Management Theses and Dissertations

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Inequality in Shared Micromobility: Global, National, and Local Perspectives
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Meng, Sian; Brown, Anne
Shared micromobility systems, such as shared bicycles and e-scooters, have seen substantial global growth over the past decade. Although these systems offer affordable, flexible, and environmentally friendly transportation options, their rapid proliferation has raised significant equity concerns. The unequal distribution of shared micromobility services may limit access for the transportation disadvantaged, which could exacerbate the inequalities in the existing transportation system. This dissertation examines inequalities in shared micromobility through three studies at global, national, and local scales. The global-level study utilized world city theory to analyze the establishment and expansion of shared micromobility companies worldwide and employed mixed methods to explain what leads to the inequality in system distribution across cities. This study reveals that shared micromobility industries are associated with the world cities of ride-hailing, advanced producer services, and startups. Factors such as low demand for shared micromobility, unfriendly regulatory environments, and negative public and governmental attitudes towards shared micromobility are the major barriers to the adoption of shared micromobility systems at the city level. The national-level study examines the effects of policies aimed at equalizing resources and opportunities on vehicle and trip inequalities within shared micromobility systems in the US. Resource-equalizing policies for shared micromobility aim to equalize the distribution of shared micromobility vehicles, which directly alleviates inequalities in vehicle distribution and indirectly lessens trip distribution inequalities. In contrast, opportunity-equalizing policies subsidize people with less capability to use shared micromobility, such as low-income, unbanked, and non-tech-savvy people. However, policies for equal opportunity are less effective in addressing inequalities in shared micromobility. The local-level study investigates the impact of introducing shared e-scooters on existing transportation modes—bikeshare, railway, bus, taxi, and ride-hailing—in Chicago’s transportation equity priority areas, where residents face increased mobility barriers. The introduction of shared e-scooters results in distinct effects on different transportation modes between equity priority and non-equity priority areas. In the equity priority area, shared e-scooters significantly boost bikeshare usage and reduce taxi usage. In contrast, in the non-equity priority area, shared e-scooters notably reduce trips by bikeshare, railway, and taxis, but increase ride-hailing trips.
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Identity Work Through Prosocial Certifications in Hybrid Organizations
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Cha, Hyeonjin; Russo, Mike
In this dissertation, I explore the role of prosocial certifications in the identity work of leaders within hybrid organizations. Existing literature has primarily emphasized the impact of these certifications on external legitimacy but has given less attention to their influence on internal dynamics. This study addresses this gap by investigating how these certifications guide internal identity alignment. Through qualitative methodologies using Certified B Corporations as an empirical setting, my research reveals that leaders initially engage in relational identity work for themselves, using prosocial certifications to deepen their understanding of their roles within the hybrid organizational context. This personal identity work is then leveraged into relational, discursive, and material identity work aimed at aligning and motivating employees. By demonstrating how these aspects of identity work are interlinked to one another and guided by certifications, this study contributes to the theoretical understanding of identity work by providing a detailed analysis of how certifications facilitate the integration of blended missions within hybrid organizations. This dissertation enriches the organizational identity literature by showcasing the multifaceted utility of prosocial certifications in enhancing internal cohesion and advancing social responsibility.
Open Access
Understanding Belongingness in the Gig Economy: The Uplifting and Undermining Effects of Online Communities on Lonely Gig Workers
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Pychlau, Sophie; Wagner, David
All humans have a need to belong and belongingness at work serves important organizational and personal purposes. However, gig workers face significant challenges to experiencing belongingness at work because their work is highly temporary, project-based, and occurs outside the relational scaffold afforded by organizations. Given these challenges, gig workers frequently engage in online communities that serve critical social and information-sharing functions. In this dissertation, I focus on gig workers’ individual behaviors in online communities related to gig work and analyze how these behaviors impede or further belongingness. Integrating the evolutionary model of loneliness and regulatory focus theory, I propose that loneliness at work motivates gig workers to engage in online communities in different ways that can either impede or facilitate belongingness. Specifically, I hypothesize that gig workers feel less belongingness when engaging in lurking behaviors, more belongingness when engaging in contributing behaviors. To offer practical advice on how to increase belongingness, I develop an intervention designed to increase contributing behaviors that enhance belongingness. Ultimately, I suggest that belongingness will affect withdrawal from work. I test my theoretical model in a ten-day experience sampling study (ESM) with 95 gig workers. My dissertation contributes to an understanding of how modern workers experience belongingness outside of organizations and the impact of online communities in this process.
