Welcome!

You've found your way to my personal webpage, a website I use to explain a bit about the research, teaching and other stuff I do.

Click the tabs above to learn more about ...

the papers I've published or am writing now,
the research program I'm pursing,
my teaching and cases I've written,
the tools I'm building and using in my research (available to academics!).

Or, get all that by clicking the CV/Bio tab where you'll then find a link to my full Curriculum Vitae and a brief bio.

Scroll down to see Working Papers, too.

Publications and Acceptances

Kennedy, Mark Thomas. 2005. " Behind the One-Way Mirror: Refraction in the Construction of Product Market Categories." Poetics 33:201-226.

Kennedy, Mark Thomas. 2008. "Getting Counted: Markets, Media, and Reality." American Sociological Review 73:270-295.

Kennedy, Mark Thomas and Peer Christian Fiss. 2009. "Institutionalization, Framing, and Diffusion: The Logic of TQM Adoption and Implementation Decisions among U.S. Hospitals." Academy of Management Journal 52:897-918.

Kennedy, Mark Thomas, Yu-Chieh Lo, and Michael Lounsbury. 2010. "Category Currency: The Changing Value of Conformity as a Function of Ongoing Meaning Construction." Research in the Sociology of Organizations 31:369-397.

Kennedy, Mark Thomas, Jay Inghwee Chok, and Jingfang Liu. Forthcoming 2012. "What does it mean to be green? The emergence of new criteria for assessing corporate reputation." In Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation, edited by M.L. Barnett and T.G. Pollock. NY: Oxford University Press.

Fiss, Peer C., Mark Thomas Kennedy, and Gerald F. Davis. Forthcoming 2012. "How Golden Parachutes Unfolded: Diffusion and Variation of a Contested Practice." Organization Science.

In Proceedings

Kennedy, Mark Thomas, and Peer C. Fiss. 2006. “Looking Good and Doing Better: Rethinking Motivations for Adopting Innovations.” Proceedings of the Sixty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (CD). ISSN 1543-8643.

Glaser, Vern, Peer Fiss and Mark Thomas Kennedy. 2011. “Rhetoric and Resonance: Framing Strategies and Growth in Online Advertising.” Proceedings of the Seventieth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management.

Under Review

Lo, Jade Yu-Chieh, and Mark Thomas Kennedy. “Recognizing Innovation: Cognition, Structure, and the Rise of Nanotechnology.
R&R at Org Science.

Kennedy, Mark Thomas, Robert Salomon and Edward J. Zajac. “The Cost of Crying Wolf: Institutions, Incentives and Social Exchange in Publicity.”
R&R At AMJ.

Chok, Jay Inghwee, and Mark Thomas Kennedy.Title removed while under review. At AMJ.

In Preparation

Kennedy, Mark Thomas. “Diffusion and Delegitimation: The Growth of Trusts and the Rise of Antitrust Law, 1865-1925.”

Kennedy, Mark Thomas. “Getting Noticed: Cognition, Categorization and Markets.”

Glaser, Vern, Peer Fiss and Mark Thomas Kennedy. “Rhetoric and Resonance: Framing Strategies and Growth in Online Advertising.”

Kennedy, Mark Thomas, and Edward J. Zajac. “Quid Pro Quote: Logic Interactions and Social Exchange in Media Coverage.”

Questions

Theory

Soapbox

How do new things emerge and become real to people?

When people confront new and unfamiliar things, they implicitly ask a simple question, "Is this anything?"

My research explores how meaning construction processes yield collective answers to this question that then contribute to the emergence of ...

new categories and identities that develop to make sense of the breakthroughs of innovators and entrepreneurs,
new organizational forms, practices and strategies, and
new criteria for judging corporate reputations along with initiatives or movements aimed at implementing or opposing such ideas.

A distinctive aspect of this topic is this: that which gets recognized as "for real" (facts of social life) includes not just phenonema ultimately seen as legitimate, but also those regarded as undesirable or threatening, even if relatively prevalent.

Understanding the emergence of new social realities—the good, the bad and the ugly—requires theory that looks beyond legitimacy as an explanation for what is accepted.

This is why meaning construction is a central topic for emergence studies.

For a more academic explanation, click Theory.

