Why Double Standards? Investment Advice from Women

Let’s start with two facts that are not very well known. The first is that investment professionals actually share advice sometimes, although it happens in certain closed online platforms.  By investment professionals I mean people who are managing money, such as mutual fund or hedge fund managers. They are different from stock analysts, who are professional advisors, not professional investors. The second, which it bothers me even to need to write, is that some investment professionals are women. Unfortunately, women are a small minority in this field.

So when investors look at advice posted by investment professionals, do they evaluate the advice from men and women equally, or is there a double standard? This is the topic of research in Administrative Science Quarterly by Tristan Botelho and Mabel Abraham, who examined whether and when women’s advice is valued less than men’s advice. Notice how interesting this context is for examining double standards. Everyone is professional. All the advice is on securities, which means that the outcomes can be traced to see whose advice is better. (In case you wonder, there is no difference between men and women.) Oh, and this is all online, so the evaluators are reading text and thinking about the reasoning.

That does not stop double standards from appearing.  Investors could see the names of the people posting recommendations before deciding whether to open them, and they were less likely to open and look at a recommendation written by a woman. Women were about 25 percent more likely to be ignored. Female readers of this post can consider whether that sounds familiar.  Investors were especially likely to ignore female investment professionals when they had a lot of information to sift through.  This evidence matches what we already know, but it is powerful evidence from real professionals making decisions about substantial amounts of money.

Now for something we didn’t know. After seeing the advice, the investors can voluntarily rate its quality and give comments. How large was the double standard in the rating? There wasn’t any. This demonstrates an important difference in how double standards are used. They are a first-cut way of approaching someone’s value and performance, but once individuals have more time to process information and think, double standards decline and may even disappear. Whether they typically disappear in other contexts, we don’t know. Investors need to think very carefully about their decisions and may turn out to be less biased after considering a recommender’s information than people in many other roles are. Possibly they are less biased than others with significant responsibilities, such as politicians.

Botelho, T. L., & Abraham, M. 2017. Pursuing quality: How search costs and uncertainty magnify gender-based double standards in a multistage evaluation process. Administrative Science Quarterly: forthcoming.

My Kind of Fraudster: How Social Group Affects Responses to Misconduct

We know that shared identity is a tool used to gain the confidence of people before defrauding them, and we suspect that it works especially well for an identity strengthened by current discrimination or a history of persecution. Bernard Madoff’s exploitation of the Jewish identity to recruit for his Ponzi scheme is a recent example of how this is done, and many more cases exist. An interesting follow-up question has rarely been considered, though: what happens to the identity after the fraud has been discovered?

In a very creative and solid piece of research, ChristopherYenkey explores this issue in AdministrativeScience Quarterly. His case is one of a stock brokerage in Nairobi that defrauded one-quarter of its clients (about 25,000 people). The clients were from many ethnic groups, and the brokerage was clearly identified with one of them. This is a dilemma for members of the defrauding (and also defrauded) ethnic group: who should they trust, and how much? For those not part of the defrauding group, the choice is easier: after the fraud, they trusted the group affiliated with the brokerage less, and trusted the institution of stock brokerages less, so they invested less than they had previously.  This effect was strongest for ethnic groups that were rivals of the ethnic group connected with the fraud, as opposed to neutral ethnic groups.

But what about members of the ethnic group associated with the fraudulent brokerage who had been personally defrauded? They made interesting choices. Like everyone else, they invested less following the fraud—but still more than neutrals, and definitely more than rivals. Shared ethnicity cushioned the blow of the fraud. In a very promising investment opportunity that happened soon after the fraud, those with shared ethnicity who had been defrauded invested more than the others, suggesting that they may have been most confident about trying to recover their lost money through investments.

The investors of different ethnicities also showed other reactions to the fraud, such as starting to doubt brokerages and placing more investments through banks, which could also act as stock market intermediaries. Naturally the choice between organizational forms is not as personal as the choice of ethnicity to transact with, so the movement away from brokerages was seen for all ethnic groups. Still, it was again the rival ethnic groups that moved the most, suggesting that the experience of being defrauded had the biggest impact on their future actions.

Trust is personal, which is why social groups can make it easier. Fraud is also a very personal experience, and affront, and reactions to it show very clearly how boundaries in our society affect people’s responses to each other and to organizations.

PS: I chose not to mention the name of the ethnic group controlling the fraudulent brokerage in this post. Kenya is a place where ethnic relations are sensitive because of power differences and a history that involves violent events as well as periods of peace.

