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The aim of this Special Issue is to demonstrate how drawing on multidisciplinary insights from the literature on prosociality can broaden the individual-opportunity nexus to make room for a variety of actors. Five feature articles emphasize the collective level of the analysis, underscoring the social distance between the entrepreneurs and the different communities they serve. Leveraging construal level theory, we abductively derive an organizing framework that helps us articulate how stretching or compressing social distance can transform initial opportunities into occasions for serving the greater good. We identify two distinct mechanisms present in all five empirical studies that explain how the needs and hopes of many others may add creativity, consistency and connectivity to one's venture. We also connect these abductive insights with the two editorials that follow this introduction and nudge our collective attention towards the research opportunities awaiting our academic community once we begin to relax the egocentric reference point that, until recently, has defined the discipline of entrepreneurship.

Certified B Corporations are ventures that have chosen to embrace third party voluntary social and environmental audits conducted by an entrepreneurial non-profit enterprise called B Lab. In this special issue, we focus on the lifecycle of Certified B Corporations and its relation to the entrepreneurial journey. We highlight research at the intersection of opportunities and prosocial certification to identify patterns and processes which add significant value to ongoing conversations in the field of entrepreneurship while charting new research pathways. We develop a framework of prosocial venturing and certification that pinpoints several elements of likely consequence and curiosity. This offers new insights about the entrepreneurial process that hint at the importance of opportunity, identity metamorphosis and sedimentation/superseding work. We thereby interpret how the exploration of prosociality may add to conversations on how and why ventures resist or embrace change over time, to what effect and ultimately, how opportunities may be reBorn.

This symposium explores the interface between organizations and marginalized persons by examining the role that organizations may have in reintegrating these individuals into work and society at la...

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. In this study, we explore how investors reconcile information on firms’ social responsibility with analysts’ assessments of future firm risk in the pricing of long-term bonds. We ask whether investors pay attention to small strides toward and/or small slips away from socially responsible behavior, arguing that analysts’ corporate bias toward gains and against losses influences investor reactions to corporate social responsibility. We hypothesize that analysts notice and reward improvements in social responsibility, yet excuse lapses. We find support for this hypothesis, using a unique dataset of long-term bonds that combines lagged measures of firm-level financial and social performance with bond-specific data pertaining to risk of default and pricing. The empirically robust asymmetry in investor responses to small but often cumulative increases versus decreases in corporate social responsibility reveals an under-examined root cause of longer-term, larger-scale distortions in financial market returns regarding corporate social performance. Our findings elaborate earlier behavioral research on how corporate bias influences analysts’ short-term assessments of economic risk, by theorizing why this corporate bias may influence long-term assessments of social risk. Our work also motivates more critical scrutiny of the role analysts play in revising the future risk of today’s social action versus inaction.

Extending the literature on social capital development in the community, this article examines the impact of diverse social interactions (in the community and the workplace) on the development of social trust in the workplace, and investigates whether their effects differ in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Using survey data collected in Canada and China, the authors find that the diversity of one’s social interactions in the community is positively associated with one’s social trust in the workplace, and this relationship is not significantly different between the two cultures. Diversity of one’s social interactions in the workplace is also positively associated with one’s social trust in the workplace, though only in collectivistic cultures.

The spring of 2002 brought new hope for improved water services to the inhabitants of Tanzania's largest city, Dar es Salaam. City Water Services Ltd (CWS) has abandoned a case at the International Arbitration Tribunal, where it has been contesting Government of Tanzania's decision to terminate its contract and enlisting the services of Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Company. In particular, CWS had begun to consistently fail to remit the Lessor tariff to Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Authority and to deposit the First Time New Domestic Water Supply Connection Fee into the First Time New Domestic Water Supply Connection Fund on a timely basis. During Tanzania's period of socialism, the government had promised and delivered free water to some of its citizens. Despite a number of apparent advantages of private sector participation, there was also evidence to oppose this form of utility operation in Dar es Salaam and other cities in the developing world.

Keeping large scale projects “on time and on budget” is no trivial accomplishment, especially when they rely on creative contributions from multiple individuals and groups that cannot be precisely timed. Simultaneously delivering on all of these aspects requires a flexible and nuanced approach to controls that builds on the discipline instilled in professional practice. We substantiate this insight with 82-day ethnography of a dramatic television series production as it unfolded in real-time. Our analyses reveal three distinct practices enacted by project members to (re)balance creativity within the parameters of the project: 1) analogically linking controls with creative tasks; 2) (in)formally attuning creative tasks to controls as the project unfolds; and 3) (re)allocating scarce resources to realize creative aspirations of the project. Taken together, these practices organically but predictably (re)balance creativity and control in large scale projects.

