About

Forrest S Briscoe is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of organization theory and strategic management. His research explores how companies and institutions evolve to reflect a changing society, how social movements influence organizations, and how employment practices affect people's careers and societal inequality. His work has been published in academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Industrial & Labor Relations Review, and Strategic Management Journal, and has been covered in media outlets including the Financial Times, Forbes, and Fast Company. Forrest has served as an Associate Editor for ASQ and the Academy of Management Annals, and as the Chair of the Organization & Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management. Prior to his current position, he was a Professor of Management at Penn State University's Smeal College of Business. His industry experience includes consulting for John Snow Inc. in Boston, focusing on healthcare, automotive industries, and environmental strategy and implementation. He holds a PhD in Management from MIT Sloan, a BA in Environmental Sciences from Harvard College, and an IB Diploma from San Diego High School.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Public relations
• Business
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Internet privacy
• Biology
• Law
• Finance
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Seeking Greener Pastures: Employee Turnover Following Corporate Stakeholder Violations

  Academy of Management Journal · 2026-01-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Are employees willing to leave when their employer violates societal norms? We develop an event-based framework for understanding employee turnover in response to stakeholder violations—publicly announced, regulator-sanctioned harms to stakeholders. We theorize that intense violations prompt some employees to reassess their affiliation due to reputational concerns, especially when violations are broad in scope, occur in rapid succession, or diverge from past patterns. These features increase the likelihood that observers, including peers and future employers, will view the misconduct as systemic, elevating reputational risk for those who remain. Using eight years of job history data from 735 large U.S. public companies, sourced from LinkedIn by Revelio Labs, we find that violations amounting to 5% of a company’s annual revenues translate into a 3.93% increase in employee turnover. Turnover rates rise further when violations are broad, rapid, or historically atypical. Departing employees tend to join firms with fewer prior violations, indicating a form of values-based sorting. We also estimate the financial toll of violation-induced turnover for representative firms in our sample. Our findings offer a new lens on stakeholder violations as organizational events that drive interorganizational migration.

  PublisherDOI

• Interpreting Violence: How Community Context Shapes Corporate Responses to Street Protests

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2026-02-19

  articleOpen access1st author

  Violence that erupts in communities invites complex interpretations that can create a dilemma for business leaders about how to respond. Investigating how organizations respond to violence in protests, we build on the community embeddedness literature and propose that business leaders’ responses to protest violence depend on their perceptions of whether the violence is justified. Leaders may view reported protest violence as evidence of either social disorder or a valid grievance in the community where the violence occurs and where their companies are headquartered. We theorize that business leaders’ interpretations of violence are influenced by their community’s recent history: A history of protest violence unrelated to the social cause underlying the current protest weakens the managerial perception that the social issue is relevant to the community, while a history of grievance-validating events strengthens this perception. Using hand-collected data on corporate announcements following the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, we find that firms are less likely to announce diversity actions in response to reported protest violence in communities marked by persistent violence in previous non-BLM protests, but they are more likely to do so in communities with records of more police shootings. These same community conditions also shape the effect of violence on whether firms decide to publicly endorse the movement when they announce their corporate actions. Demonstrating that violence reshapes the ways that organizations respond to protests, we discuss the implications of our findings for research on violence, social movements, and corporate activism.

  PublisherDOI

• How Ideologically Opposed Stakeholders Influence Organizational Practice Adoption: Theory and Evidence from the Diffusion of Domestic Partner Benefits in Higher Education

  Organization Science · 2025-05-05 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  This study investigates the concept of ideologically opposed stakeholders and its implications for the adoption and justification of contentious organizational practices. When organizations face stakeholders who oppose the ideological content of a new organizational practice, we theorize that this opposition causes organizations to emulate prior adopters whose animating values resonate with these opposed stakeholders. We further argue that if they adopt the practice that their stakeholders oppose, such organizations will be more apt to rhetorically justify the practice in a way that resonates with those opposed stakeholders’ values. Using the adoption of same-sex domestic partner benefits among U.S. public universities as our empirical setting, we find support for these ideas. When universities have conservative state policymakers (a key opposed stakeholder), this reality amplifies the university’s emulation of proximally headquartered for-profit corporations and at the same time, weakens their emulation of other universities in their intercollegiate sports network. Universities facing conservative policymakers are also more likely to issue market-based (as opposed to social equity-based) justifications when announcing domestic partner benefits adoption. These findings contribute to organizational research on diffusion, political ideology, stakeholders, and nonmarket strategy. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17219 .

  PublisherDOI

• Genetic Privacy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• New Insights from Career Histories: Advancement, Diversity, and Social Performance

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Novel large-scale, individual-level career history data have opened up new ways to study workforce composition, leadership trajectories, and organizational outcomes. This symposium presents four studies that use these data to examine how both external events and internal organizational conditions shape opportunity and diversity within firms. One study finds that while the Black Lives Matter movement leads to a short-term increase in the hiring of junior Black employees, this effect fades quickly, raising questions about lasting change. Another shows that women are less likely than men to present themselves as leaders on professional platforms, and that this gap is predicted by local social norms, suggesting that societal and organizational factors influence how individuals display their qualifications. A third paper identifies how organizational features cause underrepresented groups to use internal and external mobility differently than majority group members. A final paper explores the career histories of executives with government experience, finding that these executives may instill a mission mindset in firms, increasing their social performance. Together, these papers use newly available career data to offer evidence on where differences in opportunities persist, how leadership pipelines evolve, and how larger societal contexts play a role. This symposium underscores the potential of rich career history data to deepen our understanding of careers, organizations, and the broader social forces that shape them. BLM Movement and Workplace Racial Inequality Author: Simeng Wang; Columbia Business School Author: Letian Zhang; Harvard Business School Author: Yoongjae Shin; Harvard Business School Mission Mindset in the Upper Echelon Author: Forrest Briscoe; Cornell University Author: Thomas John Fewer; Rutgers University When do women present themselves as leaders? Author: Alan M. Benson; University of Minnesota Premium or Penalty? Differential Effects of Gender and Race on Promotions Author: Nathan Barrymore; McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin

  PublisherDOI

• YouGenes Inc.: Sale of a Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Venture 1

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• How Ideologically Opposed Stakeholders Influence Organizational Practice Adoption

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  This study investigates the concept of ideologically opposed stakeholders and its implications for the adoption and justification of contentious organizational practices. When organizations face stakeholders who oppose the ideological content of a new organizational practice, we theorize that this opposition causes organizations to emulate prior adopters whose animating values resonate with these opposed stakeholders. We further argue that if they adopt the practice that their stakeholders oppose, such organizations will be more apt to rhetorically justify the practice in a way that resonates with those opposed stakeholders’ values. Using the adoption of same-sex domestic partner benefits among US public universities as our empirical setting, we find support for these ideas. When universities have conservative state legislatures (a key opposed stakeholder), this reality amplifies the university’s emulation of proximally headquartered for-profit corporations, and, at the same time, weakens their emulation of other universities in their inter-collegiate sports network. Universities facing conservative legislatures are also more likely to issue market-based (as opposed to social equity-based) justifications when announcing domestic partner benefits adoption. These findings contribute to organizational research on diffusion, political ideology, stakeholders, and non-market strategy.

  PublisherDOI

• Artificial Intelligence: Disrupting Work and Destabilizing Social Processes

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  This presenter symposium advances our scholarly understanding of the unintended consequences of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in and around organizations. Through five papers, we unpack several emergent concerns of AI use: how Large Language Models could create labor market inequalities, AI's paradoxical undermining of professional decision-making, the deterioration of grievance authenticity in AI-based social activism, AI's homogenizing effects on entrepreneurial ideation, and how corporate control of AI systems compromises scholarly independence. Together, these papers demonstrate how AI is disrupting work and destabilizing social processes. The Uneven Impact of Large Language Models on Labor Market Dynamics Author: Paul Merritt; Cornell University Author: Ben A Rissing; Cornell University Generative AI as a Power Persuader: How GenAI Disrupts Professionals’ Ability to Interrogate it Author: Steven Randazzo; Author: Akshita Joshi; Author: Katherine C. Kellogg; Author: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf; Author: Fabrizio Dell'Acqua; Harvard Business School Author: Francois Candelon; Author: Karim R. Lakhani; Harvard Business School Authenticity in Social Activism: The Case of AI-Based Social Media Bots Author: Luis Hillebrand; University of Geneva Author: Forrest Briscoe; Cornell University The Effects of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Theorizing Author: Sung Ho Park; University of Oregon Author: Alex Michael Murray; University of Oregon Corporate Empiricism: How Controlling AI Reshapes Knowledge Production Author: Christine Moser; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Author: Gazi Islam; Grenoble Ecole de Management

  PublisherDOI

• Politics, Governance, and Leadership: What Can we Learn from the Academy of Management's Response to EO13769?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Navigating Political Polarization: Organizational Challenges and Strategic Responses

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  This symposium showcases current research projects on how political polarization shapes firms' strategies and performance. While most attention has focused on the societal repercussions of political polarization, far less research has focused on its impact on organizational strategies and outcomes. By spanning theoretical traditions and levels of analyses, the papers assembled in this symposium tackle this question, examining how polarization reshapes stakeholder relationships and corporate nonmarket strategies, influencing economic outcomes and presenting new challenges for firms navigating these shifts. They also explore how organizational practices spread in a polarized context, challenging the notion that institutionalization leads to uniformity. Finally, they offer new insights on how countermovements unfold within polarized sociopolitical contexts, strategically targeting and influencing corporations. Great(er) Expectations: Nonmarket Strategy in an Age of Affective Polarization Author: Timothy Werner; U. of Texas at Austin Author: Joel Adam Cobb; U. of Texas at Austin Author: Christopher Bruno; Management Department - The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Tyler Wry; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Fractured Endorsements: Value Alignment in Polarized Landscapes Author: Ludovica Castiglia; IESE Business School Polarization and Practice: Divergent DEI Adoption Following Salient Events Author: Grady Wallace Raines; Cornell SC Johnson College of Business The Counter-Mobilization of the Anti-ESG Movement Author: Witold Jerzy Henisz; U. of Pennsylvania

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Barbara Gray

  17 shared

• Celeste Diaz Ferraro

  Pennsylvania State University

  17 shared

• Abhinav Gupta

  16 shared

• James Maxwell

  La Trobe University

  16 shared

• Brayden G King

  12 shared

• Jocelyn M. Leitzinger

  University of Illinois Chicago

  10 shared

• Walter W. Powell

  8 shared

• Shahzad Ansari

  University of Cambridge

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professorship in Industri…