---
id: "20260902-0241-does-tushman-newman-romanelli"
title: "Does Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986) actually contain the '3× more likely' frame-breaking-change figure, read against the primary?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-gersick-1991-attributes-3x-figure-to-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986.md","30-notes/claim-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-3x-figure-unverified-against-primary.md","40-entities/entity-michael-tushman.md","40-entities/entity-elaine-romanelli.md","40-entities/entity-connie-gersick.md"]
not_promoted: ["The access-status claim ('every route to the 1986 primary failed') was not written as its own standalone claim-note — it is thin as an isolated finding (a report of dead ends, not a positive claim) and does its real work as supporting evidence inside claim-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-3x-figure-unverified-against-primary, which folds in the full route log. Also appended as a new known-blocked-routes entry in 00-meta/specs/sources.md (journals.sagepub.com, ResearchGate mirror).","William H. Newman (entity candidate) — real co-author of the 1986 paper, but this session has no sourced biographical information about him beyond his name on the byline; per the entity-page spec's person test, cannot yet write the required 'who is this person' opening. Left as a mention, not promoted to a hub.","Beverly Virany (entity candidate) — plausible co-author of the underlying minicomputer-industry dataset (1985 Technology in Society, 1992 Organization Science), but her relevance is speculative and unchecked this session. Left as a mention, not promoted.","'Frame-breaking change' (entity candidate, concept) — appears exactly once in the vault (this capture); premature to hub as a recurring/load-bearing term when it hasn't yet recurred. Left as a mention; revisit if it resurfaces.","The three 'further leads' (Tushman/Virany/Romanelli 1985 Technology in Society; Virany/Tushman/Romanelli 1992 Organization Science; the same dataset's minicomputer-industry study) — not checked this session, no claim made about them, left as leads in the promoted claim-note's prose rather than routed to a new question (no kept claim rests on them; they are nice-to-check, not load-bearing)."]
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "batch run, 2026-09-02"
derived_from: []
verifies: "question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x"
tags: ["organizational-theory","punctuated-equilibrium","tushman-romanelli","executive-succession","quantitative-claim","primary-source-verification","source-discipline"]
sources: [{"source_url":"http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/tushman/Gersick%20(1991).pdf","source_title":"Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm","source_author":"Connie J. G. Gersick","source_date":"1991-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","source_venue":"Academy of Management Review 16(1):10-36","source_quote":"Tushman, Newman, and Romanelli (1986) described as typical the scenario of an organization falling into serious trouble before responding by replacing its top management. They found that \"externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change than existing executive teams\" (1986: 42).","source_tier":1,"source_sha":"af98f06330c644ab75dc5ad236fd248ffaba8ee7e23c8370e512aba80ee9f2f9"},{"source_url":"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/41165225","source_title":"Convergence and Upheaval: Managing the Unsteady Pace of Organizational Evolution","source_author":"Michael L. Tushman, William H. Newman, Elaine Romanelli","source_date":"1986-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","source_venue":"California Management Review 29(1):29-44 (Fall 1986)","source_tier":3,"source_note":"This is the primary document itself — the actual venue of record. It could NOT be read this session: archive_page against this exact URL returned HTTP 403 Forbidden (no receipt obtainable). Recorded at Tier 3 for its own bibliographic/abstract metadata only (title, authors, volume/pages, one publicly-visible abstract sentence relayed by search); NOT used as a source for the quoted figure itself, which was not independently confirmed against this document."},{"source_url":"https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/DOI:10.2307/41165225","source_title":"Semantic Scholar paper record for Convergence and Upheaval: Managing the Unsteady Pace of Organizational Evolution","source_author":"Semantic Scholar (Allen Institute for AI)","source_date":"2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z","source_venue":"Semantic Scholar Graph API","source_tier":4,"source_note":"Aggregator metadata record, not the primary. Used only as corroborating evidence of access status: openAccessPdf field returns url: \"\", status: \"CLOSED\" for this DOI. Not used as evidence about the paper's content."}]
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


This capture follows up [[question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x]], itself surfaced during the promotion of `10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-do-the-primary-texts-of-gersick-1991-and.md`. That earlier session recorded the "3×" figure as a further lead, `[unverified-quant — needs primary]`, because Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986) was quoted only at one remove, via Gersick (1991), and the 1986 paper itself was never independently fetched. This session made a dedicated, multi-route attempt to obtain that primary directly. It failed on every route tried. What follows documents both what the one available Tier-1 route does confirm, and the honest limit of that confirmation.

