Boards Strategizing in Liminal Spaces: Process and Practice, Formal and Informal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Boards operate notionally in a liminal, nonhierarchical space, neither inside the company nor outside, creating ambiguity between service and control functions and fostering tolerance of it. With repeated corporate governance crises, however, new prescriptions institutionalized in law, regulation, and codes of conduct have added significance to the control side, marked by monitoring and compliance tasks. Taking a cue from the strategy process and strategy-as-practice literature, this study revisits the work of directors on the service side: their engagement in strategizing. Formalization of board processes has led to greater structure and reduced the liminality of the board. Using interviews with 20 directors from a range of organization types, this study finds that directors experiment respond to increased institutionalization of board practice by seeking out new liminal spaces and informal practices, with implications for theory of boards, board activities, and public policy.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".