Open Access
Resource Mobilization for Disadvantaged Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Field Experiments in Morocco
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Hmaddi, Ouafaa; Nelson, Andrew
This dissertation is composed of one conceptual review chapter and two empirical chapters with the following abstracts. In the first chapter, I adopt a resource mobilization framework, which delineates the process in three stages: search, access, and transfer. In doing so, I explore how resource mobilization is closely linked to entrepreneur’s resource endowments. I identify the main issues for the mechanisms of each stage which helps highlight the problematic path of resource mobilization when entrepreneurs lack the necessary endowments. I then suggest an adapted path with macro and micro-level solutions to potentially overcome such issues. In the second chapter, I challenge the premise that resource holders must “pick winners” because they are most likely to convert the support into tangible and positive entrepreneurial outcomes by asking when does selection matter less? This chapter’s core premise is that expanding access to resources by removing selection barriers can help enhance two key entrepreneurial outcomes: action and persistence. I find that removing selection barriers to the provision of knowledge and financial resources significantly increases the likelihood of entrepreneurs engaging in action and persistence independent of their initial stock of resources. These findings help de-emphasize the role of endowment and selection in the resource mobilization process and highlight the importance of inclusion in the allocation of entrepreneurial resources. In the third chapter, I examine the question: do entrepreneurs incorporate what they learn? Are they behaviorally experimenting? I argue that entrepreneurs within such environments may need more than the explicit knowledge on how to experiment to navigate the ambiguous and informal markets where they operate. I use a field experiment in the context of an acceleration program spanning the 12 regions of Morocco, where I randomized access to knowledge resources (training and mentoring) among other resources. I then take advantage of the staff quasi-random assignment of the mentor-entrepreneur pairs to evaluate the effect of having a matched mentor who would have the appropriate tacit knowledge to help entrepreneurs localize and contextualize the explicit knowledge they acquired. I find that having access to tacit knowledge increases the probability to engage in behavioral experimentation by 20 percent. These findings suggest that tacit knowledge helps entrepreneurs incorporate their learning into their decision-making.
Open Access
Restoring Undermined Institutions: How Firms Combine Nonmarket Strategies to Respond to Digital Piracy
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) McDonald, Aaron; Russo, Mike
How do firms strengthen their institutional environment after the unplanned and radical weakening of a strong regulatory institution? For some industries, regulative institutions play a dominant role in defining the institutional environment by providing stability and certainty for firms. Yet, environmental jolts can radically weaken regulative institutions causing increased uncertainty and instability in the institutional environment. Driven by this uncertainty, firms may attempt to strengthen their weakened institutional environment. By exploring this question, in the context of weakened copyright protection after the rise of digital piracy, I can make important contributions to the institutional change literature. Specifically, I build new theory on how firms coordinate actions targeting multiple institutional pillars (e.g. regulative and normative) to change their institutional environment and the institutional environment of different industries. I test these theories using a longitudinal dataset of the corporate political activity of copyright-reliant firms, and the copyright infringement takedown notices sent to Google.
