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How do organizations reconcile the cross-pressures of conformity and differentiation? Existing research predominantly conceptualizes identity as something an organization has by virtue of the products or services it offers. Drawing on constructivist theories, we argue that organizational members’ interactions with external audiences also dynamically produce identity. We call the extent to which such interactions diverge from audience expectations performative atypicality. Applying a novel deep-learning method to conversational text in over 90,000 earnings calls, we find that performative atypicality leads to an evaluation premium by securities analysts, paradoxically resulting in a negative earnings surprise. Moreover, performances that correspond to those of celebrated innovators are received with higher enthusiasm. Our findings suggest that firms that conform to categorical expectations while being performatively atypical can navigate the conflicting demands of similarity and uniqueness, especially if they hew to popular notions of being different.

Where do prescient ideas-those that initially challenge conventional assumptions but later achieve widespread acceptance-come from? Although their outcomes in the form of technical innovation are readily observed, the underlying ideas that eventually change the world are often obscured. Here, we develop a novel method that uses deep learning to unearth the markers of prescient ideas from the language used by individuals and groups. Our language-based measure identifies prescient actors and documents that prevailing methods would fail to detect. Applying our model to corpora spanning the disparate worlds of politics, law, and business, we demonstrate that it reliably detects prescient ideas in each domain. Moreover, counter to many prevailing intuitions, prescient ideas emanate from each domain's periphery rather than its core. These findings suggest that the propensity to generate far-sighted ideas may be as much a property of contexts as of individuals.

How do people establish and maintain cultural fit with an organization? Prior research has offered two perspectives that have heretofore been conceptually disconnected. One focuses on personal values, whereas another emphasizes perceptions of the cultural code. We develop a theoretical account that integrates these approaches by linking them to distinct mechanisms and behavioral consequences of cultural fit. We propose that value congruence—the match between one’s values and those that prevail in an organization—relates to the mechanism of group attachment and shapes behavior when one periodically steps back from day-to-day interactions, assesses one’s identification with an organization, and determines whether to stay or voluntarily depart. In contrast, we argue that perceptual congruence—the degree to which one implicitly understands an organization’s prevailing values and norms—relates to the mechanism of interpersonal coordination and influences behavior when one engages in routine peer interactions. Accordingly, we theorize that these two forms of cultural fit relate to distinct behaviors, voluntary exit and linguistic conformity with peers, respectively. Drawing on email and survey data from a midsized technology firm, we find support for our theory and discuss the implications of our findings for research on person-culture fit, dual-process models of culture and cognition, and the pairing of surveys with digital trace data. Funding: This work was supported by the Berkeley Culture Center, the Cortese Distinguished Chair in Management, the Grether Chair of Business Administration and Public Policy.

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining symbolic boundaries: boundary retention—entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—innovating new forms of symbolic distinction. Traditional approaches to measuring symbolic boundaries—interviews, participant-observation, and self-reports are ill-suited to detecting fine-grained variation in boundary maintenance. To overcome this limitation, we use the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to develop a novel approach to measuring symbolic boundaries based on interactional language use between group members before and after they encounter one another. We construct measures of boundary retention and reformation using random forest classifiers that quantify group differences based on pre- and post-contact linguistic styles. We demonstrate this method's utility by applying it to a corpus of email communications from a mid-sized financial services firm that acquired and integrated two smaller firms. We find that: (a) the persistence of symbolic boundaries can be detected for up to 18 months after a merger; (b) acquired employees exhibit more boundary reformation and less boundary retention than their counterparts from the acquiring firm; and (c) individuals engage in more boundary retention, but not reformation, when their local work environment is more densely populated by ingroup members. We discuss implications of these findings for the study of culture in a wide range of intergroup contexts and for computational approaches to measuring culture.

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: Diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation, but struggle to take coordinated action. Building on the insight that group cognition is not static, but is instead dynamically and interactively produced, we introduce the construct of discursive diversity, a manifestation of group cognitive diversity, which reflects the degree to which the meanings conveyed by group members in a given set of interactions diverge from one another. We propose that high-performing teams are ones that have a collective capacity to modulate shared cognition to match changing task requirements: They exhibit higher discursive diversity when engaged in ideational tasks and lower discursive diversity when performing coordination tasks. We further argue that teams exhibiting congruent modulation-that is, those with low group-level variance in members' within-person semantic shifts to changing task requirements-are more likely to experience success than teams characterized by incongruentmodulation. Using the tools of computational linguistics to derive a measure of discursive diversity and drawing on a novel longitudinal data set of intragroup electronic communications and performance outcomes for 117 remote software development teams on an online platform (www.gigster.com), we find support for our theory. Our findings suggest that the performance tradeoff of group cognitive diversity is not inescapable: Groups can navigate it by aligning their levels of discursive diversity to match their task requirements and by having members stay aligned with one another as theymake these adjustments.

