Deconstructing the outsider puzzle: The legitimation journey of novelty

The proposition that outsiders often are crucial carriers of novelty into an established institutional field has received wide empirical support. But an equally compelling proposition points to the following puzzle: the very same conditions that enhance outsiders' ability to make novel contributions also hinder their ability to carry them out. We seek to address this puzzle by examining the contextual circumstances that affect the legitimation of novelty originating from a noncertified outsider that challenged the status quo in an established institutional field. Our research case material is John Harrison's introduction of a new mechanical method for measuring longitude at sea-the marine chronometer- which challenged the dominant astronomical approach.We find that whether an outsider's new offer gains or is denied legitimacy is influenced by (1) the outsider's agency to further a new offer, (2) the existence of multiple audiences with different dispositions toward this offer, and (3) the occurrence of an exogenous jolt that helps create a more receptive social space. We organize these insights into a multilevel conceptual framework that builds on previouswork but attributes a more decisive role to the interplay between endogenous and exogenous variables in shaping a field's shifting receptiveness to novelty. The framework exposes the interdependencies between the micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes that jointly affect an outsider's efforts to introduce novelty into an existing field

The Nautical almanac and astronomical ephemeris for the year.

Mode of access: Internet.Vols. for 1767-1831 published by the order of the Commissioners of Longitude; 1832-1959 by the Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty, (1834-1959 prepared by the Nautical Almanac Office)

How animals follow the stars

Throughout history, the stars have provided humans with ever more information about our world, enabling increasingly accurate systems of navigation in addition to fuelling some of the greatest scientific controversies. What information animals have evolved to extract from a starry sky and how they do so, is a topic of study that combines the practical and theoretical challenges faced by both astronomers and field biologists. While a number of animal species have been demonstrated to use the stars as a source of directional information, the strategies that these animals use to convert this complex and variable pattern of dim-light points into a reliable ‘stellar orientation’ cue have been more difficult to ascertain. In this review, we assess the stars as a visual stimulus that conveys directional information, and compare the bodies of evidence available for the different stellar orientation strategies proposed to date. In this context, we also introduce new technologies that may aid in the study of stellar orientation, and suggest how field experiments may be used to characterize the mechanisms underlying stellar orientation