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Organizations need to both differentiate themselves while conforming to their audiences' expectations. To meet this demand, organizations may span different categories. However, valuing spanners is challenging for audiences. We contend that spanners' valuation depends on category nesting, as the congruence of informational cues varies between basic categories and subcategories. Furthermore, we expect that more expert audiences find spanners to be more congruent (and hence, more valuable) at a subordinate level than at a basic level of categorization. We test our hypotheses using a mixed-methods design in the context of venture capital investments. We analyze observational data on more than 29,000 venture capital deals and develop two experimental studies. Our findings support our hypotheses that subcategory spanning lowers valuation, and that this effect is attenuated as investors' expertise increases. Our experimental studies further show that congruence is a causal mechanism explaining these effects. Our findings have important implications for research on organizational conformity and optimal distinctiveness, categorization in markets from an information processing perspective, and the impact of expertise on valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and test a theory of howunintended audiences create reaction costs for firms that use corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a signal. We introduce and define reaction costs as costs that signal senders incur when unintended audiences react negatively to a true signal that was intended for another audience. We argue that activist hedge funds--an unintended audience--treat CSR as a signal that firms have wasteful intentions and capabilities, which prevent firms from maximizing shareholder value in the short term. On that basis, we hypothesize that activist hedge funds are more likely to target firms with higher levels of CSR, thus imposing reaction costs on these firms. We further argue that this relationship is weaker when firms operate in industries with high levels of CSR, and strongerwhen firms' financial communication is vague. Using data on activist hedge fund campaigns in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016, we find supporting results. Our study shows that CSR signals may be costlier than previously assumed and contributes to research on CSR, signaling, and corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the way validity and propriety cues contribute to legitimacy judgments about a practice and to explaining whether the subunit of a large firm increases or decreases the implementation of this practice. Empirically, we examine the extent to which 65 subsidiaries of a multinational enterprise implemented three corporate social responsibility practices. Adopting a set-theoretic approach, we find that both validity and propriety cues are extremely relevant to the understanding of subunits' implementation of practices over time. The endorsement of a practice in a subunit's environment plays a particularly crucial role in the extent to which it is implemented, relative to authorization by the parent firm. Furthermore, subunits strongly rely on the active evaluation of the practice's propriety, such that the consonance between the two propriety dimensions (strategic importance and value compatibility) is central to implementation increase, while dissonance between them can favor implementation decrease. By advancing our understanding of legitimacy judgment formation and practice implementation patterns, our study enriches explanations of organizational conformity and decoupling, and contributes to our understanding of how firms respond to multiple institutional demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beside making organizations look like their peers through the adoption of similar attributes ("alignment"), this paper highlights the fact that conformity also enables organizations to stand out by exhibiting highly salient attributes key to their field or industry ("conventionality"). Building on the conformity and status literatures, and using the case of major U.S. symphony orchestras and the changes in their concert programming between 1879 and 1969, we hypothesize and find that middle-status organizations are more aligned and middle-status individual leaders make more conventional choices than their low- and high-status peers. In addition, the extent to which middle-status leaders adopt conventional programming is shown to be moderated by the status of the organization and by its level of alignment. Thus, this paper offers a novel theory and operationalization of organizational conformity, and contributes to the literature on status effects, and, more broadly, to the understanding of the key issues of distinctiveness and conformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies suggest that category-spanning organizations receive lower evaluation and perform worse than organizations focused on a single category. We propose that (a) these effects are contingent on clients' theory of value, and that, as clients expect more sophisticated services, they tend to value category spanners more positively, and (b) the evaluation of producers mediates the relationship between category spanning and performance. We test our hypotheses using original data on corporate legal services in three markets (London, New York City, and Paris) over the decade 2000-2010. We find that (a) category spanners receive a better evaluation, and more so when their categorical combination is more inclusive, and (b) evaluation mediates significantly the relationship between category spanning and performance. This study enriches our understanding of how audiences apprehend a whole market category system and why organizations span categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do organizations respond favorably to minority participation-that is, conform to demands from minority resource suppliers that hold an unconventional logic? A favorable response to minority participation (i.e., "alternative conformity") helps decrease the influence of dominant players, alter the resource suppliers' social structure, and promote new logics, which makes alternative conformity a "son control strategy" for organizations. We expect a positive relationship between minority participation and alternative conformity and expect that relationship to be attenuated by organizations' adherence to a dominant logic, the centrality of minority logic holders, and a minority logic's institutional credit. We test and find strong support for our hypotheses using original data on investment funds in the French film industry (1994-2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]