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This paper reports an empirical study on the co-evolution of competitive conditions dominating firms and organizational forms in the paper industry. It has two main theoretical implications. First, with respect to research on national business systems and the societal effect, we suggest that the country of origin imprints firms especially by allowing them to develop distinctive organizational forms. Second, we show that the competitive conditions, dominant forms and dominant firms remain in constant flux even in mature industries. There is, therefore, a need for co-evolutionary research to continue to combine long-term perspectives and intensive research designs in the study of specific industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important way to expand financing channels, the listing can significantly improve the enterprises' comprehensive competitiveness. However, few studies pay attention to the continuous impact of listing years on enterprise innovation. Based on the sample data of Chinese enterprises before and after listing from 2004 to 2017, this paper discusses the relationship between the listing years and dual innovation. And analyzes the moderating effect of slack. The research shows that the listing years are related to the quantity and quality of innovation in the inverted U-shaped, but the inflection point of the innovation quantity is later than the innovation quality. Before listing, the innovation quantity and quality increased; after listing, the innovation quantity first increased and then decreased, while the innovation quality declined. High slack makes the inverted U-shaped relationship between the listing years and innovation quality steeper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annapoornima M. Subramanian, Moren Lévesque, and Vareska Van De Vrande were recognized as a runner up for the 2020 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the development of a practice-based understanding of ethics. Ethics is here conceived as a critical practice of questioning and problematizing moral orders and moral rules-in-use in which subjects (re)define their relations to self and others. Situating this conception of ethics in the context of practice theory, we draw upon ideas of responsible decision-making (Derrida) and truth-telling (Foucault) to examine Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” as illustrative of ethics as critical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the company-stakeholder relationship between a large pulp and paper company and a small monastery and nature retreat center. The literature on stakeholder management and organizational legitimacy provides a theoretical foundation. The analysis demonstrates how organizational power and legitimacy can influence stakeholder legitimacy. The authors illustrate the ways that a company can manage the legitimacy of stakeholders through the use of political language and symbolic activity. The results contribute to a better understanding of stakeholder identification, salience, and the different contexts of legitimacy in the company-stakeholder relationship. Implications for stakeholder research and practice are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article invites research papers for the 8th Organization Studies Summer Workshop of the Organization Studies and the Day to Day Life of Cultures and Communities to be held from May 23 to 25, 2013 in Mykonos, Greece.

The purpose of this literature review-based paper is to share some insights into general methodological issues pertaining to the case study research strategy and how I applied it for purposes of my doctoral study on the design and delivery of rural enterprise business support programmes. I hope that the insights I share here will help novice researchers who have intentions of using the case study research strategy for their studies or those who just want to broaden their knowledge about the research strategy. The paper is largely an excerpt of my methodology chapter from my recently completed and unpublished doctoral thesis, derived mainly from the methodology literature. The paper starts by exploring the definition of case studies and goes on to look at case studies issues to do with the unit of analysis; research questions; types of case studies; sampling, data collection, triangulation and quality issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article invites research papers on the topic of organizational and institutional trust, failures and repair for the special issue of the journal, where the last date for paper submission is December 2012.

