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Bringing together the ideas from Marx's and Bourdieu's institutional treatments of capital and Feld's theory of focused organization of social ties, we explore the circulation of social capital through learning as the mechanism of its reproduction in an educational setting. We assess the magnitude of this phenomenon in a particular case of a year-long executive education program for senior managers of a large Russian bank and test the conditions under which it is more likely to occur. An empirical analysis shows that joint learning activities are important in the reproduction of social capital. Their importance increases as learning activities become more constraining: the more joint engagement in learning is required, the more likely a social tie to form, which is consistent with Feld's theory. As a complement to Feld, we argue theoretically and confirm empirically that joint exogenous engagement in learning is as important for the maintenance of a preexisting tie as for the formation of a new one in the case of a highconstraining educational focus. On contrary, a low-constraining educational focus has a smaller effect on the maintenance of preexisting ties than on the creation of new ones. Additional analysis shows that the difference is due to the propensity of preexisting ties to focus themselves around a variety of other joint activities when the activities imposed by the educational focus are voluntary. We discuss theoretical and empirical implications of these findings for research on the reproduction of social capital in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization theorists have long claimed that organizational knowledge is nontechnological, in part, because it is unpatentable. The claim rests on the assumption that organizational knowledge is embodied in persons and contexts rather than in context-free practical tools. However, over the last three decades information and communication technologies gradually expanded the universe of tools for embodying organizational knowledge which, in principle, can be patented. To provide the first empirical evidence regarding the patentability of organizational knowledge, we trained two machine learning algorithms to identify a population of 205,434 patent applications for organizational technologies (OrgTech) and, among them, 141,285 applications that use organizational knowledge accumulated over the 20th century. Our event history analysis of the probability of patenting an OrgTech invention shows that the presence of organizational knowledge decreases the probability of patent allowance unless it includes a practical tool in addition to abstract ideas about organizing. We frame these findings as the embodiment problem: The present-day digital transformation places organizational innovations in the realm of high tech and turns the debate about organizational technologies into the challenge of designing practical organizational tools that embody big ideas about organizing. We outline an agenda for patent-based research on OrgTech as an emerging phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent literature documents a major shift in the workplace towards a market-driven employment relationship which makes labor management by fiat obsolete. The paper explores innovative practices for securing labor supply under such conditions. Specifically, I analyze how the price mechanism, organizational arrangements, and the social interactions among agents together influence telemarketing agents' labor supply behavior. I find that the role of monetary incentives is consistent with the target earnings argument; more income makes agents more eager to quit. Contracts and conventional work time, the two organizational arrangements practiced by the firm, perform as designed by greatly reducing an agent's propensity to end a shift and reversing the target earnings effect. The social interactions among agents do not have a direct effect on the agents' decision to continue working, but they do reverse the target earnings effect as well. Finally, I explore the interplay between the organizational arrangements and social interactions. Contracts are unaffected by social interactions while conventional work time is reinforced by them. Theoretical implications of these findings for the study of incomplete contracts and intra-organizational coordination mechanisms in the context of arm's-length employment relationships are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological studies of economic transactions offer valuable insights into the role of networks in managing transaction partners' uncertainty but leave aside the role of contracts in whose shadow networks often operate. The paper explores a specific labor market setting in which both incentive contracts and informal relationships help a telemarketing firm deal with uncertainties of labor supply. The analysis shows that when agents work without contracts, the cohesion of the workplace's informal network positively affects the length of an agent's work spell. The effect increases with the number of the agent's ties to the network and mitigates the negative impact of limited work hours and income targets that agents may be guided by in their quitting decisions. However, when an agent is under contract, the role of the informal structure is negligible. I conclude that in this context networks work as a substitute rather than a complement to contractual relationships. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores hiring through personal contacts in the context of the Internet. We explore whether novel community-based hiring channels on the Internet undermine the role of social networks. The analysis of unique comprehensive data on on-line hiring of sales agents in a virtual call center suggests that in comparison with community websites,personal contacts deliver more motivated applicants who more likely to complete the application process. At the same time, community websites attract as good candidates as those who are referred by the employer's current sales agents and both these channels do better than relatives and friends unaffiliated with the employer. After selection mechanisms at the application and testing stages of the hiring process are accounted for,there is no difference in the likelihood of getting a job offer among candidates recruited through personal contacts versus community websites. We conclude that virtual communities offer a new promising avenue for the dissemination of labor market information which can compete with personal channels in delivering qualified candidates. However they do not motivate their candidates to the same extent that personal channels do. The study's contributions to the literature on social networks in labor markets are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the gig economy, workers gain scheduling flexibility but lose guarantees of paid workload. Since a schedule without work has no value to workers, the size and variance of workload within an observed schedule become key dimensions of precariousness. Using detailed work data on over ten thousand agents working in a virtual call center (VCC), which pioneered a gig-based on-demand employment model fifteen years ago, we show that workers' control over their schedule does little to enhance employment security. The only simultaneous increase in size and reduction in variance of workload comes from trading off flexibility for security by making advance commitments to a specific schedule in exchange for priority in receiving calls. The case gives the first evidence of an innovative economic work arrangement ' Login Employment ' that combines formal relational contracts with informal directive control and thus becomes a mirror image of the traditional employment relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast literature on the adoption of management systems ignores the role of the language in which a system is introduced to the target audience. We show that a foreign adoption of lean production, as it is described in the extant literature, satisfies the conditions of organized anarchy, a classical behavioral perspective on organizations developed by Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972). Accordingly, employees' decisions to accept lean production follow the "garbage can" model which predicts that employees pick and choose components of lean production as they see fit, often accepting solutions but rejecting the problems that those solutions are supposed to address. We argue that the use of a foreign language exacerbates this shift in focus. To test our arguments, we study the impact of the terminology, transliterated Japanese versus invented Russian, on the acceptance of the lean production system in a large Russian retail bank and its Belorussian subsidiary. Samples of the employees in two branches, one from each bank, were randomly assigned to one of the two types of survey questionnaires, a "transliterated" Japanese or Russian one. The questions assessed the relevance of the lean system's key components to a respondent's job. Our results are consistent with the garbage can model of decision-making: the employees are more likely to identify the solutions as useful and reject the problems as irrelevant if they are offered Japanese labels than Russian ones. Also, employees find solutions more relevant than problems at an early stage of adoption in the Belorussian bank than at a later stage in the Russian one. This suggests that some order can emerge from organized anarchy as lean production takes hold in the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that formal organizational activities are a significant factor in the formation of interpersonal ties within intraorganizational networks. Working together on a specific task or working together on the same team provides a new focus that can create new ties or enrich existing ones, while the dissolution of a focus jeopardizes the relationships among the members it united. This paper argues that such conclusions are premature, because seemingly formal organizational foci prescribe activities but do not prescribe who performs them jointly with whom, leaving space for members' matching through social interactions. Little is known about how homophily, propinquity, and preexisting ties operate in foci where joint activities are strictly exogenous to social interactions. We set up an experiment in which individuals and the preexisting ties among them are randomly assigned to new foci of joint learning activities. The experiment takes place in a large Russian retail bank whose leadership rolled out a year-long educational program for 451 of its top and mid-level managers from the headquarters and regional branches, randomly divided into 8 large classroom cohorts and then, within each cohort, randomly assigned to smaller goal- oriented project teams. We find that homophily and propinquity induce ties within the random cohorts whose members maintain discretion over interaction partners. Exogenously prescribed interactions within assigned project teams increase the likelihood of a new tie formation but, at the same time, leave no room for homophily and propinquity, thereby disrupting preexisting relationships. We discuss the implications of these findings for the reproduction of social capital in organizations and, in particular, the limits of managerial interventions therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]