Open Access
The Impact of Unethical Leader-Requests on Employees' Anger, Anxiety, and Family Lives
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Qiu, Feng; Wagner, David
This dissertation aims to explore the potential non-work consequences of unethical leader-requests. Specifically, it examines how unethical leader-requests can trigger anxiety and anger in employees, which in turn harmfully influence employees’ insomnia, emotional exhaustion at home, and interactions with family members. In addition, this dissertation examines whether employees’ moral identity and responsibility displacement propensity will serve as two moderators that affect the degree to which they emotionally and behaviorally respond to unethical leader-requests. A three-wave field survey, a laboratory experiment, and an experience sampling method study were conducted to collectively improve the internal and external validity of the findings. Overall, the findings suggest that employees feel anxious and angry when they are requested by their leaders to engage in unethical behavior and that the negative emotions can spill over to employees’ family domain to harmfully impact their family lives. Implications and future directions will be discussed.
Open Access
Within-person Differences in Uncertainty Management, New Venture Ideation and Initial Belief Formations
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Gish, John; Wagner, David
This three-paper dissertation investigates dynamic performance in uncertain situations. Each chapter in this dissertation represents a stand-alone paper. The first chapter combines literature on sleep processes with decision making in uncertain contexts to create a process model of sleep and uncertainty management. I highlight many mechanisms between sleep and uncertainty management, and explore the recursive relationship between these activities and subsequent sleep. The underexplored mechanisms in Chapter 1 provide the empirical impetus for Chapters 2 and 3. The second chapter investigates entrepreneurs in new venture settings, providing causal evidence for the effect of sleep restriction on new venture ideation and belief formation. The third and final chapter provides a constructive replication of the second chapter in an angel investing context, where beliefs about new venture potential are formed more frequently and more formally by investors. These chapters work together to inform our collective understanding of dynamic performance in a decidedly uncertain new venture context. This dissertation contains both previously published and unpublished co-authored material.
Open Access
Essays on Product Variety in Retail Operations
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Yazdani, Alireza; Çil, Eren
Thanks to technological advances in the past few decades, firms find product variety a more viable and hopefully a more profitable strategy than before. In this two-essay dissertation, I employ analytical models to investigate the effects of emerging operations concerning product variety on firm profits and consumer surplus. In my first essay, I analyze a two-stage game to study product-design and price competition between two mass-customizing firms that serve consumers with varying tastes. By comparing equilibrium results in settings with and without mass customization, I establish that competition with customization may lead to lower profits and consumer surplus. In my second essay, I study sample boxes which potentially create value by helping consumers resolve their uncertainties regarding different product varieties more efficiently. I show that when a firm offers a sample box, consumers obtain equal or higher net expected surplus while the firm's expected profit may decrease. I also show that a firm can reverse the potential adverse profit impact of selling sample boxes by introducing an optimally specified future credit. This dissertation includes previously unpublished co-authored material.
Open Access
The Legitimation of Proto-institutions Among Multiple Stakeholder Communities: A Two-Phase Process Model.
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Awad, Mohamed Hassan Ahmed; Nelson, Andrew
New social entities are critically in need of different types of resources in order to survive and diffuse. In order to access these resources, a new social entity needs to be deemed legitimate by the multiple stakeholder communities who control these resources. The criteria upon which a social entity is evaluated are likely to vary among the different stakeholders, possibly leading to conflict and uncertainty. Existing research has focused on the efforts of a focal actor in legitimating a social entity. However, little research has investigated the contestations between the different stakeholder communities around the social entity and how these dynamics could shape the legitimation process. In this study, I employ a distributed and inclusive analytical approach to uncover the process through which a new social entity is contested and legitimated among multiple stakeholder communities simultaneously. I investigate three local solutions that emerged in the city of Eugene, Oregon to alleviate the issue of homelessness. I employ an inductive approach with grounded theory analysis to induce a two-phase legitimation model for proto-institutions. The model hinges on the role of issue interpretation and contestation between issue narratives. This study contributes to the growing literature on institutional complexity and issue fields through capturing the complexity of legitimation as it unfolds in a changing field, between multiple stakeholder communities with shifting criteria of legitimacy.
