Siobhan O'Mahony

Profile Summary

• Professor O’Mahony’s research explores how technical and creative projects organize. She has examined high technology contractors, open source programmers, artists, music producers, internet startups and corporate consortiums. She is interested in how people create organizations that promote innovation, creativity and growth without replicating the bureaucratic structures they strive to avoid. Dr. O’Mahony’s research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Research Policy, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Industry and Innovation, and the Journal of Management and Governance. A former consultant with Price Waterhouse LLP and Electronic Data Systems, she has consulted to organizations such as IDEO, the Global Business Network, Novell, Cap Gemini, Proquest, Microsoft, McDonald Investments, and the European Union. Her current research examines how a nonprofit organization certifying privacy and trust practices on the Internet transitions to a venture backed startup. Dr. O’Mahony also serves as the DBA liaison for the Strategy and Innovation group.
  

Education

Stanford University
Ph.D, Management Science and Engineering, 2002

Cornell University
M.P.A, Science and Technology Policy, 1993

Cornell University
B.S., Industrial Labor Relations, 1991

Current Courses

GSM SI 839 A1 Design and Innovation Strategy

GSM SI 839 F1 Design and Innovation Strategy

SMG SI 451 A1 Organizing for Design and Innovation

Research Interests

• Organizing for innovation; Design and business; Managing and leading technical communities, Network and distributed models of innovation; Coordinating knowledge and creative work.

Selected Publications

Articles

Refereed

" Public Policy and Management Research: Finding the Common Ground." Academy of Management Journal (December 2009) We write this introduction at what we hope will be the nadir of the worst economic downturn, indeed the biggest economic and institutional crisis facing the U.S. and world since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis has triggered debates that ought to have struck right at the heart of the study of management. Now is the time to see how management research might inform efforts to rebuild our economies, institutions, and organizations. From the recent crisis will come the rebuilding of businesses and institutions, and the birth of new ones. Management research will only inform this process if we reframe and broaden the dominant paradigm guiding management research. Gaining influence in policy debates will require more careful forethought as to the research subjects we choose and the design of our research programs as well as more direct interaction with the policy making community. We encourage management scholars to reframe their work in ways that can bring to bear their comparative advantage—sound theoretical and empirical research in the organizational domain—on short term and long term public policy challenges and debates.

"Differentiating Organizational Boundaries" Research in the Sociology of Organizations 26 (2009): 183-220 Although, extant theory has illuminated conditions under which organizations mimic each other in form and practice, little research examines how organizations seek to differentiate themselves from conventional forms. Our comparative ethnographic studies examine how the Burning Man and Open Source communities developed organizations to help coordinate the production of an annual temporary arts event and nonproprietary, freely distributed software. Both communities sought to differentiate their organizations from reference groups, but this was not a sufficient condition for sustaining organizational novelty. We found that the ability to pursue a differentiated strategy was moderated by environmental conditions. By exploring the organizing decisions that each community made at two critical boundaries: one defining individuals’ relationship with the organization; the second defining the organization’s relationship with the market, we show how organizing practices were recombined from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors in unexpected, novel ways. This comparative research contributes a grounded theoretical explanation of organizational innovation that adjudicates between differentiation and environmental conditions.

"Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects" Administrative Science Quarterly (2009) One body of research treats brokers as strategic arbitrageurs extracting advantage from their position, while another body of research paints brokers as relational experts connecting others to foster creativity and innovation. Because both conceptions are static, they fail to capture how brokerage evolves throughout the creative process. With an ethnographic study of music producers, we find that creative brokerage involves blending both approaches depending on the type of ambiguity involved. Producers leveraged their brokerage role not just for individual gain but to integrate project contributors’ ideas while maintaining project support. In doing so, they moved between these two ideal conceptions of brokerage and broke from them - to foster a collective creative outcome.

