, work with. Uh, and that's kind of how I

got involved and who would you so just taking a step back who who would you say the primary audiences for this paper are who who's the the most likely sort of set of Scholars to pick it up and and and run with it like what what what conversations or communities are you speaking primarily to. I personally think this can be a fairly broad appeal to primarily I think you know within management and organizational Theory probably Scholars of uh social evaluations stigma organizational misconduct um scandals and then you know Patrick can correct me here but I can also see this having some degree of appeal within you know folks in sort of Sociology of organizations and deviant who may care about uh this particular kind of devian and the way in which it's policed. There had been work on you know devian by organizations and social control of organizations kind of like especially in the 1970s and sort of sparsely afterwards but it's never had something. It's never been something that has had a

ton of traction. Um, I feel cool. Um, I mean, the other thing I thought about in reading it, you know, it's one of those papers I think where people will come with their own lens and see opportunity in it, and that's what we want in these kinds of papers. But as someone who studies sort of Entrepreneurship and startups, I started thinking about, you know, this paper inspires an understanding of sort of why in certain instances new Ventures get competitive Advantage from being deviant or are able to engineer New Opportunities from being deviant. And I would expect that there will be a bunch of people in the entrepreneurship space that if they pick this up and read it would say, would Inspire ideas for studying deviant, studying deviant as an advantage, appreciating who might do this, how they might do it in that startup space, because a lot of your salience examples relate back to startups, and it goes back to what you alluded to as the Silicon Valley sort of way of doing things.

fast and break things. You know, just go ahead and do whatever it is. So, I mean, as you identified correctly, right, so entrepreneurship was a big inspiration for the paper, and it's no coincidence, right, that many of the examples that we actually draw on are either startups or fairly small companies, right, because it's often them that end up doing the bulk of the type of deviant that we are interested in. Yeah, so I want to ask about sort of maybe two or three aspects of the paper, um, and just the work that went in behind those aspects of the paper. The one is you, the utilization of examples, where you find them, how you use them, what that looked like, the backend process to doing that. The second is sort of the notion of incorporating different kinds of theorizing, having both propositions and something that sort of represents a process model, and then these sort of pretty um useful tables that might be thought of as at least outlaying something of a typology, um, and often as editors.

or so on. We're sort of saying to people, Well, choose one and go with that, and yet you incorporate them. So, I want to just ask about those things. So, let's start with the examples. Um, and um, you know, as we've alluded to these very salient examples. You've already mentioned Uber, there's Airbnb, there's mixed martial arts, there's um, even more controversial ones, I think um, I was trying to remember some of them. Yeah, smart gun manufacturers, um, e-per, um, finest. So, um, really like jump-off-the-page examples. What was the process for number one identifying them, number two sort of uncovering the required information about them, and then number three using them without making it an empirical paper. Do you want to take a stab at this one, or should I go ahead? I don't want to monopolize the conversation. I feel like you two were really good about coming up with the examples, especially us. Give us your take, whiz. I mean, there, I mean, we within organizational theory, I would make the argument that there's a

there's a whole subset of organizations that we don't study, and our eyes just don't naturally go to because of the lens that we use. When you're thinking about legitimacy or you're thinking about institutionalization, you're not thinking about these other organizations that can have large societal impacts initially and can all of a sudden appear to grow out of nowhere. So, I think the reality is that there wasn't a substantial theoretical base in the social control of organizations in order to drive a lot of this home. I mean, we had to sort of go out and take a look at these unique examples, and the reality is I do have a bunch of folders and documents filled with organizations I think are just neat and would be interesting to study. So, that was, from my vantage point, one of the easier

aspects and one of the neat things, because I didn't know that in writing the paper beforehand, that we could draw so closely from these examples in order to generate Theory. And I think that's what a little bit unique about our paper. I can say two things about the examples too, which is one thing is the examples are fun, right? They make for good writing, and if deployed correctly, I think they can help kind of keep the reader hooked to the page, right? And so they do that hopefully. And on the other hand, I also think like, you know, Theory, you know, especially pure Theory, often risks like being a little dry, right? So that it's not immediately self-evident why one needs the theory or what the theory is for. And so, you know, by drawing on a fairly varied set of examples, you can actually show the reader, look, this is actually something that can help, you know, explain things that you may have heard about or things that you maybe read in the media or what have you.