Open Access
Outsourcing (In)Equity: Do Informal Government-Nonprofit Collaborations Lead to Inequitable Government Service?
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Fiocco, Emily; Galvan, Dennis
Local governments often rely on collaborations with nonprofit organizations to serve “underheard” communities. These collaborations are often resource-intensive, but not well-analyzed. I engage a case study of City of Eugene's efforts to create "Welcoming Parks" for its Latino community to analyze the effects of these collaborations on the equity of government services and policy outcomes. My analysis is based on qualitative analysis of interviews and observations conducted with government staff, nonprofit leaders, community advocates, and community members. It demonstrates that local governments' reliance on nonprofit collaborations to address the needs of their “underheard" communities can lead to inequitable service and policy outcomes. Rather, representation of “underheard” communities within government may be necessary to produce outcomes. This research paves the way for further empirical studies of informal government-nonprofit collaborations and provides suggestions regarding how local governments should work with their communities to achieve equitable service and policy outcomes.
Open Access
Elaborating a Model of Cultural Exchange: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Organizational Cultures and the Adoption of Environmental Certified Management Standards
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Boren, Brooke; Howard-Grenville, Jennifer
In this dissertation, I investigate how organizations understand and apply shared meanings of sustainability. Integrating recent theoretical developments regarding organizational culture with findings from prior literature suggesting that corporate codes can be effective instruments for shaping employee behavior, I describe the flexible exchange of cultural meanings and practices between organizations and their environment with respect to the adoption of environmental certified management standards (ECMS). Taking an inductive, mixed methodological approach, I first use cultural consensus modeling survey techniques to analyze the types of situations vineyard managers in Oregon and Washington categorize as sustainable management conventions and the consistency of these categorizations among those organizations that have adopted ECMS and those organizations that have not. I then draw on interview and archival data to gain deeper insight into the survey findings, focusing on the nature of the relationship between the adoption of ECMS and managerial knowledge around shared meanings and practices regarding sustainability. I find that the adoption of ECMS is associated with an alignment among organizations regarding how they understand and apply sustainability, with three characteristics enhancing the effectiveness of ECMS in cultivating alignment: detailed practice descriptions, demanding objectives to achieve and maintain, and industry specificity. I further uncover that key activities involving the interaction of ECMS and ECMS members facilitate this alignment in cultural meanings and practices surrounding sustainability. From these findings, I develop a grounded conceptual model of cultural exchange, describing how organizations serve varying roles in the cultural exchange process and how each role leverages a set of specific mechanisms to facilitate the adaptation, generation, and transfer of existing and new cultural meanings and practices between organizations drawing on a shared cultural repertoire. The findings from this study contribute to enhancing our theoretical understanding of organizational culture as an open system through a more complex, intentional, and hierarchical account of cultural exchange, as well as develop insight into how the substantive adoption of ECMS practices is associated with alignment among organizations regarding cultural meanings and practices regarding a salient issue in an industry, such as sustainability.
Open Access
Nonmarket Autonomy: Combining Private and Collective Approaches to Corporate Political Activity
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Minto, Amy; Parmigiani, Anne
By pursuing private and collective political action in the nonmarket environment, businesses attempt to influence public policy that shapes their operating environment. This dissertation considers how a firm’s market-based experience and its accumulation of political resources affect how the firm combines private and collective political tactics. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm (RBV) I investigate how a firm’s alliance experience, political resources and prior collective political experience influence the autonomy of its Corporate Political Activity (CPA). I use fixed effects GLS regression with clustered standard errors to test my model on a panel of 21,329 firm/year observations of 2,779 U.S. property casualty insurance companies over the ten-year period between 2005 and 2014. I find support for the influence of state-level political resources, equity alliances, and the interaction of prior collective CPA experience with regulatory complexity and learning capacity on autonomy. My findings contribute to the growing literature connecting market and non-market strategies by linking collaboration in the political arena to the related market activity of alliance experience. Findings also contribute to our understanding of how participation in a collective provides opportunities for learning, and reveals that taking advantage of this opportunity depends on a firm’s learning capacity and the complexity of its regulatory environment. These findings add insight to the literatures on CPA, inter-organizational learning, collective action and trade associations.