In this paper, we address recent calls to increase the societal relevance of entrepreneurship research. We explore how entrepreneurship researchers and practitioners work together in the formulation of a research problem for impact. Leveraging process-tracing, we analyzed six entrepreneurship research projects, from early conceptualization to publication, all part of the Journal of Business Venturing Insights ' Entrepreneurship Rapid Response Research Initiative. We made two discoveries, as it pertains to the formulation of problems in entrepreneurship research. First, we found four critical change dimensions, along which a problem evolves throughout the research process: worthiness, divisibility, centrality, and specificity. Second, we found two equifinal problem formulation pathways in impact-oriented entrepreneurship research: inward-looking iterative and outward-looking joint problem formulation. These are marked by drivers of the research project, timing of involvement of the practitioner, and interactions between researchers and practitioners, which influence the sequence of the four change dimensions in problem formulation. Our study contributes by theorizing problem formulation as a process, not a point in time, and hence intertwined with solutions, making the process consequential. We also offer concrete implications for entrepreneurship scholars wanting to engage in research that impacts practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mixed ownership reform of China is a kind of further partial privatization for the listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and an opportunity for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) to expand their commerce boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of heterogeneous blockholders on corporate innovation. Spanning the analysis with listed companies in China from 2007 to 2017, we find that heterogeneous blockholders have a significant positive effect on enterprise innovation. Lowering agency costs and improving corporate innovation efficiency are the two plausible mechanisms. From further research, we find that compared with non-SOEs, the positive effect of heterogeneous blockholders on enterprise innovation is more pronounced for SOEs, and the effect is more positive with the improvement of relative power balance between heterogeneous blockholders. The paper sheds light on the innovation effects of mixed-ownership reform in emerging and transitioning countries. JEL Classification : G32, M13, D23, G34 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the retail business, rarely studied the impact of top transformation leaders on middle management personnel creativity. In this study, the middle management personnel of 258 retail enterprises were discussed, explored the impact of top transformation leaders on the double-dimensional creativity of middle management personnel, and analyzed individual psychological security. Results show that transformational leadership (morale modeling, visionary motivation, individualized consideration, and charisma) has a significant positive impact on the progressive creativity and breakthrough creativity of middle managers. Transformational leadership (Same as the above four dimensions) has a significant positive impact on the psychological security of middle managers. Psychological security has a significant positive impact on the progressive creativity and breakthrough creativity of middle managers. Psychological security plays a partially mediating role between transformational leadership and the creativity of middle managers. Among which, it plays a partially mediating role between morale modeling and progressive creativity, visionary motivation and progressive creativity, individualized consideration and progressive creativity, charisma and progressive creativity, morale modeling and breakthrough creativity, and charisma and breakthrough creativity, while it plays a fully mediating role between visionary motivation and breakthrough creativity, individualized consideration and breakthrough creativity. This study expanded the study of psychological security as an intermediary variable and deepened the study of dual-dimensional creativity. Based on the above conclusions, this paper puts forward relevant suggestions to promote the development of progressive creativity and breakthrough creativity of middle-level managers, to provide a reference for enterprises to maintain talent advantages and for managers to enhance development potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International new ventures (INVs) and born globals (BGs) play a significant role in the global economy. These firms have rapidly expanded into foreign markets offering unique products and services. Despite the role such ventures play in the global economy, we know relatively little about the role of corporate governance (CG) in INVs and BGs and the challenges these firms face in foreign markets. This introductory article and the papers included in this Special Issue provide important insights into the role of corporate governance and the rapid rise of INVs and BGs and their evolutionary process, and highlight the topics where more research is needed. We also contribute to the current literature by examining corporate governance in early internationalising firms and discussing what sets them apart from well-established multinational enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of low-carbon development and drawing on the resource-based and dynamic capability theories, this paper provides a conceptual model of the relationship between external knowledge acquisition, green dynamic capability and corporate green innovation. Then, using 416 samples of firms in China collected from January 2018 to September 2018, the model was tested using the hierarchical regression analyses. The empirical results show that external technical knowledge acquisition and market knowledge acquisition have a positive influence on corporate green innovation. Additionally, the results show that green integration capability and green dynamic configuration capability positively moderate the relationship between technical knowledge acquisition and green innovation. The results also show that green learning capability, green integration capability and green dynamic configuration capability positively moderate the relationship between market knowledge acquisition and green innovation. This study supports the resource-based view, enriches the application of external knowledge acquisition in sustainable development, and extends the theory of green dynamic capability from causal prediction to situational factors. This paper provides theoretical support and practical guidance for firms seeking to effectively conduct open innovation, implement green innovation, and realize low-carbon development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article invites research papers for the Fifth International Symposium on Process Organization Studies to be held from June 20 to 22, 2013 in Crete, Greece.

