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There is a growing expectation that businesses take more active roles in addressing societal problems. Recent scholarship further endorses the idea of corporate purpose, which implicitly assumes a form of moral responsibility towards society. By drawing from the philosophical doctrines of the common good, we offer a moral view of corporate purpose. We conceptualize the common good as a multidimensional construct that draws from three moral perspectives, substantive, procedural, and consequential, where all three are jointly necessary but individually insufficient to explain the moral view of corporate purpose. We explain how the dimensions underlying each of these perspectives of common good could serve as a rubric for decision-making through the process of framing, formalizing, and realizing corporate purpose. We develop a research and practice agenda that provide tests of the common good as applied to a firm's governance, actions, and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the intergroup contact hypothesis has demonstrated that interactions across social groups affect individuals' attitudes toward outgroups, and more recently their stance on outgroup-related policies. We investigate whether these interactions have an even more foundational effect of shaping individuals' overall political ideology—deeply rooted belief systems guiding individual behavior. Our theory proposes that intergroup contact challenges the normative fit underlying in- and out-group differences, thereby influencing a core dimension of political ideology. Evidence from COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates (Study 1) and NASA's spaceflights from 1961 to 2019 (Study 2) show that intergroup contact increases voting and donating to liberal candidates and campaigns, and this effect is stronger for minorities. Establishing this link informs organizational and political scholars about the role of social interactions in shaping political views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars have long noted the strategies to manage the regulatory, technical, and cultural barriers to cross-border collaborations, knowledge of the processes that facilitate collaboration between organizations embedded within geopolitical rivalry is scanty. To understand the mechanisms that promote this important, yet understudied form of collaboration, we conduct a historical case study of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a collaboration between the space programs of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Our study demonstrates that the antagonistic governments attempted to restrict interactions between the organizations to a more formal, 'supervised' space, which nonetheless reinforced the regulatory, technical, and cultural barriers. Noting the limitations of the politically controlled space, organizational members gradually developed a more informal, 'free' space, built on open exchange, common ground, and interpersonal trust. We observe the interplay of these spaces, including the boundary work to create and maintain the autonomy of the free space outside of political control, and the translation work to exchange problems and solutions between these spaces and overcome the politicized barriers to collaboration. We advance the literature on cross-border collaboration by showing how free spaces can be used against the divisive forces of geopolitical rivalry to support successful partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Status research typically assumes that status hierarchy is legitimate and stable, but this assumption may not hold during social revolutions which destabilize political, economic, and social institutions. We predict that, during revolutionary times, businesses whose founders are linked to a declining "power elite" group have higher failure rates than businesses without such a "status birthmark." Moreover, this status birthmark effect is stronger for larger businesses whose resources and salient identity could become their liability. We tested these hypotheses by examining business survival in late Imperial Russia (1861-1914), one of the major revolutionary times in world history. Results show that firms whose founders were from the declining "power elites" (nobles, government officials, and military officers) were more likely to fail during this period than other status groups (e.g., merchants), and this risk was stronger for larger firms. Our study highlights how a once coveted status symbol may become a liability for businesses during radical institutional changes. Keywords: Status; Founder; Social Revolution; Institutional Change; Organizational History [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misconduct poses a significant threat to organizations, as these unethical and illegal actions result in loss of credibility and market value in addition to harming environmental and societal well-being. Because of the importance of the CEO in making organizational decisions and "setting the tone," research has identified CEO dismissal as an important consequence of misconduct. However, not all CEOs are punished for misconduct. Contrasting extant studies which highlight governance structures in explaining turnover following misconduct, we build from theory on organizational identity orientation to suggest that this may be the product of firm-level factors. Using a sample of S&P 1000 firms from 2000-2018, we conduct word embedding and natural language processing on letters to shareholders to capture organizational identity orientation, and find that organizational identity orientation influences CEO turnover following misconduct. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications to organizational identity and misconduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization's misconduct harm their organizations, society and environment alike. Prior research have proposed agentic and trait-based explanations on why executives engage in misconduct. However, misconduct is essentially a moral failure, where personal values underlie engagement in misconduct. These values are often embodied in one's political ideology--defined as the sets of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved. Drawing on recent research on political ideologies and social identity theory, we hypothesize that CEOs with extreme political ideologies- extreme conservatives and extreme liberals- are more likely to engage in misconduct than CEOs with politically moderate ideologies; and this effect is accentuated when the organizational and state ideology echo the CEO's views. We find strong evidence for our hypotheses in a sample of Fortune 500 CEOs in the period 2010-2018 by taking advantage of variation imposed by CEO turnover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although organizational studies have hinted at a dark side of institutional entrepreneurship, little is known about how actors creatively deceive regulative agencies in the pursuit of private interests. To unearth such deceptive strategies, we conduct a framing analysis of the discourses with respect to training certification of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Our analysis reveals strategies used by Boeing employees to deceive the FAA and international aviation regulative bodies into accepting major flight software changes as only minor additions to the prior-generation aircraft. We also identify the microscopic strategies in preventing and suppressing resistance from within Boeing. The dark side of institutional entrepreneurship employed by Boeing employees ultimately contributed to technological catastrophes (i.e., Boeing 737 MAX crashes). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catastrophic accidents can considerably threaten organizational members' identification with their organization, and consequently cause their psychological distress. However, no studies have examined the strategies that organizational members use to make sense of such accidents and restore their psychological wellbeing. This paper draws on Weber's theodicy concept, which reconciles the conflict between sacred and profane, to examine how organizational members sensemaking strategies. We combine an interpretive analysis of accounts by NASA employees following three fatal organizational accidents with a goal of creating a generalizable sensemaking framework, illustrating the utility of Weber's theodicy concept to our understanding of how organizational members make sense of accidents. Our analysis reveals extensive use of theodicy logics to explain these accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although collaboration between competing organizations is one of the most challenging tasks in management, our knowledge about social-cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the collaborative interaction between members of competing organizations is rather limited. We conducted an inductive, interpretive historical case study of the collaboration between the US and USSR space programs during the Cold War. Our study uncovers a process by which individuals used a "free space," i.e., social space in which organizational members cognitively severed themselves from the higher-level ideological/political tension by initiating and maintaining informal and isolated interactions with their collaborative counterparts. The concept of "free space" has profound implications for analyzing effective collaboration between competing organizations in both market and nonmarket contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are major social settings in which interactions between individuals with differences in political ideologies take place. Does interacting with outgroups shape individuals' political ideologies? To answer this question, we draw from the contact hypothesis, which argues that intergroup contact leads to favorable intergroup attitudes. We go one step further and hypothesize that intergroup contact influences individuals' political ideologies. We test our theory in NASA's manned space missions from 1967-2019, which offer a unique, confined, and isolated setting to examine the effects of intergroup contact. Our findings support the notion that positive intergroup contact leads to a shift towards a liberal political ideology." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]