Open Access
Imported Mothers and Subsidized Love: An Analysis of U.S. Labor Policy and Rights for Domestic Workers
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Ohia, Emilee; Yarris, Kristin
Over the last several decades, economic and cultural shifts in the United States have created an increasing demand for domestic labor, and data shows that these jobs have largely been filled by women of color, many of whom are immigrants who may or may not have documented legal status. Despite the growing importance of this industry, domestic workers have historically and intentionally been excluded from most federal and state labor rights and regulation, which has resulted in substandard working conditions, exploitation, and abuse for workers in this industry. This research traces the gendered and racialized legislative exclusion, and analyzes recent state efforts to enact policies extending labor rights to domestic workers. It concludes with recommendations for the role of advocacy in pushing for legislative change, and for bridging the gap between policy and enforcement.
Open Access
Reconciling Oregon's Smart Growth Goals with Local Policy Choice: An Empirical Study of Growth Management, Urban Form, and Development Outcomes in Eugene, Keizer, Salem, and Springfield
(University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Witzig, Monica; Yang, Yizhao
Oregon's Statewide Planning Goals embody Smart Growth in their effort to revitalize urban areas, finance environmentally responsible transportation systems, provide housing options, and protect natural resources; yet the State defers to its municipalities to implement this planning framework. This research focuses on Goal 14 (Urbanization), linking most directly to Smart Growth Principle 7 (Strengthen and Direct Development toward Existing Communities). It assesses Eugene's, Keizer's, Salem's, and Springfield's growth management policies that specifically target infill development of single family homes against this Goal and Principle. Though these municipalities must demonstrate consistency with the same Goals (see Supplemental File 1 for this context), this research questions whether sufficiently different policy approaches to curtailing sprawl yield significantly different results. The primary analytical method is a logistic regression that uses parcel-level data to understand how administration affects development by isolating these policies' direct effects on observed outcomes (see Supplemental File 2 for this theory).
Open Access
Explore with Strangers, Exploit with Friends: Organizational Ambidexterity and Networks in Successful Technology Commercialization
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-10) Earle, Andrew; Russo, Michael
This dissertation seeks to relieve theoretical tension between organizational ambidexterity and network perspectives by developing a contingent model of firm-level exploration and exploitation. The central proposition of this model is firms need to both effectively explore and exploit to succeed but that inter-organizational network features supporting one of these activities are detrimental to the other. This model indicates firms can resolve this apparent paradox by configuring their networks contingent on the particular goals of these networks. In the context of technology commercialization, I hypothesize firms should benefit by configuring their inter-organizational networks to gather novel information when seeking to discover new technologies but gather redundant information when seeking to bring these new discoveries to market. I test these hypotheses with a unique panel data set of firms active in publishing, patenting, and commercializing technologies in the field of green chemistry. My empirical results largely support these hypothesized relationships.
Open Access
An Alternative Alternative: The Road to Sustainable Transportation Law
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Bloomfield, Jessica; Schlossberg, Marc
The dominance of motor vehicle use throughout America reflects a massive government intervention on behalf of automobiles. Congress directs billions of dollars into America's highway system annually, assuming that building new roadways is the best option to move people and goods from one place to another. These policies stand in direct contradiction to today's travel patterns. This research examines ways to improve federal law to achieve a more sustainable transportation future. First, it identifies the specific provisions in federal transportation law that inhibit the development of "low-build" transportation projects. Second, it describes challenges to halting roadway construction through litigation in federal court. Understanding the problems of federal transportation law and litigation sheds light on the ways to make positive change in the next federal surface transportation reauthorization. This research culminates in recommendations for how Congress can implement policies that require a comprehensive approach to transportation planning.