The resource-based view (RBV) provides a rich framework for analyzing the role of a firm's tangible and intangible resources in creating and sustaining competitive advantage. As a result, it has been widely used to explain entrepreneurial firms' strategic choices that generate such an advantage. While researchers have established the usefulness of the RBV, they have overlooked the fundamental question of how entrepreneurial firms manage their resources to gain competitive advantage. This paper examines this issue in the context of independently owned startups, which typically lack resources, are constrained in their access to key resource providers, and have limited experience in assembling and managing resources. Adopting a broader conceptualization of startups' resource management process, the paper identifies several questionable assumptions in related RBV-based research. Further, recognizing the limits of RBV to determine ex ante the nature and magnitude of entrepreneurs' resourcefulness when managing their resources, the paper suggests linkages between the RBV and several entrepreneurship frameworks and outlines promising research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge created outside the firm, but within the same region, is a key enabler of high-growth firms. This paper develops an entrepreneurial ecosystems conceptual framework focussing on knowledge spillovers and regional absorptive capacity, to account for interregional differences in high-growth firm rates. This is tested using panel data from 378 regions in Great Britain. Knowledge creation (SME-engaging and research-intensive universities, innovative firms) and knowledge spillovers (primarily through vertically related industries) reveal to be of key importance. Other key regional enablers of high growth firms pertain to entrepreneurship culture, talent, intermediate services, networks, finance and demand growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Necessity entrepreneurship (NE) describes the process of venturing a business out of need when alternative options are seemingly absent. Whereas prior research typically understands NE to be a homogenous construct, recent theorizing suggests the possibility of NE heterogeneity. In this paper we employ Sen's capability approach to elicit NE variety. Using data gathered from 820 households in rural Tanzania, our cluster analysis generates four distinct types of NE that vary significantly regarding their entrepreneurial activities, determinants and outcomes. Our findings demonstrate the relevance of life satisfaction and reveal the role of choice in NE. Our study thereby advances a nuanced perspective of NE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many economists and psychologists have studied the impact of nudges on households' pro-environmental behaviors. Interestingly, "private nudges" can be imagined for companies. Yet, studies focusing on nudging employees' energy use are rare. The objective of our paper is to explore this issue with the help of a field experiment conducted at 47 French companies' sites. Using a difference-in-difference methodology, the effects of three nudges on employees' energy conservation are tested. The first nudge, "moral appeal", stresses the responsible use of energy. The second one, "social comparison", informs employees on the energy consumption of other firms participating in the experiment. Finally, the third nudge, "stickers", alerts employees about good energy conservation practices. Our results stress the complementarity of these nudges. When implemented alone, the three nudges have no significant effects on energy consumption. However, when the moral appeal and social comparison nudges are combined with the stickers nudge, they become effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Phyllis Macfarlane concerning business market size, and an article by Andy Dexter concerning market segmentation.

Global climate change has caused governments worldwide to take actions to improve their energy efficiency. This paper investigates how China's Top-1000 program, a command-and-control type of energy-saving mandate, has affected the operational choices of firms, and in turn, their profitability. We apply the propensity score matching method to find "identical twins" for the participants in the Top- 1000 program, then conduct a difference-in-differences analysis on the matched sample. Our findings suggest that the profitability of the enterprises targeted for energy savings decreased by one-third, mainly due to increased production costs. The targeted enterprises tended to increase their fixed assets per capita, which was associated with improvements in energy efficiency. Furthermore, compared to similar untargeted enterprises, there was a significant slowdown in the production growths of the targeted enterprises, raising concerns about carbon leakage due to increased production by less efficient producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a call for papers that explore the family business as multilevel and complex phenomenon. It looks for studies that focus on either macro or micro levels of analysis, designed to produce incomplete views of the family organization. It also encourages papers that use theories and approaches developed in organization studies to enhance the knowledge of family firms and their complex interrelationships across levels.