Right, so in terms of the process that kind of went on sort of behind the scenes, right, as I theorized, you know, I kind of looked for examples, right, either things that I saw in the media or things that I looked up on the internet that I thought might fit, and in turn, I think the examples helped sort of spark new conversations, right, and sort of at times even take the theory in directions that we had not originally envisioned. I will also say not all the examples we collected ended up making it into the paper, so the paper actually has some fairly outrageous examples, but we actually left some out that we could have put in and didn't. So, some of the examples you've got in your secret folder were even more extreme than the ones you referred to here. Me secret folder folder. We had a classic example of rule-breaking, you know, which I don't think made it into the final paper, and it's basically this Utah-based startup that essentially sold human

breast milk, right, which a lot of people say just like, Oh, you know, it's icky, but it's not illegal to sell, right? Eventually, it was discovered that the breast milk was sourced from women in Cambodia, and so then it got shut down. Yeah, but, uh, so that is like one of the examples that I think didn't make it into the paper in the end, but we had it in the back burner. Yeah, and if I can just build on the usefulness of the examples for me, one thing it really helped to have this whole set of examples because it was a great way to check the theory that we were coming up with. You know, we come up with a theory, but then if that couldn't explain half the examples we had, then, you know, maybe the theory wasn't comprehensive enough. And so, I found that really helpful to kind of for the back and forth between the theorizing and the examples. Yeah, I mean, in the end, we're organizational and management scholars, and so we're

trying to explain and account for pragmatic things out in the world, and if the the the we're developing doesn't account for or explain those, then we're not really doing our job. And so that back and forth does seem very valuable. And um, and and and in the end, going to the point Alesandra started with, it makes for good writing and enjoyable reading. And so all of that uh, it's just a, it's just a good example of using examples effectively. What about the the not that that there's sort of quite a lot going on with the theorizing here. There's the the the figure one sort of left to right process model. There's then propositions that are accounting for certain relationships in that process model. And there's the table, I think it's table two and table three, um, almost like topologies of different forms of social control um, and different outcomes from social control um. Which one of those did you start with with and then how did they begin to incorporate with with each.

other you may not even remember, but what you can I think will be helpful. So, in fact, to prepare for this conversation, I actually went back to the original draft that we submitted, um, all the way back in 2021, right? And so, you know, that made me realize, you know, how indebted we are to the editor and to the viewers and the suggestions they made over time, right? Because in the original submission, we actually had a table of examples that is pretty similar to the one that ended up in the final version. And we have kind of a barebones, like, Theory framework that isn't really a process model because we haven't really, at the time, we had not really fleshed out many of the core pieces around separating the form of social control from the outcomes and having the distinctions between cooperativeness and formality on the one hand and accommodation and permanence on the other. So, those were things that were ultimately developed after um, getting feedback from the editor and the reviewers, especially in the first round where you know, basically

they made me realize that, you know, maybe we were onto something, but we were not quite there yet. And so, actually, just in terms of, like, you know, the mirror figures and the table, you know, there's, like, you know, day and night between the original submission and, um, the paper that ended up getting accepted in the end. I would add, though, the IAL submission had hypotheses. It did. When we resubmitted, we took out the hypotheses and we focused on a process model final submission. Just jammed it all together, and so that's why you see process and hypothesis all together. Yeah, I forgot about it. Works. It works pretty well. It works well, in my opinion. And it's a good example of saying these are not mutually necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, they can support each other quite well if you can build it up appropriately. And I think this will be an exemplar of a paper that can do that. So, so, so well done. And then, and then the table two and table three are really

