1. Future-Time Framing: The Effect of Language on Corporate Future Orientation
- Author
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Liang, Hao, Marquis, Christopher, Renneboog, Luc, and Sun, Sunny Li
- Subjects
Corporate social responsibility -- Research ,Corporate culture -- Research ,Organizational behavior -- Research ,Investments -- Research ,Business, general ,Social sciences - Abstract
We examine how international variation in corporate future-oriented behavior, such as corporate social responsibility and research and development investment, could partially stem from characteristics of the languages spoken at firms. We develop a future-time framing perspective rooted in the literatures on organizational categorization and framing. Our theory and hypotheses focus on how companies with working languages that obligatorily separate the future tense and the present tense engage less in future-oriented behaviors, and this effect is attenuated by exposure to multilingual environments. The results based on a large global sample of firms from 39 countries support our theory, highlighting the importance of language in affecting organizational behavior around the world. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1217. Keywords: language * corporate social responsibility * organizational cognition * R&D investment * corporate future orientation * corporate culture, Introduction Decades of research on organizational behavior have shown that it varies significantly across countries and regions and is strongly influenced by the socioeconomic environments in which firms operate (Aguilera [...]
- Published
- 2018
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