This study contributes to an emic understanding of how different types of social obligations may help or hinder the formation of initial organizational trust within collectivist cultures. We extend prior social categorization insights by challenging the expectation that in-group favouritism automatically facilitates higher levels of initial trust among collectivists. We theorize and test the asymmetric effects of two different types of social obligations toward members of distinct social categories (kinship and friendship in-groups) on the formation of initial organizational trust. Using a quasi-experimental research design in a collectivist culture (Japan), we hypothesize and show that in ambivalent situations, voluntary social obligations toward members of friendship in-groups encourage early trust in trustees' organizations; however, involuntary social obligations toward members of kinship in-groups discourage early trust development toward the organization these trustees represent. The effects of (in)voluntary social obligations on initial organizational trust are contingent on how collectivists perceive each encounter: voluntary social obligations are more conducive to trust-building at lower levels of perceived opportunity; involuntary social obligations have stronger effects on initial organizational trust at higher levels of perceived risk.

This article develops a critical theory of value creation in cross-sector partnerships by recasting value creation from the standpoint of the beneficiary. We first explain how distinct combinations of principles, relations and relational processes set largely non-overlapping foundations for conceptualizing the role of the beneficiary in value creation within Marxist, pragmatist and Frankfurt schools of thought. We introduce the construct of beneficiary voice to delineate and illustrate three distinct roles that beneficiaries may play in value creation in cross-sector partnerships: voice-receiving, voice-making and voice-taking. We then focus on the generative tensions to bridge value creation arguments across these three critical theories and thus contribute an overtly socialized and explicitly relational foundation of value creation in cross-sector partnerships.

Prior research flags the inherent incompatibilities between for-profit and nonprofit partners and cautions that clashing value creation logics and conflicting identities can stall social innovation in cross sector partnerships. Process narratives of successful versus unsuccessful cross sector partnerships paint a more optimistic picture, whereby the frequency, intensity, breadth, and depth of interactions may afford frame alignment despite partners’ divergent value creation approaches. However, little is known about how cross sector partners come to recognize and reconcile their divergent value creation frames in order to co-construct social value. Using longitudinal narratives of four dyads, we show that partners initially contrast their sector-embedded diagnostic frames and then work together to deliberately develop partnership-specific prognostic frames. We extend the literature on framing by developing a four-stage grounded model of frame negotiation, elasticity, plasticity, and fusion which unpacks the relational process of value creation in cross sector partnerships. Our qualitative analyses further show how partners orchestrate multilevel coordination that helps scaffold and calibrate this relational process of frame fusion.

This study explores the relational processes that underpin social innovation within strategic cross-sector partnerships. Using four longitudinal narratives to document the duality of success and failure in strategic collaborations between nonprofit and for-profit organizations, the authors explain how partners navigate this duality: deliberate role (re)calibrations help the partners sustain the momentum for success and overcome temporary failure or crossover from failure to success. Our grounded framework models three relational factors that moderate the relationship between role recalibrations and the momentum for success or failure: relational attachment, a personalized reciprocal bond between partners, which provides a stabilizing buffer in the face of unexpected contingencies; partner complacency, an insufficient investment that signals temporary misalignments; and partner disillusionment, an erosion of confidence in the other partner’s commitment that diagnoses premature failure.

The context-contingent view of competitive advantage suggests that firm-level performance depends on the interaction of internal capabilities and environmental conditions. This study evaluates whet...

This study offers new insights into the context-contingent origins of attainable competitive advantage.We investigate how human capital pools and specialized training enable firms to extract superior margins from adopted information technology resources under different environmental contingencies. Using longitudinal survey data from a large and representative sample of manufacturing firms, we find that: first, specialized training for the users of adopted information technologies consistently promotes above-average increases in firmlevel performance; second, human capital endowments do not contribute to attained advantage directly, but significantly enhance the performance gains derived from specialized training in low munificence and technologically complex environments; and third, in munificent or technologically simple settings, investments in specialized training are associated with comparable performance gains for adopters with above-average and below-average human capital endowments.

The study articulates a two-dimensional typology of dynamic capabilities, grouping them by the life-cycle stage and the timing of expected returns. Using a cross-industry sample of manufacturing SMEs, we validate and map four distinct innovation strategies onto specific sets of product innovation capabilities. Results show that human capital development efforts catalyze both the external absorption and the internal emergence of novel capabilities. Stronger emphasis on product features and broader market access stimulate the effective replication of extant capabilities, yielding immediate payoffs. Process-focused strategies are a double-edged sword: they facilitate the acquisition and incorporation of external insights yet bound internal capability development.

This article presents a study that examined the development of inter-organizational trust at the beginning of a cross-cultural alliance for trustors from Canada and Japan. Trust is a critical facto...

This study examines unfolding organizational learning processes at MacMillan Bloedel, a company which, after years of resisting stakeholder pressures for change, disengaged from the field’s dominant paradigm and developed a new solution. We elaborate the Crossan, Lane and White multi–level framework of organizational learning processes, finding support for the four feedforward learning processes they identified (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing), and adding two action–based learning processes: ‘attending’ and ‘experimenting’. We introduce the concept of a ‘legitimacy trap’ to describe an organization’s over–reliance on institutionalized knowledge when external challenges arise. The trapped organization rejects external challenges of its legitimacy when it perceives the sources of those challenges to be illegitimate. Feedforward learning is blocked as the organization escalates its commitment to its institutionalized interpretations and actions. Taking a grounded theory approach, we discuss how individuals attend to new stimuli and engage in intuiting about them, how groups interpret, experiment with and integrate new solutions, and how the firm validates and institutionalizes the successful solution. Facilitators and impediments of each of these learning processes are identified. Our additions to the model recognize the importance of context in organizational learning processes, and suggest how power may impact organizational learning.

This study explored if, and how, cultural values affected the types of organizational goals pursued in work-related influence attempts, and which influence tactics were used to achieve these goals. A scenario-based field study of 223 part-time MBAs from three countries - the United States, Romania, and Japan - showed that similar organizational goals were sought in these countries in upward, lateral, and downward influence attempts. In general, respondents preferred using rational explanations, inspirational appeals, and consultation tactics, and disliked using pressure tactics. In simulated work situations, respondents' choices of influence tactics differed, depending on their cultural values. National culture had a significant influence on ingratiation, exchange, personal appeals, and coalition tactics. Within each culture, gender had a significant influence on ingratiation tactics, and the type of organizational goal pursued had a significant influence on rational explanation, inspirational appeals, consultation, and ingratiation tactics.

Survival under adversity is an ongoing, effortful accomplishment: entrepreneurs continuously counter-act the sudden and often significant vulnerability of their venture to external shocks and/or chronic crises. While quantitative studies paint a bleak picture by the numbers of the entrepreneurs who exit and fail, qualitative research recognizes that different types of adversity may either strain or strengthen the entrepreneurial-venture relationships. Using an inductive study of entrepreneurs traversing a 12-window year of unprecedented political turbulence, we develop a theoretical model of continuance under cumulative adversity that delineates how entrepreneur’s orientation towards the pain of others or their own relates to the survival paths they choose to follow to prolong the life- span of damaged and rapidly declining ventures. We contribute a processual understanding of survival and differentiate between paths of persistence, endurance and reflexive perseverance. By inducing the twin notions of pro...

This study explores the influence of national culture upon leaders' interpretations of corporate environmentalism. The first part of the paper reviews the theoretical and empirical premises for a common interpretation of corporate environmentalism across countries. Three dimensions of corporate environmental performance are distilled from the qualitative literature developed in North America: organizational embeddedness, capacity to undertake environmental actions, and responsibility for protecting nature. We develop a survey instrument to measure corporate environmentalism and collect data from two random samples of Chinese (Shanghai-based) and Japanese executives. Exploratory factor analyses suggest that North American, Chinese, and Japanese executives employ three similar dimensions to interpret the corporate environmental performance of their companies. Using these dimensions, the second part of the study compares the overall degree of corporate environmental performance reported on the average by Chinese and Japanese executives. The study also investigates the influence of national culture, environmental values and socioeconomic contexts upon firm-level greening in both countries.

This paper examines the partnership between a non-profit community hospital and a for-profit technology start-up using a longitudinal case study and a mixed method emergent research design that includes comprehensive real-time accounts, observation, direct communication, retrospective reflection and prospection. Prior literature on cross-sector interactions argue that partners actively co-create value through a deliberate goal-setting and frame-alignment process. We look beyond value creation to understand whether and how partners strive and reach impact in cross-sector collaborations. Elaborating on the two modes of synthesis discussed in the transdisciplinarity literature, we distinguish theoretically between extractive integration (part-to-part combinations) and additive integration (whole-to-whole combinations). We then empirically reveal two reinforcing cycles, showing that extraction promotes value creation whereas additive integration stimulates impact making. To iterate between value creation and ...

In this paper, we study the effects of deinstitutionalization and examine how institutions at multiple levels interact with one another in influencing firm-level outcomes. Our empirical context is ...

Using 16 longitudinal case studies of organizations operating in Lebanon from 1922 to 2014, whose founders, CEOs and/or general managers and trusted third party experts described as "survivors", th...

For over 40 years, sustainability research has explored the incentives that encourage managers to operate within their social responsibilities. This study synthesizes property rights theo...

In an era of global competition, there is a growing interest within the strategy field to study how the institutional environments influence firm strategies and competitive advantage. In this paper...