This paper examines the papers presented at the 2007 Theories of Family Enterprise Conference for their applicability to practice and presents some ideas to make family business research more appropriate to practitioners. In general, we found the papers are not immediately useful to practitioners; however, the papers of a theory conference should not necessarily be immediately useful to practitioners. We identify several areas for future research, which include the development of a concrete definition for family business, a thorough analysis of the positive and negative effects of the concept of familiness, a close look at failed family business, as well as other issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immunocytochemical (ICC) techniques are frequently used in basic and clinical research. Here, we focus on the importance of using antisera/antibodies at optimal dilutions to achieve specificity and reduce costs. Unfortunately, the basic principle, the necessity to test method specificity of the staining by a series of increasing dilutions of primary antiserum/antibodies, is only occasionally seen in papers using ICC. Many researchers rely on the company's information or others' published data. In this study, we show examples with monoclonal antibodies used in the peroxidase-based ICC technique in mouse and guinea pig brain sections. We show images of ICC staining of phospho-S129 alpha-synuclein in A53T mice and NeuN in guinea pig brains and demonstrate that optimal staining with them can be achieved at least at two to three orders of magnitude higher dilutions than generally used in the literature. We strongly recommend that when antisera/antibodies are used for the first time in any laboratory, independent of what the manufacturer or vendor recommends or are found in the literature, a dilution curve should be set up to identify the optimal dilution. This practice provides not only the highest specificity but is also an economic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What mechanisms has Amazon deployed in its effort to control the labor of its warehouse employees? This question holds both practical and theoretical interest, given Amazon's prominent position in the economy and the wider importance of the logistics sector for consumer capitalism. This paper, part of a broader mixed-methods study of Amazon's workplace regime, uses a small national sample of interviews with Amazon warehouse workers (N = 46) to identify the mechanisms of labor control the company invokes. In keeping with accounts propounded by activists and journalists, we find evidence of highly coercive labor controls, chiefly in the form of what we call techno-economic despotism (which applies algorithmic technology to a precariously employed workforce). Yet many workers also experience forms of labor control that rely not on coercion but on the generation of consent. We identify three such mechanisms of hegemonic labor control - normative, relational, and governmental – that Amazon uses to foster workers' consent. The efficacy of Amazon's workplace regime stems largely from its ability to deploy a multiplicity of labor controls that resonate with different groups holding distinct positions in the labor process. Given shifts in the social and economic conditions that bear on the company's regime, cracks have begun to appear in Amazon's armor, potentially reducing the traction its labor control mechanisms have gained with segments of its employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers are becoming more knowledgeable about companies' social responsibility (SR) practices. As a result, they are increasingly skeptical when companies do not provide clear information about these practices. One way to overcome this skepticism is to strengthen consumer trust through improved supply chain transparency. To create transparency requires a company to both gain visibility into its supply chain and disclose information to consumers. However, the current SR literature has only focused on the effect of disclosure on consumer trust, while the effect of visibility on trust in SR communications is not well understood. Our work addresses this gap. In this paper, we employ an incentivized human‐subject laboratory experiment, an online vignette study, and causal mediation analysis to investigate the impact of visibility on consumer trust in a company's SR communication, and as a result, its impact on consumers' purchase decisions. To further enhance our understanding of consumer behavior, we examine how consumer heterogeneity and workers' conditions in the upstream supply chain influence our results. We find that increasing visibility always strengthens consumer trust. Also, opportunities exist for a trust‐driven revenue benefit (due to greater visibility) when consumers are highly prosocial or have low general trust beliefs, or when the impact of an SR initiative is small. Our results underscore the crucial role that supply chain visibility plays in engendering consumer trust. Moreover, identifying trust as a mechanism to help explain the effect of visibility on sales of SR products offers actionable insights to improve a company's communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an introductory article to the special issue In Search of the Next Growth Episode: How Firms Catalyse and Sustain Periods of High Growth. The article reviews alternative streams of research on firm growth, including 'random growth', 'responsive growth' and 'resourceful growth'. The themes of, and contributions to, the Special Issue are presented. Finally, we identify a number of directions for future research, including the importance of unpacking the drivers and causes of high growth episodes (HGEs), amplifying the role of the leader in research on firm growth, while questioning the desired outcomes and consequences of growth. We assert that there is still much to learn about firm growth. Our hope is that this special issue inspires new approaches and an enlarged understanding in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent contributions to the literature on small firm growth have been marked by a growing sense of frustration with the state-of-the-art and what it implicates in both theory and policy. In short, while growth episodes appear relatively common, a tiny proportion of firms sustain growth and 'scale'. This calls into question the very basis upon which