Emergence involves invention and recognition of new language

Words, language and meaning construction are of central importance in studies of ...

institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) and the categorical imperative (Zuckerman 1999),
sociocognitive studies of markets (Porac and Rosa 1996; Porac et al. 1995; Rosa et al. 1999), and
ecologies of organizational and industry environments (Hannan, Pòlos, and Carroll 2007).

In contrast to research that explores the penalties of failing to fit established categories generally treated as having fixed meanings, understanding emergence requires dealing with meaning directly as it is changing. For that, I draw on cultural sociology and its relational perspective (see Mische 2011) because it links language and social structure. As White (1992:67) put it, "a tie becomes constituted by story." And repeated ties or associations, even if first seen as oddities, all but demand explanatory stories (Weick 1995).

To explore how stories constitute and reflect the real, I theorize emergence as a process in which public discourse—especially the media and blogs—assembles connections between instances and attributes that define the meaning and structure of the social (Mohr 1998, LaTour 2005). This process produces cognitive embeddedness (Zukin and DiMaggio 1990; Porac and Rosa 1996), or embeddedness in shared cognitive maps of entities and identities recognized as real.(1) I use the phrase "cognitive embedding" to refer to the process itself.

See Tools for a brief description of MemeStat, the "assocation engine" application I developed to study cognitive embedding.

¹My research is arguably applied philosophy—i.e., the shared knowledge (epistemology) of structures people accept as real (ontology). It's hard to cite philospophy in organizational research, but I do try (see Kennedy 2008). It's also fair to see my work as an American flavor of what LaTour calls the"sociology of association."

Some provocations ...

Population counts aren't possible for populations that haven't yet been named.

Counts depend on categories, so you can't count whatx isn't yet categorized. I make this point in my "Getting Counted" paper in ASR (2008, see "CV"). In that exploration of what it takes for new types of organizations to get counted, I conclude that the counts that help legitimate are a product of sensemaking and cognitive embedding that produces a new category label. In that process, the counted compete over how they'll be categorized (a la Fligstein 1996), and "critics" (broadly speaking) play a role not only in refereeing that competition, but sometimes also by sponsoring a particular contestant (a la Hirsch 1973).

So counts of organizations are not just independent variables, they are outcomes in battles over how to be counted.

While growth is a powerful legitimator, it can also be a catalyst for censure.

The diffusion and growing prevalence of a thing definitely contributes to their legitimacy (see esp. Carroll and Hannan 1989, Tolbert and Zucker 1983). You've heard it said, "There's strength in numbers" and "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Andrew Young put it this way, "Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it, and that's true anywhere in the world."

And yet, growing numbers of a thing can also be cause for alarm that leads to public policies that censure growing phenomena. Something like this happened recently with marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles and, much earlier, with with the growth of trusts and the rise of antitrust law— (see paper on that one, under "Papers / In Preparation").

Courses

Cases

Teaching

MBA Teaching

Negotiations & Deal Making (Best 4.7/5). I combine the social psychological approach to this course with macro perspectives on factors that affect deal-making situations. For example, students use March on logics of appropriateness in decision situations; institutional theory on categories, rules and conformity, and Berger and Luckmann on social construction.
General Management (Best 4.0/5). General Management core course for MBAs.

PhD Teaching

PhD Seminar in Strategic Management (Best 5.0/5). I taught this course for five years from a syllabus I changed a bit each year to include both classics and recent research on different sources of competitive advantage as seen from the economics, management and sociology literatures.
PhD Student Advising. I co-chaired dissertations for Jade Lo (2010) and Jay Chok (2011), and I have been on 13 qualifying exams and / or dissertation committees for students in strategy, OB, communications, and sociology.

Executive Teaching

I have taught a number of topics to a variety of executive audiences at USC and been a faculty director for several multi-year custom programs. Among the topics I taught were ...

Leadership and Change (Best 4.9/5). For a Masters in Medical Management program.

Organizational Change (Best 4.9/5). For managers of a large gonvernment bank.

Negotiating Leadership and Social Capital (Best 4.7/5). For CPAs.

Networks and Leadership (Best 4.7/5). For senior managers of a California bank.

Networks and Leadership (Best 4.7/5). For executives of a specialty financing company.

Undergrad Teaching

Strategic Management and Decision Making (Best 4.5/5). I taught this required capstone course for business majors for two years before being moved into MBA teaching.

Cases

I personalize my classes by writing cases that reflect my personal and research interests and writing mini-cases for exams. The full cases below are all ones I've used for multiple years because they worked well. (I don't recycle the exam mini-cases.) Although I don't post the cases here, please feel free to email me if you would like to see one.

