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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 [...]

Recognizing the need to better understand institutional change processes in authoritarian states, which play an increasingly prominent role in the world economy, we examine the efficacy of civic activism aimed at spurring governmental action concerning the environmental performance of firms in China. We highlight the paradox of 'responsive authoritarianism' on display in China: to avoid needing to rule by coercion alone, the government seeks citizens' feedback and tolerates pressures for change, but at the same time it resists the associated legitimacy threats regarding its capacity to rule. Local governments and the media play crucial and dual roles in this system: they mitigate change pressures from civic activism that takes place within the state's systems, but they magnify change pressures from publicly visible civic activism occurring outside those systems. We test our conceptual model using a unique data set of environmental penalties imposed on Chinese publicly listed firms from 2007 to 2011. Our findings contribute to understanding processes of institutional change and outcomes of social movements. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1212. Keywords: civic activism * authoritarianism * China * regulation * corporate sustainability, Introduction Because governments are the embodiment of coercive institutions, their organization and decision-making structures have a profound impact on economies and organizations (Scott 2014). In liberal democracies, the government is [...]

This paper explores how organizations respond to simultaneous institutional influences from two distinct sources: the industry in which they operate and the local geographic community in which they are headquartered. [...]

Do political connections buffer firms from or bind firms to the government? To examine this theoretical puzzle, we distinguish two types of managerial political connections, ascribed and achieved, and theorize [...]

Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We theorize circumstances under which firms [...]

This study focuses on how and why firms strategically respond to government signals on appropriate corporate activity. We integrate institutional theory with research on corporate political strategy to develop a [...]

We examine the link between corporations and community by showing how corporate density interacts with the local social and cultural infrastructure to affect the growth and decline of the number [...]

A study on the concept of exaptation to organizational theory by identifying an important process whereby the historical origin of a capability differs from its current usefulness is presented. Branching policy, modernization, and political culture are three founding conditions that influenced banks' development of capabilities for managing dispersed branches.

The effect of public policy on the growth of commercial banking in the US from 1896 to 1978 is studied. The performance of centralized and dispersed growth strategies depends on public policy effects on the technological, economic, and cultural environments.

The way in which competing logics facilitate resistance to institutional change is presented, highlighting on banking professionalsE resistance to large, national banksE acquisitions of smaller, local banks.

The community as a focal unit and the influence of its isomorphism on the nature and level of corporate social action within local communities is presented.

Economic and organizational sociologists have increasingly demonstrated that the actions of individuals and firms are affected by the social networks within which they are embedded. In recent years scholars have begun to recognize that the effects of these social networks may vary across populations or types of relations. This article examines the extent to which the effects of interfirm networks on the behavior of firms are historically contingent. Focusing on the level of debt financing among approximately 140 large U.S. corporations over a 22-year period, the authors show that the extent to which the firms' use of debt was influenced by those with which they were tied through director interlocks declined over time. The authors argue that this decline in the network effect reflected a shift in the institutional environment within which the firms operated, and that it was driven by three processes: the professionalization of the finance function within the firm, the internalization of financial decision-making, and the increased volatility of the environment. They conclude that corporate financing is socially embedded, but this embeddedness is historically contingent.

This paper argues that research in organization theory has seen a shift in orientation from paradigm-driven work to problem-driven work since the late 1980s. A number of paradigms for the [...]

Organizational imprinting theory to networks is analyzed by examining how the social technology available during the establishment of community-based intercorporate networks continues to influence contemporary network structures despite major changes in the U.S. corporate environment. It contributes to work on imprinting by extending it to networks and in theorizing the social mechanisms that result in the persistence of social forms.

It was a cold and snowy morning on February 9, 1825, as New York Congressman Stephen Van Rensselaer trudged through Washington, D.C., to the Capitol building, where he was about [...]

The bear-sized man, on trial for mutilating a child's ears, stormed about the court, cursing out judge, jury and any man who would try to subdue him. Russell Bean, the [...]