policies seeking to target high growth firms (HGFs) rest. In addition, it cautions against perspectives that view growth as the essence of entrepreneurship. In this paper, we argue that understanding the frequency of growth episodes and the rarity of sustained growth requires a better understanding of growth consequences. To this end, we describe case study evidence from ambitious entrepreneurs whose firms experienced an episode of high growth followed by longer periods of mixed performance. Our goal is to shed light on how the experience of growing affects further growth. Our data provide initial insights into the mechanisms linking past growth to growth motivations and into the ways in which past growth lays the foundations for future performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zhang wrote that the Louisville enterprise zone (EZ) was more successful than what previous research showed and that variations in research design have led to conflicting or mixed reviews of many local economic development policies that are based on the EZ concept. She mentions a study and an article on the Louisville, Kentucky EZ and implies the time horizon used to evaluate it was too short. This Forum/Letter to the Editor points out that the Louisville EZ went through multiple transformations and expansions over its history from 1983 to 2003, and as noted in the first of two studies, the original zone showed virtually no progress from 1983 to 1990. Several other unpublished papers pointed out the same results when the original EZ and other parts of the expanded EZ were analyzed up to the last years of the 20th century. Finally, this Forum/Letter to the Editor argues that and provides reasons for the methodology employed by Lambert and Coomes as a superior way of analyzing the Louisville EZ when compared with the methods employed by Zhang. The main reason why Zhang showed success in the EZ is because she mostly evaluates it in its final form in the late 1990s after it had annexed many sections of Jefferson County, which were not as nearly economically disadvantaged as the original Louisville EZ established in 1983. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affordable energy is often argued to be a vital condition for manufacturing industries to be able to compete on global markets. Consequently, the idea of introducing a (unilateral) carbon tax is usually opposed on the grounds of potential losses of competitiveness and leakage of economic activity abroad. In this paper, we shed light on one potential channel of such effects-the impact of energy prices on firms' outward FDI. Using an instrumental variable strategy we estimate the longer-term effects on a sample of listed firms from 9 manufacturing sectors in 24 OECD countries over 1995-2008. The results suggest that relative energy prices-that is the difference between domestic energy prices and prices in the potential FDI destination-are significantly and asymmetrically related to firms' outward FDI asset share. Only firms that faced increases in the relative energy prices have increased their international asset position and this effect was relatively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shale Revolution and the two oil crises have overwhelmingly reshaped the petroleum industry in the last decade. Heterogeneity across companies is also a big concern as many multi-product (oil and gas) and multi-segment (upstream and downstream) firms exist, both state-owned and privately-owned. Therefore, a varying coefficient model is introduced to capture the effects of time, ownership, and business portfolio on both productivity and input elasticities to closely observe the fundamental transition, which is further interpreted using decomposition equations. The shape of the production function is indeed firm- and time-variant, which confirms the transition of the industry and the necessity of using the varying coefficient model. The average productivity achieved tremendous growth after the 2007-2009 financial crisis but lost momentum following the 2014 price crash. Finally, privately-owned, gas production and downstream activities are more productive than state-owned, oil production and upstream activities, respectively. Some policy implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of comparable worth rests on an assumption that each job possesses an inherent worth independent of the market forces of supply and demand. Implementation of comparable worth further requires that inherent job worth be measured with reasonable accuracy. This paper reports the results of an experimental study of comparable worth. Three commercial job evaluation firms rated the same set of 27 jobs in an actual company. Statistical analysis of the experimental data indicates that the three evaluators differed in which job trait, or constellation of traits, they used to evaluate inherent job worth, implying that at least one of them failed to measure inherent job worth accurately. These results suggest that any attempt to implement comparable worth may be quite sensitive to the evaluator chosen to measure job worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to address a gap of missing modularization methods for engineer-to-order (ETO) companies. The research project was initiated by clarifying the challenges facing ETO companies, based on these challenges synthesis of existing methods was done to conceptualize a method. This article presents the modular candidate identification (MCI) method aimed at identifying modular candidates in ETO companies. The method analyzes five dimensions, namely, market segments, customer requirements, product architectures, cost and lead time to find modular candidates. The method was applied in a Danish ETO company and shown to be successful in identifying two modular candidates. Both were recognized by management and redesigned in modular product development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features several notable people related to education, in the U.S. Edwin E. Howell of Washington, D.C. was considered to have the most perfect collections in mineralogy for school use placed on sale. A new corporation related to general school supply business was formed by J. L. Hammett, who is favorably known to the educational public, after being active in business. A man of large experience in the paper trade, H. H. Young, then, associated himself in this new enterprise.