explaining pieces within that that have got that have got some dimensionality to them is is that fair to say yeah because basically the process model right so in those boxes that say form of social control and outcomes right right so those are really the dimensions right According to which you can classify forms and outcomes but that actually tells you nothing about those you know what those actually look like in practice right so that the tables were added so that people could actually see you know look this is not just something abstract that we came up with like there are actual things that can happen that map onto these things yeah so for so for the sake of our listeners so if you've got low cooperativeness and low formality you're in the space of a boyot if you then shift to higher levels of in of of um uh formality you're in the space of a unilateral ex or a legislative action where someone's just imposing but and low cooperativeness and then if you go onto the high high you're

in this notion of participatory making and then you've got a variance between those so it's a 3X3 Matrix on those two dimensions and something similar on the outcome side so very interesting use of sort of typologizing different variants of both the forms of social control and the outcomes from social control yeah indeed which makes it pretty complex did you find it difficult to write everything within the sort of constraints of what are the Norms without deviating from too many Norms of an AMR article um to what extent did you have to sort of go through the pain of cutting things out or condensing things um in editing down this work to fit in with those Norms there was there was a lot it was a lot of so where we want to know about so just talk us I mean even even if it's just saying it's a lot like that's actually useful for people what was what was useful I'm sorry Alexandro uh what was what was

from you know what I need to do is I need to put the onus on Patrick and Alessandro for the confidence in which they basically took our initial work and broke it down and reassembled it in really a remarkable way. I mean, like this was not a cons. We were not conservative, and I was probably the one that was asking us to be more conservative in the process because, you know, both the process model as well as changing the forms and the integration of the two of all of it was basically reconstructed in the, I mean, I'll be honest, like the third, the last round we submitted was a very different paper than the second round, and you actually went through essentially breaking it down and reassembling it in order to meet expectations, deliver something that was sort of in compliance with what people were asking for, and it was new. It was largely Patrick and Alexander coming with really new concepts, and

that was new to the paper, as well as new theoretically. In the third round, I kind of was watching in fear and awe as they took the lead and really delivered an incredible process model. It was also difficult because, you know, at various parts through the review process, right, we got feedback from the editor along the lines of, you know, You are still trying to do too much, right? And so, this is something that I think, you know, many papers, if not most, go through, right? You know, you have this kind of like big thing, this cathedral in your head, and then you have to make it fit within the confines of a 35-page paper, and you realize you just can't do everything, right? So, in our case, I think we had a lot of ideas, for example, on, you know, the conditions under which social control agents are activated versus not, and all that stuff never made it into the paper because there was simply no room for it, right? So, we had to

basically, start the model by assuming that you know social control agents would do something and then kind of figure out, you know, what would happen from there. But we couldn't do the previous part, you know, within the confines of the paper. I see, you know, writing Theory, especially after the first draft, as like sculpture, right, where you start from like a block of marble and then theory is crafted not by adding but by actually taking stuff out, right, and that is how the statue is made. I have always believed that what you take out is more important than figuring out what to put in, almost in fact, that is a very useful, pertinent analogy because I think a lot of times you need to take stuff away in order to make sure that the essence and the salience and the nuance of what you're trying to say comes out. Um, and you still managed to leave quite a lot in. Um, one of the things you did very well, which I think is worth just noting for other people.

wanting to learn from this is, I think, and this probably comes from having to cut stuff out as you very clear up front on some of the key assumptions of what are you theorizing about and what are you excluding from your theorizing and specifying this is included but these other Notions of self-control and these other things that are um more coverts as opposed to overt or just excluded because and and so you at least carve out some of the stuff that you're not going to tackle which allows you to spend more time focused on the things that are actually Central to your the Rising so um I think that's one of the almost tactical things practical tactical things that needs to happen in order to get something that's this grand um down to a a a a reasonably digestible uh um article length um piece of work so that is absolutely right yeah and in fact you know we became very mindful of it because again we had these things which we wanted to put in and couldn't and so we kind of figured out