"Boundary Organizations: Enabling Collaboration Among Unexpected Allies" Administrative Science Quarterly 53 (3) (September 2008): 422-459 Our research examines how parties challenging established social systems collaborate with defenders of those systems to achieve mutual goals. With field interviews and observations from four community projects in the open-source movement, we examine how these projects collaborated with firms defending proprietary approaches to software development. Drawing on social movement and organizational theory, we explain how challenging parties not only mobilize to achieve their goals but how they are able to transform contestation into collaboration. Open-source projects and firms held divergent interests but discovered areas of convergent interest and were able to adapt their organizing practices to collaborate through the creation of a boundary organization. By showing how boundary organizations help challengers and defenders manage four critical domains of organizing practices—governance, membership, ownership, and control over production—we provide analytic levers for determining when boundary organizations work. At the same time, we reveal the subsequent triadic role structure that unfolded among communities, the boundary organizations they designed, and firms.

"Exploring the Foundations of Cumulative Innovation: Implications for Organization Science" Organization Science 18 (6) (November 2007): 1006-1021 Organizational theorists have built a deep understanding of the conditions affecting knowledge sharing. However, for innovation to occur, knowledge must not just be shared, but also reused, recombined, and accumulated. Such accumulation is not inherent to the innovation process but can be either supported or limited by the context in which it occurs. We propose a framework arguing that three conditions shape this context: disclosure, access, and rewards. We show how these conditions operate at the institutional, field, community, and organizational levels. Our framework highlights how when innovators encounter barriers to the accumulation of knowledge, their solutions are often organizational ones rather than legal ones. This suggests an expanding terrain for organizational scholars interested in debates often dominated by law and economics.

"The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community" Academy of Management Journal 50 (5) (April 2007): 1079-1106 Little is known about how communities producing collective goods govern themselves. In a multi-method study of one open source software community, we found that members developed a shared basis of formal authority but limited it with democratic mechanisms that enabled experimentation with shifting conceptions of authority over time. When members settled on a shared conception of authority, it was more expansive than their original design. A statistical test of the predictors of leadership reinforced this finding. By blending bureaucratic and democratic mechanisms, the governance system evolved with the community’s changing conceptions of authority.

"Stretchwork: Managing the Career Progression Paradox in External Labor Markets" Academy of Management Journal 49 (5) (2006): 918-941 Changes in employment relationships have diminished the degree to which internal labor markets shape careers. Using comparative field studies, we examine how contract workers try to achieve career progression without the benefit of organizational guidance. Specifically, we examine how contract workers manage the career progression paradox: the problem of finding a job without prior experience. “Stretchwork” bridging from proven competencies to new ones helps reconcile this paradox. We identify four tactics used to acquire stretchwork, explore the conditions affecting the success of those tactics, and offer theoretical implications for career progression in external labor markets.

"Guarding the commons: how community managed software projects protect their work" Research Policy 32 (2003): 1179-1198 Theorists often speculate why open source and free software project contributors give theirwork away. Although contributors make their work publicly available, they do not forfeit their rights to it. Community managed software projects protect their work by using several legal and normative tactics, which should not be conflated with a disregard for or neglect of intellectual property rights. These tactics allow a project’s intellectual property to be publicly and freely available and yet, governable. Exploration of this seemingly contradictory state may provide new insight into governance models for the management of digital intellectual property.

"Do Digital Telecommunications Affect Work and Organization? The State of our Knowledge" Research in Organizational Behavior 21 (1999): 125-161

Academic Positions

• 2009 - present, Associate Professor, Boston University

• 2007 - 2009, Assistant Professor, University of California at Davis Graduate School of Management

• 2002 - 2007, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

Nonacademic Positions

• 1995 - 1997, Project Manager, Electronic Data Systems

• 1993 - 1995, Senior Consultant, Price Waterhouse LLP

Honors & Awards

• Academy of Management 2006 Proceedings Best Paper Award

• 2005 American Sociological Association, Computer Information Technology Division Outstanding Paper Award

• Social Science Research Council Fellow