In many markets, consumers have time‐varying needs for product or service quality. Recent technology advances equip firms with the on‐demand product‐adjustment capability (OPAC), which allows them to efficiently process customers' requests for short‐term (e.g., daily or hourly) changes of service quality to meet their time‐varying demands. This paper examines how OPAC affects a firm's optimal pricing and product‐line decisions in a market with consumers having time‐varying product needs and different average need levels. OPAC gives the firm a new way to price discriminate consumers—having a targeted consumer use a low‐end product in her low‐need state and upgrade to a high‐end product in her high‐need state; this contrasts the traditional use of a product line to segment consumers based on their expected valuations, that is, average need levels, whereby each consumer uses only one product and cannot flexibly adjust the product quality over time. We show that OPAC does not always improve the firm's profit: it does so only when consumers' valuations vary significantly over time or when each segment of consumers with different probabilities of having a high valuation is not too small. Moreover, although OPAC enables the firm to provide additional options to serve more consumer segments, it may actually induce the firm to optimally serve fewer consumer segments. One may intuit that OPAC would induce the firm to reduce the low‐end product's quality to elicit more upgrades; our analysis shows that, interestingly, OPAC can lead to an increase in quality for both high‐end and low‐end products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dialogical dimensions of discursive legitimation in social media sites to understand how organisations produce knowledge of legitimacy in concert with their stakeholders. Drawing on the dialogical theories of Bakhtin and Nikulin, we consider the potential for conceptualising discursive legitimation as a product of dissent: an ongoing 'allosensual' dialogue comprising different voices and competing knowledge claims. We explore this through a micro-level analysis of organisation-led social media sites, wherein organisational practices are increasingly subjected to public scrutiny and where knowledge of legitimacy can be significantly shaped. Our dialogical lens highlights three interrelated functions of discursive legitimation. Discursive authorisation represents attempts to assume a credible 'voice' in-relation-to 'other' voices, within the dialogue. Discursive validation represents attempts to subject truth claims about legitimacy to rational, normative and moral verification. Finally, discursive finalisation represents attempts to harmonise dissent, by either co-opting or antagonising stakeholders towards consensus. Primarily, this paper unpacks the role of social media in legitimation processes, while also elaborating on organisational attempts to control stakeholder dialogue in online contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the effects of firm performance and firm characteristics on concession outcomes over the years 1980-87. Across similar firms, the author finds, concessions were inversely related to stock price and employment growth. Concessions were also most likely in small firms, in firms paying high wages and in firms with relatively low union coverage. The effect of firm performance and firm characteristics on the likelihood of concessions was uniform across concessions of differing severity and was stable in magnitude over the eight-year period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant literature has noted that traditional paper-based reporting is becoming less timely and less useful to decision makers. Stakeholder pressure is making companies use communication channels other than paper-based reporting, such as the Internet. This article seeks to contribute to the literature by analyzing the extent to which firms are using the Internet to communicate their corporate environmental reporting as a transparency information policy to manage corporate legitimacy. Because utility and resource industries are considered sensitive industries with regard to their impact on the natural environment, these firms are expected to offer corporate environmental reporting on the Web to cope with prevailing stakeholders pressures. This article also explores the environmental online disclosures made by Spanish publicly listed companies. Although sample firms practice corporate environmental reporting on the Web, results indicate differences between sample industries' Internet disclosures and the lack of a standardized framework for corporate environmental reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon current research into the organizational implications of 'modularity'. Advocates of modularity argue that the 'invisible hand' of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the visible hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits to the extent of division of labour: what kinds of problems firms solve, and how they solve them, set limits to the extent of division of labour, irrespective of the extent of the market. This paper analyses the cognitive limits to the division of labour, relying on an in-depth case study of engineering design activities. On this basis, it explains why coordinating increasingly specialized bodies of knowledge, and increasingly distributed learning processes, requires the presence of knowledge-integrating firms even in the presence of modular products. Such firms, relying on their wide in-house scientific