We revisit Zuckerman's (1999) “The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount,” which theorizes that when organizations are recognized as legitimate players in a category, they perform better. A replication exercise fails to reproduce two of three sets of results. Assisted by data shared by the original author, we find evidence that the inconsistency is due to a coding error in the original and differences between analyst data sets. We illustrate the use of epistemic maps and evaluate the theory's predictive power across a broad set of plausible empirical assumptions and also for a subsequent time period. The results are not robust. We conclude that these data provide little evidence to support strategic recommendations. Challenges and remedies for replication are discussed.

中文翻译：

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重温 Zuckerman (1999) 的绝对命令：认知映射在复制中的应用

我们重温了 Zuckerman (1999) 的“绝对当务之急：证券分析师和非法折扣”，其中的理论认为，当组织被认为是某个类别中的合法参与者时，它们的表现会更好。复制练习未能重现三组结果中的两组。借助原作者共享的数据，我们发现有证据表明不一致是由于原始编码错误和分析师数据集之间的差异造成的。我们说明了认知图的使用，并评估了该理论在一系列合理的经验假设以及随后的时间段内的预测能力。结果并不稳健。我们得出的结论是，这些数据几乎没有提供支持战略建议的证据。讨论了复制的挑战和补救措施。