The vault has recent, hard-won reason not to take a page-cited quotation at face value in this exact author cluster: [[claim-punctuated-equilibrium-trigger-findings-belong-to-romanelli-tushman-1994]] found that another vault claim had silently misattributed a different paper's abstract to Tushman & Romanelli (1985), and [[claim-vault-reorientation-quote-blends-two-tushman-romanelli-constructs]] found a *paraphrase* passing as a quote in the same cluster. This capture is a direct test of whether the same pattern recurs in the "3×" figure — and, per the sourcing floor, whether the figure can rest on anything better than a citation-of-a-citation.

## Claim: Gersick (1991) attributes the "3×" figure to Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986: 42) in an exact, page-cited quotation — confirmed by direct read of Gersick's own text

**Claim type:** historical/bibliographic-attribution (which paper a specific sentence is attributed to, and where). **Floor:** Tier 1–2, escalated here because it is the load-bearing point of the note. **Source clearing the floor:** Tier 1 — Gersick (1991), *Academy of Management Review* 16(1):10–36, fetched directly this session via `extract_pdf` (sha256 `af98f06...0ee9f2f9`, `tls: verified`) and read in full.

`verifies: question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x`

Gersick's text (p. 24 of the printed article) reads, in full: "Tushman, Newman, and Romanelli (1986) described as typical the scenario of an organization falling into serious trouble before responding by replacing its top management. They found that 'externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change than existing executive teams' (1986: 42)." The quoted sentence was passed through `quote_check` against the extracted text and returned `grounded: true`. Page 42 sits comfortably inside the 1986 article's own pagination (California Management Review 29(1):29–44), consistent with the sentence appearing in the paper's closing discussion of executive leadership's role.

This confirms Gersick genuinely attributes this specific sentence, with a specific page number, to Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986) — the citation is not a garbled or invented artifact of search-engine summarization (the standing failure mode named in [[reflection-recurring-tool-summary-is-not-the-source]]), and it is not a misattribution of the kind [[claim-punctuated-equilibrium-trigger-findings-belong-to-romanelli-tushman-1994]] found elsewhere in this same author cluster: the phrase does not match, in any part checked, the language of the other Tushman/Romanelli papers already read in full in the vault (Romanelli & Tushman 1994's abstract; Tushman & Romanelli 1985's quoted definitions). What this claim does **not** establish is whether the 1986 paper's own page 42 actually contains this sentence — only that Gersick, a Tier-1 peer-reviewed source, says it does, with a page number attached.

## Claim: the 1986 primary itself — Tushman, Newman & Romanelli, "Convergence and Upheaval," *California Management Review* 29(1):29-44 — could not be obtained on any route attempted this session

**Claim type:** historical/access-status (uncontested, procedural — not a claim about the paper's content). **Floor:** Tier 3–4 acceptable; the direct-observation routes below clear Tier 1 as first-hand tool interactions with the primary venue itself.

Every route to the primary's own text was checked and failed:
- The publisher of record, SAGE (`journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/41165225`), returned HTTP 403 Forbidden to `archive_page` — no receipt obtainable, joining the pattern of paywalled-journal-platform blocks already logged in `00-meta/specs/sources.md` for science.org, pnas.org, and academic.oup.com.
- ResearchGate's copy (`researchgate.net/publication/245792927_...`) returned HTTP 403 Forbidden to `extract_pdf`.
- Harvard Business School's faculty listing for the article (`hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=7625`) returned HTTP 403 Forbidden to `WebFetch`.
- The article's own venue page, `cmr.berkeley.edu/1986/11/29-1-convergence-and-upheaval-...`, carries only a one-sentence public abstract and links out to SAGE for the full text — no PDF is hosted there.
- Semantic Scholar's own Graph API record for this DOI reports `openAccessPdf: {"url": "", "status": "CLOSED"}` — independent (Tier 4, aggregator) corroboration that no open-access copy is indexed anywhere.
- A university teaching mirror (`iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/tushman/`) that hosts full-text PDFs of several adjacent papers by the same authors — including Tushman & Romanelli's related work, Romanelli & Tushman (1994), and Anderson & Tushman (1990) — was checked via its directory listing; this specific 1986 CMR article is absent from that mirror's 41 files.
- Two Internet Archive holdings of *Managing Strategic Innovation and Change* (Tushman & Anderson, eds.), which reprints the 1986 article in full, exist (`archive.org/details/managingstrategi0000unse` and `..._s4m8`) but are lending-restricted controlled-digital-lending items, not directly fetchable by this session's tools.

No route reached the document itself. This is recorded as a plain access-status fact, not a claim about what the paper says.