and technological capabilities, have the 'authority' to identify, propose and implement solutions to complex problems. In so doing, they coordinate networks of suppliers of both components and specialized competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on issues and themes discussed in the seventeenth conference of European Group for Organizational Studies held in Lyon in the month of July. To start with, the first topic of discussion was focused on the analogy of organizing and narrating sectioned under the heading "Narratives We Organize by." It described narrative approach to cover a wide range of perspectives, interests, and epistemological orientations in context to business organizations. Another issue for presentation focused on re-discovering history in studying organizations. A distinction was offered between organizational history and historical organization theory as a way of conceptualizing the intersection on whether organizational analysis needs to take history seriously. Other important focus of the conference acknowledged the question of whether public organizations be brought back in industry. As a result, it raised many voices for new public management, changing nature of bureaucracy, the public sector reform process, and the nature of organizational change.

The article discusses entrepreneurship theory from an interdisciplinary perspective. Earlier versions of eight discipline-anchored papers in these two sets were presented in January 1991 at the University of Baltimore, which co-sponsored with Baylor University an "Interdisciplinary Conference on Entrepreneurship Theory." The original intention of the conference was to examine how various disciplines had viewed entrepreneurship, how they had examined it, what they had contributed to it, and how the disciplines themselves had been affected by the intersection. One interesting observation that emerged from this exercise is that each discipline has its own unique way of viewing entrepreneurship which remains relatively unaffected by the perspectives of other disciplines. In other words, one sees evidence that many "uni-" rather than one or more "multi-" disciplinary views of field currently exist. Papers were invited from leading scholars who had already contributed to the body of work in entrepreneurship but whose work was anchored in eight different disciplines. In keeping with the objective of furthering the development of the study of entrepreneurship, two additional papers were invited to introduce and conclude these volumes.

How much companies pay in corporate income taxes is often better captured by effective tax rates (ETRs) rather than by statutory ones. Economists further distinguish between those modeled using the law—forward-looking ETRs—and those estimated from actual data on companies' profits and taxes—backward-looking ETRs. In this article, I move beyond this distinction, and I break down backward-looking ETRs according to the type of data used to estimate them. I focus on backward-looking ETRs that are estimated using companies' balance sheet databases. Based on my review of recent findings, I argue that backward-looking ETRs—of multinational corporations in particular—have become more frequently estimated thanks to advances in data availability while also becoming more relevant as a result of ongoing global corporate tax reform debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that knowledge on `organizational culture' has acquired authority and constitutes a `truth' on mergers, a truth imbued with both enabling and constraining power effects. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the paper theorizes `organizational culture' as a discursive formation that is implicated in a regime of truth. This regime has involved a process of disciplinary normalization in merger integration with the result that `culture' has become naturalized to `organization'. Drawing on ethnographic research into merger integration, these arguments are illustrated through two vignettes titled `surveillance' and `sanctuary'. These represent the reproduction of, and resistance to, the truth effects of `organizational culture'. The implications of critically examining `organizational culture' in this way are twofold: first, it opens up space for other merger discourses, and second, it enables positioning of merger accounts within cultural discourses in a way that forwards productive rather than divisive effects in theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the variable intensity of selection pressure on firms. Failing to include a theory of selection pressure in assessing a firm's performance can lead to ambiguous or incomplete judgements on the rationales of the firm's success. Building on previous threads of literature (population ecology, evolutionary economics, and the dynamic resource-based view of the firm), this paper paves the way for a unified theory of selection through seven research propositions. Emphasis is placed on the fact that managers can use the determinants of selection strategically, either to avoid the direct pressure of selection or to pass it on competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the procedural justice literature published since 1990. The distinction between procedural justice and distributive justice, with few exceptions, is well accepted in the literature. Four theories exploring procedural justice are presented. The antecedents, consequences and contexts for procedural justice effects are reviewed. Two additional issues discussed are the relationship between procedural justice and distributive justice and higher-order procedural justice effects. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential for operational efficiency improvement is a key consideration for firms contemplating the consolidation of both internal and external business units. This paper develops a leader-follower game model to assess such potential gains from the merger of different organizations with constrained resources. A profit-sharing strategy and algorithm are proposed to solve the model while maintaining incentive compatibility within each unit's decision-making process. This paper further demonstrates that in a framework, within the data envelopment analysis paradigm, a supply chain with an upstream leader and downstream followers is efficient if and only if both the leader and the followers are individually efficient. A case study of a banking operations merger shows how incentive compatible merger of operations can produce overall efficiency improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has emerged as a key concept in the management literature, with various studies demonstrating its positive effects on important firm-level outcomes. However, our understanding of whether and how EO shapes dynamics within organizations is still underdeveloped. Thus, by integrating EO and social information–processing theories, this study develops and tests a cross-level contingency model that describes how and when EO cascades through an organization—bridging firm, supervisor, and employee levels. We conducted a three-source, three-wave study involving 280 supervisors and 1,214 employees from 94 organizations to test our model. The results show that firm-level EO is positively related to employees' creative performance and that supervisors' and employees' passion for inventing serves as the central serial mediators for these links. The results also reveal that these cascading effects of EO do not occur unconditionally but depend on an important boundary condition—that is, the extent to which supervisors identify with their organizations. A follow-up study of 238 supervisors from various firms provides further support for the social information–processing perspective of our model. It shows that the link between firm EO and supervisors' passion for inventing is mediated by perceived normative expectations for creativity. Taken together, these findings offer a new perspective on the internal dynamics of EO, uncover a crucial boundary condition, and provide insights for the effective implementation of EO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an effort to review and organize the now vast literature on inter-firm networks, with the aim of assessing the important current forms of network, the organizational mechanisms supporting them, and the main variables that have been shown to influence network emergence and shape. These results are achieved through a literature review encompassing a number of approaches across the social sciences. The paper can therefore be used as a typological state-of-art on inter-firm networks, and as a basis for developing hypotheses of relationship between network antecedents and forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a constructivist framework for understanding the outcomes of the entrepreneurial process. The core thesis of the paper is that, taken alone, neither the personality of the entrepreneur nor the structural characteristics of the environment determine the outcome. Rather, it is argued that the outcome of the entrepreneurial process is emergent from a complex interaction between the entrepreneur, the environment, chance events and prior performance. The framework is illustrated with evidence from biographies of six entrepreneurs involved in successful processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis on the individual "female entrepreneur" in much of the small business literature in the last decade disguises the fact that many women in business ownership are in partnership with others, usually with men. How "gender" impinges on the process of small business ownership has been little studied. The paper examines gender and ownership using evidence from a three-year study on the impact of gender on small business management, involving interviews with 602 male and female UK business owners, drawn from three industrial sectors. Difficulties were encountered in interpreting sex differences as "gender" trends, owing to significant sectoral variation. Nevertheless, some marked gender differences were identified. These referred to differential patterns of kinship with the respondent; the allocation and perception of specialist roles within the business; and the fact that female owners are less likely to be associated with more than two businesses. Overall sole traders were in the minority in both sexes, implying that most owners shared responsibility and management in some way with other owners. The paper concludes with methodological implications of co-ownership for the sampling and analysis of small business owner/managers from a gender perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain the observations that not all individuals have the potential to found organizations, and that of those who do, not all try or succeed. Three dimensions to organization formation are proposed: propensity to found, intention to found, and sense making. These three dimensions lead to a decision to found the venture, or to abandon the attempt. Several propositions are derived from the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]