Yenkey, Christopher B. 2017. Fraud and Market Participation:Social Relations as a Moderator of Organizational Misconduct. AdministrativeScience Quarterly, forthcoming.  

Our Secret Environmentalism: We Don’t Say We Are Sustainable

Firms are under continued pressure to certify themselves as virtuous, good, effective, high quality, and any number of other positive things. Often they display the certification prominently. For example, if you type “General Motors ISO” or “General Electric ISO” into Google, it will fill in “9001,” because both companies display prominently on the web that they are ISO 9001 certified.

There is an interesting exception to this. Many firms are certified as environmentally responsible through the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, but four out of ten DJSI firms do not display this certification. Why would a firm with such a positive achievement not promote it? Chad Carlos and Ben Lewis have a new article in Administrative Science Quarterly that looks at the reasons for this silence, and they find that it is a strategic silence. They are silent because it is a way of avoiding attention, and attention to sustainability could be risky for the firm.

Firms don’t announce why they stay silent about an environmental certification, of course, but we can see how they behave. Carlos and Lewis found that they are more likely to invoke strategic silence if they run the risk of looking like hypocrites. The main problem for firms is to lose their reputation through being called out as less sustainable than they claim to be or should be. So, we should expect firms that have good environmental reputations to be more concerned about looking bad if their commitment to the environment is called into question. That is exactly what Carlos and Lewis found.

Shareholders can file resolutions against firm actions that go against sustainability. If they do, and if the firm has a good environmental reputation to begin with, the firm is especially likely to be strategically silent about the DJSI certification. Other stakeholders can target the firms through boycotts, demonstrations, and other protest actions. If they do, and if the firm has a good environmental reputation to begin with, the firm is likely to be strategically silent about the certification. It’s clear that those firms already seen as good on environmental issues are very careful not to have this reputation damaged by any charges of being hypocritical. That means sometimes keeping the sustainability certification out of sight, to avoid attracting attention.

The evidence is interesting because certification is usually an initiative to do three things: make firms follow a standard, make firms influence others to follow the standard, and make firms compete to beat the standard. The firms that were secret environmentalists broke this chain by only doing the first of these three steps. Through their strategic silence they did not influence other firms, and they did not compete to be the most environmental either. Many try to influence firms, for many purposes, but it is important to keep in mind that firms also want control over what they do, and they have a wide range of actions to escape the control of others.

Carlos, W. Chad and Lewis, Ben W. 2017. Strategic Silence: Withholding Certification Status as a Hypocrisy Avoidance Tactic. Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming. 

Since the Roman Empire: Organizations Engage History to Make Changes

How to change an organization? The answer to this question is made surprisingly difficult by all those who think that change is unnecessary, change is risky, and in any case it should be change that favors their favorite option; nothing else will do. Using history to promote a change effort is an old trick that makes a lot of sense, because it is a way of claiming that change is actually a return to a golden age. And history can be edited in many ways, so it is a very flexible trick. Managers use it.

But can it be more than a managerial trick to manipulate the organization? New research by Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz in Administrative Science Quarterly shows how change can be created in a more autonomous fashion by employees reaching back into the organizational history. The research follows two distinct and independent occasions that Carlsberg brewery used its old motto, the latin phrase semper ardens (always burning) to foster change. In each case the users were different and the change was different, but the old and flexible motto proved a way to successfully make changes with less controversy. In one case, a group of master brewers working on their own used it to formulate, gain acceptance for, and launch a craft beer line, in stark contrast to the industrial beer that was the core of Carlsberg. In the other, it was proposed by consultants seeking to create a unifying statement for Carlsberg, which had become large and diverse through recent mergers,and then promoted internally in the organization.

Even though these processes were unrelated, they followed a remarkably similar sequence.  The steps are described in detail in the paper, but here I want to focus on the two final ones: renewing and re-embedding. Renewing is central when history is used to motivate change, because the new activities are never exact equivalents of the historical record. Indeed, the historical record can be unclear or even contradictory, so renewal is needed. Semper ardens was a phrase favored by the second generation Carlsberg owner, but did not have any concrete brewing practices associated with it. But the master brewer team reached back into the brewing recipes from that time period, and combined these with the passion for improvement expressed through the “always burning” meaning to create beers that were distinct in taste and packaging.  

