In three essays, I investigate the antecedents and consequences of the firm-government revolving door, a type of employee mobility between firms and their regulators. In contrast to previous studies, which categorize the revolving door as a type of corporate political strategy, I suggest that both firms and governmental entities actively participate in the revolving door for their own strategic purposes. I argue that firms may hire former regulators in order to acquire their regulatory expertise, as well as their connections to current regulators. On the other hand, governmental entities, such as regulatory bodies, may hire individuals with regulated industry experience in order to build industry support for regulatory initiatives, as well as to learn how to regulate more effectively. Finally, as a consequence of this type of personnel movement, firms may obtain more favorable regulatory outcomes due both to the cognitive and regulatory capture of current regulators through past or (potential) future employment, respectively. Using a novel database containing career histories of all commissioners who served on 17 U.S. Independent Regulatory Commissions from 1887-2000, in Chapters II and III, I find evidence in support of firms and regulatory bodies both partaking in revolving door for their strategic ends. Furthermore, using another unique database of revolving doors between the USDA and its regulated agribiotechnology firms, in Chapter IV I find evidence for the revolving door contributing to more favorable regulatory outcomes for firms during the revolving regulators’ tenures. Thus, this project sheds light on the antecedents and the consequences of cross-sector mobility. The results of my study suggest that firms are able to skew regulatory outcomes in their favor, by using their new revolver hires to learn about, and influence the regulatory process. However, any negative consequences of such skewness may be at least partially balanced by the positive consequences of the regulatory agencies’ learning and support building with industry, which may improve regulatory quality.

In this thesis, I demonstrate that the theory and practice of contemporary institution forming, in community, business, administration and governance, are dominated by approaches that prevent us finding that which is now most urgently sought. This is an understanding of the endogenous origins and nature of social change and innovation, and the means by which it can be managed. I point directly at an alternative, provide an exposition of its potential and implications, both theoretical and applied, and propose a conceptual framework for its further application and extension. Methodologies appropriate to such a theory will include both simulation and qualitative research, in particular situated narrative. For the former, agent based simulation is most appropriate. For the latter, a 'naturalistic inquiry' method is most appropriate as it best highlights the importance of keeping track of phenomenal domain from which situations are being interpreted and explained. These combined techniques make possible a rigorous development of social theory denied where the extremes of positivism or relativism are embraced along the dimensions of the existing modernist/post-modernist divide. Agent based computational theory and method is currently dominated by cognitive and representationalist models. These are inconsistent with the assumptions necessary to bring to the fore the implications of complexity for social analysis. One of the most important contributions of this work is the development of a theory of agency consistent with that required if sources of order other than deliberate action in a boundedly rational decision space are to be considered. This is essential if the full import of complexity for understanding social dynamics is to be explored. This theory of agency takes the form of a social meta-model as a guide to future development and research. The work concludes with a brief exposition of a research program needed to advance the ideas presented. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (Social Ecology)

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, 1999. / Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-312).

This dissertation consists of three essays on regulation. In the first essay, "Firm Reputation and Screening at the Patent Office", we assert that the patent office is an important regulator, exerting influence on firm outcomes. Prior research argues that powerful groups such as top innovators are able to capture their regulators , gaining favorable treatment in return for either monetary contributions to legislators' political committees or hoped-for future employment of regulators in the firms they regulate or in the firms of their legal representatives. It is also argued that regulators face many audiences and attempt to maximize their legitimacy to political entities, legal entities, the general public and the firms affected by their regulation. This can introduce a lack of consistency in decision-making. Given the considerable power of many regulators, this has implications for both policy and firm strategy. The patent office, in particular, faces considerable uncertainty about the value of the patent rights it provides. Further, patent examiners are under pressure to grant patents quickly and have no way of permanently disposing of an application other than by granting it. We argue that patent examiners tend to look for certain signals in attempting to determine the quality of the application. We assert that the patent office's focus on helping its clients obtain intellectual property rights make their clients' prior reputations most salient. Therefore examiners tend to rely on the prominence of the applicant in the prior patent art. This can grant either a positive or negative reputation depending upon the general reputation of that field in prior patent art. We utilize a dataset of all patents granted from 2001-2003. We use examiner-added citations to prior patent art, controlling for applicant-added citations as a measure of examiner screening. We find that firm reputation for patenting influences the level of scrutiny to which a patent application is subjected. In the conclusion we discuss the implications of these findings. In the second essay, "Which drugs obtain the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision" we examine the pediatric exclusivity regulation provision. Pediatric exclusivity is designed to reward companies for conducting pediatric trials for dosage and safety with 6 months' extra monopoly on their drug. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996-2007 and drug data from the FDA, we find that companies appear to base the decision to conduct pediatric trials almost solely on the basis of current sales (and hence presumably future projected revenue). We find the threshold for a sharply increased probability of obtaining pediatric exclusivity is annual sales of $260 million in the prior year. We estimate, very conservatively, that the total liability to consumers is US$ 21 billion as of end 2007. We also find, in accordance with prior criticism, that, (barring ADHD drugs, which are marketed primarily to minors) even after controlling for the total sales, the proportion of sales to minors does not affect the probability of obtaining pediatric exclusivity. This is in concordance with regulatory capture theory which would suggest that a powerful group (i.e.. brand-name drug manufacturers ) influenced Congress to pass this legislation to procure a benefit for themselves with a not-easily perceived cost to the much more diffuse group of pharmaceutical customers who pay brand-name prices for 6 more months as a result of delayed generic entry. In the third essay "Pediatric Exclusivity - Are the intended benefits being realized?" we examine the underlying rationale for the pediatric exclusivity and test whether the intended benefits of pediatric exclusivity are being realized. The pediatric exclusivity rule is intended to provide benefits to pediatric patients by providing clinicians with label information regarding safety and dosage in pediatric populations. We test whether valuable and important information is being produced and disseminated by the clinical trials that are undertaken to gain pediatric exclusivity. We do this by examining the patterns of publication of clinical trials before and after pediatric exclusivity is obtained and by examining the patterns of prescriptions to minor patients before and after pediatric exclusivity is obtained. We find no evidence of greater dissemination of pediatric information in the peer-reviewed literature after obtaining pediatric exclusivity. We also find no evidence of changing patterns of prescriptions to minor patients after pediatric exclusivity is obtained. This leads us to question the value of the information being provided and conclude that the intended benefits of pediatric exclusivity provision are not being realized. We conclude that pediatric exclusivity legislation is an example of regulatory capture, designed primarily to increase monopoly protection of the sales of brand-name drugs without producing many tangible benefits.