Well, you know, we have to explain clearly to the reader why we are not doing this right, because people have all sorts of priors coming into the paper. So, let me tell you, let us tell you why we are going here and not there. Makes a ton of sense. So, I've got two last questions I want to ask. The first, and I think we can just for both of these, circle around the group if you don't mind. So, the first is, what impact do you hope this paper will have? Like, what would be the outcome you would hope to see? And it could be a pragmatic outcome, it could be a theoretical outcome, it could be a policy outcome. What would be, what would you love to see come from this work? And then secondly, what have you learned from going through this process of conceptualizing an AMR paper, going through the review? And I want you to sort of think about the notion that you've got a PhD student.

that comes to you and thinks they've got a good idea. They want to write G to try and write it or incorporate it into an AMR paper. What would be the sort of one or two key tips you might give them based on what you've learned from this process? So let's start with where you hope the impact for this paper will be, and we'll just go down the author list. So Alesandra, start with you, then Patrick, then WIS. So my hope is that, and it's a lofty hope, right, to actually over time build a community of scholars who are people that broadly care about this, right, and care about deviance, and care about, like, you know, what happens to organizations that deviate, like, for good or bad, right? And so, you know, on that note, we, you know, the three of us with a colleague are doing a conference track at EOS next year on this, and we are hoping that, you know, more scholarly efforts will follow. I think, you know, more importantly too

right. You know, I think I hope this will bring more theoretical attention to social control in management studies because, you know, I often feel like the role of social control and social control agents is often obscure, right? So, you know, we studied stigma, and like, you know, we know that bad things often happen to stigmatized organizations, right? But they're not like struck by lightning. Uh, someone is doing those things to them, right? And generally, it's social control agents that do those things, right? So, my hope is that this will bring um some of that um going forward. Did you also want the second question or or no? No, no, no. I'll I'll come back for the second question. Give you all time to think about it. Patrick, what's your what's your take on the paper's impact, assuming Alesandro hasn't stolen all of your thunder. Um, so he he did steal a lot of it. Um, so so I guess the two perspectives that I I hope to build on or I hope this this paper builds on is one, you know, there there's been a kind

of burgeoning area of research in organizational wrongdoing, and there's just been a growing attention to that space and just not nearly as much, and not much at all, to what happens in response. And so, you know, I've looked at that more at kind of the micro level with whistleblowing on the individual, but I feel like there's a lot of opportunity for looking at social control of organizations and organizational deviants. And so, I really hope other people, you know, jump into this and really start building this space up. And then, kind of from the sociology side, a lot of the work on social control and sociology is very, very much at the macro level, and this was done, you know, back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And so, I would love for that, you know, this to help that area grow as well, and kind of return to a sociology of social control, but with more focus on individual actors, whether those are organizations or people, but you know, how they're

responding rather than this kind of high-level macro perspective. I think social control is this interesting thing that there are some fundamental elements to social control that probably never change, but then there are almost evolving sort of mechanisms, um, and evolving ways of communicating in technology that do change. And so there's this sort of, there's this sort of more stable fundamental piece, but then there's a lot of change that's, I think, happens that drive something that might have driven social control 30 years ago, no longer has any power, but something else has a whole lot of power. So as I was reading this, I was just thinking there is such richness in this notion of social control, which for the most part, we're looking over, we're ignoring. So I appreciate that you sort of allow it to reemerge here and give it some air time and some light. Whereas what about you, you know, just, I mean, I think just very similar to Al's and Patrick's comments, you know, I mean, for me as a, as

a scholar who was interested in stigma and, um, you know, determining the difference between stigma and sanctioning, um, and, you know, understanding that, you know, this role of, it's, it's not because the organization was stigmatized, it was because the organization was sanctioned and, and punished, why certain firms are punished. And I think that you're spot, that you're spot-on, um, uh, in your assessment that this is, there's a lot of richness here, um, if you, for me, it's, you know, about the social control agent, um, and whether or not a rule is enforced or not because, um, there's a lot of, I think we can make an argument that rule enforcement doesn't happen that often, um, and, and so that may explain, you know, certain changing dynamics where, you know, you know, the idea of, of why bad things happen is, is, is, is not simply, you know, that because it's not bad or because these organizations legitimate themselves, it's because, you know, they're negotiating and, and dealing with social control agents. So I, I think you

know this notion of having an alternative lens for explaining deviance, um, and perhaps one that's more deviance-focused and de and attends to, you know, the strategies of how deviant succeed. And my, my, you know, my own sort of take on is I really like the social control lens and the idea of interactions with social control agents is explaining that, uh, and providing new theoretical insights based upon that. Cool. And so let's go in the reverse direction now. So whereas I'm going to go back to you so that, uh, so that we put Alesandro under all the pressure this time around, um, uh, what do, what did you learn from this project? What advice might you give to someone else wanting to tackle writing a fairly ambitious conceptual piece? Um, you know, this for me was, it was all about the co-authors. We had the right team, uh, we had shared interest, and, and you know, you, I mean, like you have to write about, you have to be honest about what

you don't know, and you have to build people, uh, build a team around you of those scholars with skills that you don't have and knowledge that you don't have, and um, to, you know, to enable. I mean, this is really, uh, this is a team effort, and know, you know, you know, I'm, I'm by, I think I've been out longer than both of you guys by probably five years, um, and I learned just, you know, a tremendous amount from, you know, working with, with these individuals about writing theory, uh, so honestly, for me, it was, it was a really social, um, collaborative experience, and, and learning to, you know, trust, um, and, you know, trust and, and collaborate with, with people that are, that have similar interests but diverse skills than you do, so I'm just appreciative of Alisander and Patrick. Cool, yeah, that's great. Patrick, what about you? Yeah, so a couple of things. First, start with a really interesting question. I mean, I, I think that got us so far in this.

project um and and it just you know these these things take years to uh you know from start to finish, and it really I think kept us all engaged just having this this really interesting kind of tangible question to to be working with. And then the the second thing, so I showed a draft for feedback before we submitted for the first time, and the feedback this this person had, you know, one main piece of of uh, I guess, criticism or or feedback on the paper. And it was, you know, we had this really great framework and question and introduction, and and we build up the literature, but at least at that point in time, that version, the the hypothesis, that the second half the paper didn't live up to the promise of the first half. And I think it's really hard when writing Theory to not rehash old explanations for things, um, even if you're putting them in into a new context, you know, it's it's and and not come up with something that's that's kind of obvious. And so you

know if I was talking to a PhD student. I'd really push them to get to the point in their theorization where they're at something where they say, You know what, this is a new perspective, or This feels different than borrowing kind of the obvious explanations. And it took us a while to get there, but I feel like we ultimately did. And I think, you know, that's a takeaway I'm gonna take into the next Theory project I work on as well. Great boss, thanks, Alesandro. First of all, I subscribe to the points that, uh, to both points made, right? So the importance of the team and the importance of, like, you know, sort of developing nuance over time. Now, this is my first Theory paper. I hope it will not be the last. And so, I will not pretend to have mastered the craft. Uh, I think what I have learned is, you know, at the end of the day, you are still writing a 35-page manuscript, right? So you have

to think about it, you know, as a little orchard that you're tending to, right, where you know that you have to stay within those confines, and so you don't want to get lost sort of chasing every idea that comes to you, but you got to stay focused and motivated, and most of all, like, you know, being aware that it takes time. Like, so as Patrick said, like, even within those, like, relatively narrow confines, it's actually fairly tough to say something that is not obvious or just a rehashing of previous literature, right? So, giving the paper, I think, enough time to mature and, you know, being patient and trying to sort of read broadly, incorporate multiple perspectives, those are all things that can help, although I think there is no silver bullet. We got lucky this time. We'll see how next time goes. Great perspective. I'm glad you got lucky. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the paper. I think it's going to be a paper that others will enjoy reading, enjoy using in doctoral.

seminars, um, using as a basis for additional work, whether it be empirical or further theorizing. So, if you haven't seen it yet, getting away with it or not, the social control of organizational deviant. Thank you to the three of you for sharing the background to this paper and just for being willing to be so open, honest, and transparent about what went into it. Um, I think everyone will benefit from that. Thank you for having us. Thanks, Greg.

AMR Origins Series - Episode 44 - Piazza, Bergemann and Helms

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