Re-embedding is actions taken to give the referral to history endurance in the organization. This is needed because the change attempts are frequent and often override previous ones, including those backed by history, so without embedding changes may become temporary. The master brewer team were able to embed semper ardens into the organization well enough that it lived on in a new craft brewery project even after the beer using it as a label was discontinued, and as a marker of distinction used when announcing extraordinary team efforts or noteworthy events. Thus the motto lived on in its renewed form of encouraging a passion for improvement at Carlsberg. And passion for improvement is, we might agree, useful both for organizations in general and for beer brewers specifically.

Hatch, Mary Jo and Majken Schultz. 2017. Toward a Theory of Using History Authentically: Historicizing in the Carlsberg Group. Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming. 

Fertilizing Green Chemistry: How an Occupation Renews Itself

Green chemistry is a set of principles to make chemistry healthier, safer, and more environmental. It has made significant changes in how chemistry is done, and in a way that is very different from how we usually think of reforms in organizations. Usually we think of a powerful outside actor starting reform, like the state, not individuals in an occupation. Usually we think of reforms as a series of prescribed practices, not as principles that each actor translates into practices. With no powerful actor to prescribe and no practice to prescribe, it seems like a puzzle that green chemistry could even become important. How did it happen?

The answer is connected to a set of mechanisms that describe how occupations can change themselves, and is described in a paper by Howard-Grenville, Nelson, Earle, Haack, and Young in Administrative Science Quarterly. The method behind the mechanisms is based on two ideas: change is voluntary, and the people in the occupations are highly diverse. As a result, many people with different views and professional practices need to be persuaded. This is a common problem for social movements that seek to reform occupations from inside, so it is broader than the specific case of green chemistry. And, it is a complicated problem too, as green chemistry showed.

The advocates of green chemistry used three methods: 1) portraying it as normal, 2) explaining how it was morally right, and 3) saying it was a pragmatic approach. Each of these three methods had limited success because they were tailored to specific chemist roles, but in total they were effective because they covered key roles in the occupation. Normal portrayals matched the chemistry professionals as being innovators. Moralizing worked through the teaching role that many of them had. Pragmatic matches their role is industrial problem solvers.  Any chemistry professional might spend some time in each of these roles, and some were heavily dedicated to one of them, making them open to influence through these different methods.

But using three methods has one disadvantage: they are inconsistent, and this is easy to recognize. The inconsistency of the methods also led to inconsistency in the principles – imagine how much stricter the moral approach was – and lack of clarity in how one could do green chemistry. However, the inconsistency was not enough to make green chemistry fail. Because many chemistry professionals accepted these principles, as a result of any of the three methods of persuasion, they instead turned their focus on how to make them consistent – either by finding ways to integrate them, or by finding ways of switching focus depending on circumstances.

This is interesting because it suggests that internal reform does not work the same way as a political movement. Political movements thrive on apparent consistency in messaging and principles, and will typically try to solve (or deny) inconsistency before turning to advocacy. Occupational movements do not need consistent messages, but rather that each individual occupation member is convinced. They will later find ways to solve the inconsistency, because occupational members – unlike political movements – encounter inconsistency in their daily work and are used to finding solutions. Green chemistry has succeeded through a combination of persuasion methods followed by problem solving.

Howard-Grenville, J., Nelson, A.J.,Earle, A.G., Haack, J.A., Young, D.M. (2017). “If Chemists Don’t Do It, Who Is Going To?” Peer-driven Occupational Change and the Emergence of Green Chemistry. Administrative Science Quarterly.

War, Exploration, and Interference: The Rise of Amateur Broadcasters

In daily life we know that professionals rule the roost. Anything remotely important is done by a profession with restricted access to practice and many rules for practitioners -- or it is done illegitimately. Did you undergo medical treatment last time you were ill, or did you see a homeopath? Many activities that seem easier and safer also take on profession-like features. Espresso making is done by a high-pressure machine, but there is still a barista profession with formal training and certification. Researchers also have been interested in professions, especially because their effects range from regulating the safety and quality of important service (again, think doctors) to restricting access to work in a way that looks like a power grab (pick your favorite example).

So is there room for non-professionals to get things done? Gregoire Croidieu and Phillip Kim answer that question in a recent article in Administrative Science Quarterly, looking at the key role of amateurs in the development of radio broadcasting in the US. They show that amateurs can get a significant role if the right conditions are in place, even as professionals, companies, and the state seek to push them to the margins. How? Well, that’s where the war, polar exploration, and interference come in.