Organizational participation in morally contested markets, that is, markets surrounded by controversy reflecting values-led beliefs, is an understudied topic (Zelizer, 1978, 1979; Healy, 2006; Quinn, 2008; Anteby, 2010). The extant research has tended to focus on the genesis and evolution of contestation toward certain categories of trades, to the relative neglect of attention toward the responses of organizations, to such contestations. Yet the market exchange outcomes of organizations hinge not only upon social relations (Granovetter, 1985; Uzzi 1996, 1997) and power distribution (Blau, 1964; Emerson, 1976) but also upon the legitimacy benefit that exchange might render (Jensen, 2006). In deciding whether and how to engage in markets associated with debated legitimacy, organizations establish and express their meaning, status and identity (Phillips and Owens, 2004; Jensen, 2010). Particularly in markets that are morally contested, firms inevitably balance two competing sources of institutional demands: the rationale for economic efficiency, and the defense of values and norms. In weighing and negotiating these interests, how do firms behave and choose in response to institutional and organizational factors? Meanwhile, organizations on either side of the market act as critical forces to enhance or challenge a market's capacity to survive (Fligstein and Dauter, 2007; King and Pearce, 2011); given this, how do the organizational participation decisions matter for the institutionalization of a new, morally convicted market as a whole? This dissertation studies organizations as customers, by looking at factors that facilitate or impede their purchasing decisions in morally contested markets. I examine firms' differing decisions toward participation in one such market, the carbon credit trade, across several countries displaying varying cultural attitudes. I study these choices at the nascent, unstable stage, before the carbon market has become institutionalized as a viable solution strategy responding to global environmental challenges. I argue that firms construct the proper scope of commercial activity via channels including managers' individual mental accounting as well as social norms and law, and that all channels can be understood as culturally dependent. Building upon cross-national qualitative comparative work of morally contested markets (Zelizer, 1979), I empirically link market participation patterns to dissimilarities originated from the various national institutional environments surrounding firms (Healy, 2006). I look at organizational structural and strategic factors that affect firms' participation in morally contested markets, in order to understand how cultural norms matter for firms' choices. The prevailing norms and values in the country where a firm operates may be deemed to matter, either because of a firm's reputational concerns vis-à-vis its customers; or because of firm internal rationales, e.g. the top management also shares those values, or the firm wants to appeal to current or potential employees who share those values. By looking at whether cultural values matter more for firms that are more retail oriented, or are more inclined to retain employees, or have a chief executive officer with educational background in economics, I disentangle the internal and external mechanisms. The empirical context for understanding the organizational and institutional dynamism of morally contested markets is the carbon market. By facilitating the exchange of carbon credits, the carbon market authorizes an entity to achieve greenhouse gas reduction goals by exchanging part of its obligation with another party, which is believed to both lower the costs of mitigation and increase the efficiency of emission reductions (Sandor, Walsh and Marques, 2002; Stern, 2006). Since its debut in 2005, however, the idea of carbon trading has been much contested, based on claims that the environment is a sacred good and that providing a market for pollution allows the wealthy to evade their responsibilities (Caney and Hepburn, 2011). The carbon market, then, offers a fitting setting for my study in three ways: First, the market prompts firms to make a distinct choice, between efficiency and norm. Firms reducing their carbon outputs choose either to trade on-market, which is a more efficient solution but violates the cultural notion of a "non-tradeable" environment, or to reduce in-house, which is perceived as a less tainted way of emission abatement, yet a more costly one. Second, the carbon market purports to respond to the issues of global warming and climate change, which has become increasingly recognized as a global priority. Examining the carbon market can elucidate how organizations across nations differ their choices on carbon trading, based on the given organization's headquartered country values and norms. Third, this carbon market allows for directly examining the values effect, by offering a relatively clean-cut measure for the efficiency gains that the market mechanism would provide. My results suggest evidence of a strong cultural norm effect that can indicate whether firms are likely, or not likely, to engage in the carbon credit market. Firms located in countries where people more frequently voice skepticism toward market mechanisms in environmental policy are less likely to engage in the carbon credit market. The channel is specific to cultural norms about environmental-economic trade-offs and not to norms about environmental concerns in general. Moreover, by looking at firm-level factors such as consumer orientation, CEO educational background, and sector-level factors such as unemployment rate, I highlight the mechanisms through which cultural values are demonstrated. The result suggests that for firms' choices, cultural values and norms do matter, for reasons based in rationales that are both internal and external. Beyond illuminating such a values effect that influences the choices firms make, this work reveals the nuanced ways in which values-based beliefs impact corporate behavior by examining the interplay between cultural norms and countervailing