"Ocean Dive: Deal or No Deal?". Based on due diligence challenges in a complex acquisition in the online marketing services industry.
"SuperClub versus MegaLeague." A sports management dispute that led to high-stakes arbitration and, ultimately, to major changes in this field.
"NewsCo." A case that rewards participants for scoring points in an interview situation in which it is unclear which set of social norms for the situation ought to apply.
"Frank McCourt vs. Bud Selig." A mini-case on the dispute between MLB and the owner of the LA Dodgers.

Overview

Uses

How to

Tech

Associative content analysis for emergence studies.

For researchers or authors writing about the emergence and diffusion of new ideas and related social change, MemeStat (pronounced "meem-stat") is a web app for studying the unfolding or changing meaning of a term, or meme, as a window onto the emergence or change of, to name just a few examples, things like new industries, markets, social movements, fields, technologies, or organizational forms, strategies and practices.

Use MemeStat to ...:

associate words that could be related to a concept's meaning by searching your uploaded text collections to determine which elements are co-mentioned in stories, paragraphs or sentences at least one each year, quarter, month or week
explore association data using table, histogram or network views you can use to navigate to and browse the stories, text, and co-mentions that make up concept networks
share association and observations to a project "notebook" where your team mates can see and comment on your work

Click the Tools subtabs for more information on MemeStat's Uses, How to, and Technologies.

Update: To request an account, go to www.memestat.net and click "Request an Account" (at the lower left) to fill out and submit the form.

MemeStat is for studying changes in meaning

But why study changing meaning? Observing changes in the meaning of a meme from text supports inferences about changes in related attitudes or behaviors. Of course, understanding social change as it is happening is never as clear as with the benefit of hindsight's perspective, but the ability to see changing meaning in current and very recent public discourse provides at least some help for the job of understanding or even trying to anticipate important social changes such as the following:

Innovations that create products categories that become new markets
Business strategies and related capabilities that transform industries
Creative work that alters the landscape of literary or artistic genres
Scientific breakthroughs seen as establishing new fields
New ideas that anchor influential social movements or political issues
Beliefs that inspire and mobilize people to do great good, or grave ill

MemeStat's Main Functions are that it enables you to:

Mine your collection of news stories or blog posts (a "corpus") to produce dynamic semantic networks
Analyze networks for mathematical properties relevant to idea currency (see Kennedy, Lo and Lounsbury 2010)
Visualize networks to see relationships and how they change over time
Browse semantic networks to get to stories by clicking on visualizations or summary charts
Export longitudinal data sets for custom statistical analyses

How MemeStat works

What you need to use MemeStat

A corpus of news stories, press releases or blog posts from any combination of Lexis/Nexis downloads (html format), Factiva downloads (xml format), or URLs for blogs with RSS feeds.
An ontology that relates terms for the idea you are studying to those potentially relevant to its meaning—attributes, instances, synonyms, etc.
Your team! MemeStat allows you to build and join multiple overlapping teams to share work and results like a social media site for research.

What it does. MemeStat can analyze your corpus for two kinds of data about patterns of word usage over time.

a hit-count: every mention of every term in a list of terms you want to track; presented in either a table or histogram format
an association: every co-mention of every possible pair of terms from two lists of terms you want to associate;
presented in a table, histogram or graph visualization format.

What you'll see and get. MemeStat allows you to explore a hit-count or association at three levels:

A View (a table, histogram or network) of results by period (move forward and back) in which clicking on View elements populates ...
A list of Stories associated with the selected View item(s) in which clicking on stories populates...
A Text viewer with the selected story with mentions or co-mentions highlighted.

Technologies that MemeStat Builds On

The heart of MemeStat is an association engine, a search utility designed to do multiple searches that show either how mentions of a set of words change over time (think of it as 'count this'), or how co-mentions of two sets of words change over time (think of it as 'associate this and that'). The association behind MemeStat is called AE.

Ideas

From AI, the use of semantic networks (graphs) to model meaning
From sociology, the idea that structure reflects meaning, and vice versa

Open Source Libraries used

Lucene is used to build AE, MemeStat's association engine
MySQL is used to store and retrieve all data
Protovis is used for visualization of graph data. (We will soon switch to its successor D3 or Gephi.)
UCI's JUNG framework is used for social network analysis