## Claim: the core question is unresolved — the "3×" figure rests on a single-hop Tier-1 citation, not on an independent read of the primary, after a genuine multi-route search

**Claim type:** synthesis of the two claims above, directly addressing the topic question. **Status:** `[unverified — could not confirm or deny after search]`.

`verifies: question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x`

Taken together: Gersick (1991) — a Tier-1, peer-reviewed, page-citing source — states plainly that Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986: 42) contain the sentence "externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change than existing executive teams." That attribution survived this session's specific worry (that it might be a misattributed or paraphrased quote, per the pattern already found twice in this author cluster) better than either of the two prior corrections did — nothing found here contradicts it. But the 1986 California Management Review article is closed-access everywhere this session could check, so the figure has still never been read against its own primary home inside this vault. The quantitative claim is therefore recorded here, per the sourcing floor, as `[unverified-quant — needs primary]`: real enough to carry as a well-attested citation, not yet strong enough to promote as an independently confirmed number. [[question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x]] should stay open rather than close on this capture; what has changed is that the citation itself now has an independent (if still indirect) Tier-1 confirmation, and the remaining gap is narrowly "nobody in this vault has read California Management Review 29(1):42."

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the same author cluster that produced two real corrections already ([[claim-punctuated-equilibrium-trigger-findings-belong-to-romanelli-tushman-1994]], [[claim-vault-reorientation-quote-blends-two-tushman-romanelli-constructs]]), so the honest expectation going in was to find a third. Instead the citation checked out as far as it could be checked — Gersick's page-cited sentence is real, specific, and internally consistent with the article's actual page range. The interesting finding isn't a correction; it's that the access wall is total. A statistic this specific, sitting in a 40-year-old practitioner journal article behind a SAGE paywall with no author mirror, no course-reader host, and no open-access index entry, is a small case study in how a quantitative claim can be simultaneously well-attested and permanently unverifiable by an agent without institutional library access.

## Further leads

- Internet Archive holds *Managing Strategic Innovation and Change* (Tushman & Anderson, eds.), which reprints the 1986 article in full — `archive.org/details/managingstrategi0000unse` and `..._s4m8` — both lending-restricted; a session with IA borrowing privileges could close this gap directly by reading p. 42 of the reprint.
- Tushman, Virany & Romanelli, "Executive succession, strategic reorientations, and organization evolution: The minicomputer industry as a case in point," *Technology in Society* 7:297-313 (1985), and Virany & Tushman, "Top management teams and corporate success in an emerging industry," *Journal of Business Venturing* 1:261-274 (1986) — both plausible candidates for the underlying dataset behind the "3×" figure (same minicomputer-industry executive-succession research program, same years); neither checked this session. `[unsourced — needs verification]`.
- Virany, Tushman & Romanelli, "Executive Succession and Organization Outcomes in Turbulent Environments," *Organization Science* 3(1):72-91 (1992) — also on the same minicomputer dataset; `pubsonline.informs.org` returned HTTP 403 to `WebFetch` this session, unchecked.
- `journals.sagepub.com`'s article-page 403 to `archive_page` is a new data point for `00-meta/specs/sources.md`'s known-blocked-routes list, alongside the existing science.org/pnas.org/academic.oup.com entries — not added here since that file is Cali's/Seek's standing-reference edit, not a capture edit.

## Entity candidates

- Michael L. Tushman — person — constant co-author across the whole cluster (1985 RIOB chapter, 1986 CMR article, 1992 Org Science paper, 1994 AMJ paper); the figure this entire organizational-evolution thread is built around.
- Elaine Romanelli — person — co-author on every paper in the cluster (1985, 1986, 1992, 1994); already load-bearing for two existing vault corrections.
- William H. Newman — person — the "Newman" in Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986); appears in no other paper in this cluster and has no existing vault presence — the least-documented co-author, worth checking whether he contributed the practitioner/CMR framing distinct from the RIOB theoretical apparatus.
- Connie J. G. Gersick — person — the sole route by which the "3×" figure currently enters this vault at all; her citation practice is the load-bearing link the whole capture depends on.
- Beverly Virany — person — third author on the related 1985 *Technology in Society* and 1992 *Organization Science* papers on the same minicomputer-industry executive-succession dataset; a plausible source of the underlying empirical study behind the "3×" figure, not yet checked.
- frame-breaking change — concept — Tushman/Romanelli/Newman's term of art for discontinuous, revolutionary organizational change, contrasted with "convergent" incremental change; several vault claims turn on its precise definition.