sources of legitimacy, namely, regulatory forces as well as other firms' decisions or experiences. The results suggest that while firms regulated to reduce emissions have a higher rate of carbon market participation, the rate difference between regulated and unregulated firms is evidently larger in countries where the idea of using the market to deal with environment problems is perceived as less acceptable. In the meantime, there is little to no evidence that similar or connected organizations' decisions toward participation in the contested market engenders a positive spillover that reinforces the values effect. Both results hint at the unique properties of the values effect as it tends to separates "good" firms from "bad" firms, according with the extent to which corporate behaviors conform to the moral ideals. My investigation of the carbon market among European firms contributes to the institutional literature by highlighting the importance of specific national institutions in particular organizational domains (Vasudeva, Spencer and Teegen, 2012) as well as interrelatedness between institutional theory and strategic perspectives in the context of firm market participation decisions (Oliver, 1991). By assessing the effect of national cultural values in legitimating these nascent markets while taking into account the opportunity cost of not using the market, my dissertation sheds light on some of the conditions that determine when and how much concerns about legitimacy, controlling for efficiency, loom large in market behaviors, as well as which organizational and institutional mechanisms are involved. This dissertation also contributes a new framework for thinking about morally contested markets in responding to the relative lack of studies on what happens before the institutions become institutionalized (Fligstein and Dauber, 1989), by connecting and extending literature on institutionalization. One of institutional theory's main ideas is that the legitimacy of practices within an organizational field rises with the level of their diffusion in the field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Tolbert and Zucker, 1983). By studying the values effect in the nascent stage of institutional development, my dissertation reveals a necessary but often understated condition for extant explanations of institutional shifts (Schneiberg and Soule, 2005), that is, for the instrumental and normative rationality of an institutional project to occupy the same domain which implies the capacity to reinforce each other. In cases where the rationale of economic efficiency is separated from normative rationality by strict moral codes, these moral challenges not only impede buy-in, but also prevent the enactment of the diffusion processes as well as shifts in cultural framings and thus halted the dynamism that usually underlies the spread of practices and social changes. Identifying whether a market institution is embedded within the right social environment helps to shed light on the divergent institutional trajectory that new markets follow. This research has implications for corporate reputation management. A key aspect of corporate social responsibility is dialogue with and responsibilities to diverse stakeholders that project conflicting demands and raise difficulties for companies seeking to meet those demands. The case of the carbon market poses challenges and interesting trade-off for companies intending to pioneer in innovative but controversial CSR instruments. This paper also aims to arrive at implications for the design of the carbon market and policy making. Many observers take the view that the answer to invigorating the carbon market lies in identifying ways to increase demand or reduce supply of carbon credits. What I show and suggest is that, the dissolution of moral restrictions on the carbon market can be seen as one of the most important processes among attempts to institutionalize this currently quasi-taboo market, and should be part of the on-going policy debate.

<p> This study addressed the frequently discussed issue of a relationship between the demographic diversity of a workgroup and its performance, by empirically testing for a relationship between a complex conceptualization of diversity (demographic faultlines) and workgroup performance bifurcated into processes, specifically relationship and task conflict, and outcomes, in terms of groups member's individual satisfaction with the group, commitment to the group, liking of other group members, and intent to stay. In addition, it hypothesized processes (relationship and task conflict) as mediators of outcomes. An online survey was administered at a single firm, ultimately gathering data from a sample population of 95 workgroups, representing 389 individual members. Using hierarchical regression analysis, the strength of the demographic faultline (<i>Fau</i>) of each group was tested for a relationship with relationship and task conflict and workgroup outcomes. Controlling for group size, the study found <i>Fau</i> positively predictive of relationship and task conflict, and not predictive of workgroup performance outcomes (given the finding of no relationship between <i>Fau</i> and outcomes, relationship and task conflict as mediators of outcomes was not tested), confirming only one of five hypotheses. The possible impact of the sample characteristics on this field study was discussed in conjunction with the theoretical, research, and practical implications of the findings.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1975. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 334-346). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- James Cook University, 2004. / Typescript (photocopy). Bibliography: leaves 229-242.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1975. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-242). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (M.S. in Product Development)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Gail Fann Thomas, Mark E. Nissen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-180). Also available online.