How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Cultural diversity is commonly thought to present a tradeoff between task coordination and creative problem solving, with diversity arising primarily through cultural differences between individuals. In contrast, we propose that diversity can also exist within persons when individuals hold multiple cultural beliefs about the organization. We refer to these different forms as interpersonal and intrapersonal cultural heterogeneity. We argue that the former tends to undermine coordination and portends worsening firm profitability, while the latter facilitates creativity and supports greater patenting success and more positive market valuations. To evaluate these propositions, we use computational linguistics to identify cultural content in employee reviews of nearly 500 publicly traded firms on a leading company review website and then develop novel, time-varying measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our empirical results lend support for our two core propositions, suggesting the need to rethink the performance tradeoffs of cultural heterogeneity: it may be possible to reap the creativity benefits of higher intrapersonal heterogeneity and, at the same time, the efficiency benefits of lower interpersonal heterogeneity.

How do people adapt to organizational culture, and what are the consequences or their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. By contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. We trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a midsized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our language-based model of changing cultural fit (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit; and (4) finds that a decline in cultural fit or individuals who had successfully enculturated portends voluntary departure.

Culture is assumed to play a pivotal role in organizational success and failure. In contrast to prevailing top-down perspectives, this article proposes an approach to studying culture that accounts for myriad organizational subcultures, how individuals fit into those subcultures, and the causes and consequences of shifts in culture and cultural fit. The language through which people communicate with colleagues offers a powerful lens for studying cultural dynamics and its relationship to individual, group, and organizational success. This article describes a burgeoning stream of research that uses language as a window into culture and discusses its implications for managerial practice.

Cultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an elusive, poorly measured construct. Recent research draws on computational linguistics to measure cultural fit but overlooks asymmetries in cultural adaptation. By contrast, we develop a directed, dynamic measure of cultural fit based on linguistic alignment, which estimates the influence of one person’s word use on another’s and distinguishes between two enculturation mechanisms: internalization and selfregulation. We use this measure to trace employees’ enculturation trajectories over a large, multi-year corpus of corporate emails and find that patterns of alignment in the first six months of employment are predictive of individuals downstream outcomes, especially involuntary exit. Further predictive analyses suggest referential alignment plays an overlooked role in linguistic alignment.

Cognitive differences can catalyze social learning through the process of one-to-one social influence. Yet the learning benefits of exposure to the ideas of cognitively dissimilar others often fail to materialize. Why do cognitive differences produce learning from interpersonal influence in some contexts but not in others? To answer this question, we distinguish between cognition that is expressed—one's public stance on an issue and the way in which supporting arguments are framed—and cognition that is latent—the semantic associations that underpin these expressions. We theorize that, when latent cognition is obscured, one is more likely to be influenced to change one's mind on an issue when exposed to the opposing ideas of cognitively dissimilar, rather than similar, others. When latent cognition is instead observable, a subtle similarity-attraction response tends to counteract the potency of cognitive differences—even when social identity cues and other categorical distinctions are inaccessible. To evaluate these ideas, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm in which participants (a) respond to a polarizing scenario; (b) view an opposing argument by another whose latent cognition is either similar to or different from their own and is either observable or obscured; and (c) have an opportunity to respond again to the scenario. A preregistered study (n = 1,000) finds support for our theory. A supplemental study (n = 200) suggests that the social influence of latent cognitive differences operates through the mechanism of argument novelty. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social influence, collective intelligence, and cognitive diversity in groups. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00895. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension tends to take either a structural or a cultural perspective. We fuse these two traditions to develop a theory of how structural and cultural embeddedness jointly relate to individual attainment within organizations. Given that organizational culture is hard to observe, we develop a novel approach to assessing individuals’ cultural fit with their colleagues based on the language expressed in internal e-mail communications. Drawing on a unique dataset that includes a corpus of 10.24 million e-mail messages exchanged over five years among 601 employees in a high-technology firm, we find that network constraint impedes, whereas cultural fit promotes, individual attainment. More importantly, we find evidence of a tradeoff between the two forms of embeddedness: cultural fit benefits individuals with low network constraint (i.e., brokers), whereas network constraint promotes attainment for people with low cultural fit.

