Search

Supplemental material, Online_Supplement_-_Submission for Organizational Adaptation by Andrew Sarta, Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne in Journal of Management

Supplementary Material, DS_10.1177_0001839218771550 for Shine on Me: Industry Coherence and Policy Support for Emerging Industries by Panayiotis (Panikos) Georgallis, Glen Dowell, and Rodolphe Durand in Administrative Science Quarterly

Raters of firms play an important role in assessing domains ranging from sustainability to corporate governance to best places to work. Managers, investors, and scholars increasingly rely on these ratings to make strategic decisions, invest trillions of dollars in capital and study corporate social responsibility (CSR), guided by the implicit assumption that the ratings are valid. The authors document the surprising lack of agreement across social ratings from six well-established raters. These differences remain even when we adjust for explicit differences in the definition of CSR held by different raters, implying the ratings have low validity. The authors' results suggest that users of social ratings should exercise caution in interpreting their connection to actual CSR and that raters should conduct regular evaluations of their ratings.

In stigmatized industries characterized by social contestation, hostile audiences, and distancing between industry insiders and outsiders, firms facing media attacks follow different strategies from firms in uncontested industries. Because firms avoid publicizing their tainted-sector membership, when threatened, they can respond by divesting assets from that industry. The authors' analyses of the arms industry demonstrate that media attacks on the focal firm and its peers both increase the likelihood of divestment for the focal firm. Specifically, attacks on the focal firm are the most consequential, followed by attacks on peers in the same industry subcategory, and by attacks on peers in different subcategories. These findings shed new light on divestment as a response to media attacks in stigmatized industries and lead the authors to rethink impression management theory.

We propose that institutional logics are resources organizations use to leverage their strategic choices. We argue that firms with an awareness of multiple available logics, expressed by a larger stock of competences and a broader industrial scope are more likely to add an institutional logic to their repertoire and to become purist in this new logic. We also hypothesize that a favorable opportunity set as expressed by status leads high and low status firms to add a logic but not to focus exclusively on this new logic. We examine our hypotheses in the French industrial design industry from 1989 to 2003 in which a managerialist logic emerged and prevailed along with the pre-existing institutional logics of modernism and formalism. Our findings contribute to theory on the relationship between organizations’ strategy and institutional change and partially address the paradox of why high-status actors play a key role in triggering institutional change when such change is likely to undermine the very basis of their social position and advantage

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC, n° 934/2010; Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC nº 934; In unsettled fields with multiple ideal-typical institutional logics, why do organizations tend to weaken or conform to prevalent logic order? The authors argue that prestige, defined as a tribute paid by field members to a select few with valued distinctive traits, plays a determinant role in explaining institutional heterodoxy (i.e., the choice to stop instantiating dominant logics or start instantiating less prevalent logics). In unsettled fields, prestigious organizations adopt institutional heterodoxy to maintain their distinctiveness because they consider logics as means rather than constraining ends and because awarding bodies cannot impose strict obedience rules. Controlling for alternative explanations, a study of 165 French industrial design agencies (1989 to 2003) provides evidence that prestige favors the decision to undertake heterodox choices. This relationship is weakened when organizations diversify their expertise, is marginally reinforced when organizations have high-status clients, and is influenced by peers' heterodox choices. The authors discuss contributions to the neo-institutional theory of organizational choices, the socio-cultural analysis of field's evolution, and the strategic perspective of the firm.

In this paper, the authors derive a typology of five parental altruistic archetypes that exhausts the possible altruistic influences in the governance at family firms. They argue that when taken in concert, these five types comprise a more balanced explanation of the cross-sectional variance in the governance efficiency of these firms and therefore can better explain why some family firms are more able than others to capitalize on the family governance's positive attributes.

Traditionally, strategy scholars have paid too little attention to epistemological issues. To advance our understanding of these issues, we focus in this paper on the theory of truth underlying specific traditions in strategy research. We distinguish positivism, constructionism, scientific realism, and pragmatism as viable, but fundamentally different epistemological approaches. We argue that each of these approaches is based on a specific theory of truth. As a case in point, we concentrate on the notion of competitive advantage, and argue that each of the four approaches attributes a specific epistemological status to competitive advantage that should be taken seriously when conducting empirical research and interpreting research findings.