Brokering a Stick for a Hammer (or a Rock): Inter-Board-Committee Cooptation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental threats do not affect all groups equally within an organization. Due to this uneven external pressure, only certain groups engage in problemistic search, limiting the pool of solutions to those that are within the affected group’s control. When an affected group does not have a viable solution, we argue that the group will seek access to another group’s set of solutions. Melding the BTF framework with work on brokers, we posit that tertius iungens brokers who connect the affected and unaffected groups may use their coordinating ability to coopt one group to advantage another. We study this dynamic in the context of board committees following a peer restatement event. Peer restatements constitute a legitimacy threat that directly affects the audit committee of the focal firm. Unable to signal legitimacy themselves, the audit committee may seek to coopt the decisions of the compensation and nomination committees, which control more visible signals of legitimacy: CEO compensation and new director appointments. They accomplish this through multi-committee directors (MCDs), who link the audit committee with one of the other two. Notably, only MCDs with tertius iungens abilities are successful. We test and find evidence for inter-committee cooptation. Audit-compensation cooptation results in a decrease in CEO compensation, while audit-nomination cooptation results in new director appointments that change the composition of the board to the advantage of the audit committee. Importantly, this latter cooptation creates an endogenous feedback loop, facilitating coordination–and further cooptation–should the audit committee encounter a similar threat in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".