How do people adapt to organizational culture and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. In contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. To illustrate the power of this approach, we trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a mid-sized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our languagebased measure of changing cultural fit: (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; and (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit.

Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We propose a practical approach that conceptualizes meaning as an instance of an actor interpreting a stimulus. Reviewing existing literature, we find that most sociological accounts understand interpretation either as categorization or as semantic association. We show that an integrated approach is analytically useful for conceptualizing shared interpretation and the process by which people coordinate their interpretations. This provides a framework for addressing interpretative heterogeneity when studying attitudinal or behavioral variance. We conclude by highlighting how recent advances in computational linguistics have opened exciting new possibilities for the study of interpretation, and suggest several avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status consumption, making boundary-crossing a source of cultural capital. Consequently, the right to adopt a practice from a culture that is not one's own is determined on the basis of the costs and benefits one is presumed to accrue. People express disapproval at boundary-crossing if they believe it devalues or extracts value at the expense of the target culture. We call this process cultural tariffing. We test our theory in a between-subject experimental design, demonstrating that individuals who enjoy a privileged social position, as inferred from their social identity or socioeconomic status, have less normative latitude to cross cultural boundaries. This is explained by perceptions that these actors are either devaluing or exploiting the target culture. While symbolic boundaries and cultural distinction theories are inconsistent with our results, we find that Americans who are disenchanted about group-based social mobility are the most likely to be outraged by cultural boundary-crossing. Cultural tariffing, we therefore posit, is a form of symbolic redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people establish and maintain cultural fit with an organization? Prior research has offered two perspectives that have heretofore been conceptually disconnected. One focuses on personal values, whereas another emphasizes perceptions of the cultural code. We develop a theoretical account that integrates these approaches by linking them to distinct mechanisms and behavioral consequences of cultural fit. We propose that value congruence—the match between one's values and those that prevail in an organization—relates to the mechanism of group attachment and shapes behavior when one periodically steps back from day-to-day interactions, assesses one's identification with an organization, and determines whether to stay or voluntarily depart. In contrast, we argue that perceptual congruence—the degree to which one implicitly understands an organization's prevailing values and norms—relates to the mechanism of interpersonal coordination and influences behavior when one engages in routine peer interactions. Accordingly, we theorize that these two forms of cultural fit relate to distinct behaviors, voluntary exit and linguistic conformity with peers, respectively. Drawing on email and survey data from a midsized technology firm, we find support for our theory and discuss the implications of our findings for research on person-culture fit, dual-process models of culture and cognition, and the pairing of surveys with digital trace data. Funding: This work was supported by the Berkeley Culture Center, the Cortese Distinguished Chair in Management, the Grether Chair of Business Administration and Public Policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exposed batch cultures of the bacterium Escherichia coli to a high concentration of ampicillin (100 µg [ml.sup.-1]), which is 15 times greater than the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), in [...], The great therapeutic achievements of antibiotics have been dramatically undercut by the evolution of bacterial strategies that overcome antibiotic stress (1,2). These strategies fall into two classes. 'Resistance' makes it possible for a microorganism to grow in the constant presence of the antibiotic, provided that the concentration of the antibiotic is not too high. 'Tolerance' allows a microorganism to survive antibiotic treatment, even at high antibiotic concentrations, as long as the duration of the treatment is limited. Although both resistance and tolerance are important reasons for the failure of antibiotic treatments (3-6), the evolution of resistance (7-9) is much better understood than that of tolerance. Here we followed the evolution of bacterial populations under intermittent exposure to the high concentrations of antibiotics used in the clinic and characterized the evolved strains in terms of both resistance and tolerance. We found that all strains adapted by specific genetic mutations, which became fixed in the evolved populations. By monitoring the phenotypic changes at the population and single-cell levels, we found that the first adaptive change to antibiotic stress was the development of tolerance through a major adjustment in the single-cell lag-time distribution, without a change in resistance. Strikingly, we found that the lag time of bacteria before regrowth was optimized to match the duration of the antibiotic-exposure interval. Whole genome sequencing of the evolved strains and restoration of the wild-type alleles allowed us to identify target genes involved in this antibiotic-driven phenotype: 'tolerance by lag' (tbl). Better understanding of lag-time evolution as a key determinant of the survival of bacterial populations under high antibiotic concentrations could lead to new approaches to impeding the evolution of antibiotic resistance.