Open Access
Conflict and Change in Category Identities: How Did the Internet Change What It Means To Be a Travel Agent?
(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Metzger, Matthew; Meyer, Alan
This research investigates evolution of the meanings assigned to the categories that designate and demarcate formal organizations of the same genre or type. I use grounded theory techniques to examine whether and how members and stakeholders relabel organizational categories and ascribe associated new meanings. Specifically, I uncover that what seemed to be an organizational category's change in direct response to the Internet was actually better explained as a confluence of gradual changes in response to socio-cultural, regulatory, and technological pressures. The empirical context for this study consists of the population of privately owned travel agencies as they confronted almost two decades of shifting consumer demands, the aftermath of deregulation, and the emergence of online competition. Data were gathered through interviews with agents and other individuals employed within the travel industry, archival accounts from various print and electronic sources, and nearly two decades of articles published in the category's primary trade journal. I pair discourse analysis of the agents' trade journal articles with other grounded theory techniques to build theory and document mechanisms through which both members and external stakeholders of an organizational category influence the meanings ascribed to a social construct.
Open Access
Bicycle Boulevards: Statistical Analysis of the Presence of Bicycle Boulevards and Their Influence on Bicycle-to-Work Rates in Portland, Oregon
(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Khut, Rithy; Schlossberg, Marc
One of the top bicycling cities in the United States, Portland, Oregon has used a mixture of bicycle infrastructure to create a cohesive network for bicyclists. Building on their success, in 2010 Portland set forth on an ambitious path to envision their bicycle network in 2030. The primary goal of this plan is to attract the “Interested but Concerned” demographic of bicyclists through an increase of their bicycle boulevard network from 30 miles to 286 miles. However, there has been no direct link between bicycle boulevards and bicycle rates. Therefore, this study analyzes the influence of bicycle boulevards on bicycle-to-work rates using U.S. Census data with Geographic Information Systems data in concert with both ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and a fixed effects (FE) regression. The OLS and FE models both indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between bicycle boulevards and bicycle-to-work rates.
Open Access
Great Expectations and Dodgy Explanations
(University of Oregon, 2012) Krause, Alan; Krause, Alan; Parmigiani, Anne
How do organizations assess and explain their performance? Prior studies have attempted to demonstrate that, like individuals, organizations take credit for good performance and blame poor performance on influences in their environment. However, these studies have found only a weak relationship between performance and attribution at the level of the firm. This dissertation seeks to elucidate this relationship by conceptualizing firms as social agents and by combining aspiration and attribution theory for the first time at the level of the firm. Analysis of performance explanations by large, public manufacturing firms in 2004 and 2005 revealed that firms' performance explanations correlated with their cognitive experiences of success and failure. These findings further understanding of organizational cognition, attribution, and image management.
Open Access
The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: Institutional Maintenance in the Face of Social and Technological Change in American Public Libraries, 1876-2006
(University of Oregon, 2012) Irwin, Jennifer; Irwin, Jennifer; Howard-Grenville, Jennifer
Institutions are generally assumed to be stable, but recent research has focused on how that stability may be overturned to create institutional change. The assumption of stability has led to a lack of research on the flip side of change, maintenance, even though we cannot fully understand change without understanding the forces change agents work against. By examining more than a century of American public library discourse, I develop the construct of core ideas and a model of the maintenance of these institutions. Core ideas are those institutionalized ideas at the heart of a field that act as touchstones of a field's work and identity. Like other institutions, core ideas may be both added to and subtracted from a field and require maintenance through reinforcement and reinterpretation to endure. The model of maintenance of core ideas shows how core ideas are maintained in the face of social and technological change through use, as actors draw on core ideas to justify or deny accounts of practice, which reinforces, reinterprets, or undermines existing or proposed core ideas. In developing a model of maintenance I also examine how core ideas illuminate the internal workings of institutional logics and explore how the multivocality of core ideas allows and even supports multiple logics within a field.