Let’s start with interference. Technically that is what happens when radio transmitters are near each other in signal spectrum and physical space, and distort each other’s transmissions. It was a major reason that many sought to limit access to the airwaves of amateurs, especially those building their own transmitters and behaving independently from the profession. Socially the limitation of access was also a form of interference – trying to make it hard to be an amateur. But radio amateurs were enthusiastically building up their lay expertise and using it, legally or not. Except for the WWI years, they could be given access as registered radio operators.

That brings us to the war. WWI was when radio amateurs were blocked from the airwaves, with security given as the reason, but it did not mean that they stopped broadcasting. They signed up for military service instead, and fully half of the military radio operators were originally amateurs. This was when the state recognized the value of the lay experts, and took advantage of their skills. After the war, they were supposed to return to their old status as marginal actors, more than before (rising to 20,000 in 1922), but still regulated and limited. Professional radio operators still campaigned against amateurs, seeing them as having little value.

This is where the polar explorations come into play. The amateurs were many, highly skilled, and willing to experiment, and they soon registered a series of technical accomplishments – including shortwave communications with the North Pole, which had been thought impossible. The amateurs, through their lay expertise, became leaders in radio. This role soon turned into the start of radio as an industry and as lay culture, because the establishment of radio stations for communicating to many – instead of point-to-point – happened in parallel. Radio ownership and interest in radio listening rose also, and the radio broadcasting industry eventually grew to as many radio stations as there were licensed radio operators in 1921.

War, exploration, and interference were three of the elements that brought amateurs to the forefront of radio, against the resistance of professionals, companies, and the state. Clearly it was not an easy process, and it took a lot of interest to gather the necessary momentum. Does this show that amateurs have a clear role in society, or that they can overcome the odds under special circumstances? We clearly need to learn more about this so we can understand when activities become professionalized, and when they are open to amateurs.


Croidieu, G., Kim, P.H. (2017). Labor of Love: Amateurs and Lay-expertise Legitimation in the Early U.S. Radio Field. Administrative Science Quarterly

Albert Dunlap Style Likability: Those Who Seek Flattery Get Enemies

I will start this post with an old story. CEO of Sunbeam Corp., Albert Dunlap, known as an expert in turning around troubled firms and selling them for a profit, was sued by the SEC in 2001 for accounting fraud. He was eventually barred from serving as an officer or director in any company, plus ordered to pay investors defrauded money in a class-action lawsuit.  Albert Dunlap was clearly someone in need of flattery, not just money, as he had the classical flattery-sickness symptom of a book written to celebrate his successes (see also his picture!). How he managed things internally in each firm he led is disputed, but much was said about his intimidation of other managers, who probably would conclude that a lot of flattery and ingratiation might help their career. Of course, managers still did better than employees, because his signature move in turning firms around was mass layoffs.

An interesting detail of his downfall was that managers around him were quick to release information that helped the investigation, which is distinct from the many firms with management teams that do all they can to deter and obstruct investigators. Is there a systematic reason for this difference? Possibly. A recent article in Administrative Science Quarterly by Gareth Keeves, James Westphal, and Michael McDonald looks at what happens when managers ingratiate their CEO through flattery and other tools. Their findings are interesting. First, managers who flatter lose their liking of the CEO. Somehow when people artificially put others on a pedestal they also start looking down on them.

Second, managers who flatter may go on to undermine the CEO. The light-handed version of this is to undermine the CEO’s messages to journalists, as this research showed. The heavy-handed version is what happened to Albert Dunlap. Among other events, his comptroller reported that he had been pushing for accounting practices that crossed the legal boundary, and sales people were quick to report “channel stuffing.” Channel stuffing is to sell too many goods and selling them too early, which is not illegal in itself (the sales channel can return unsold goods, so it is safe for them), but it is illegal when the sales are accounted as if they were final.  Those were practices that the SEC (and some investors) suspected, and that meant that what looked like a turnaround in sales and profits was actually a fraudulent scheme.

Seeking flattery is never thought of as a good thing. What we now know is that it also triggers undermining, and for those who have real weaknesses – like a CEO engaged in fraud – that undermining can be very consequential.

Keeves, G. D., Westphal, J. D., &McDonald, M. L. 2017. Those Closest Wield the Sharpest Knife: How Ingratiation Leads to Resentment and Undermining of the CEO. Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming.