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BACKGROUNDEarly antiretroviral therapy initiation (ARTi) in HIV-1 restricts reservoir size and diversity while preserving immune function, potentially improving opportunities for immunotherapeutic cure strategies. For antibody-based cure approaches, the development of autologous neutralizing antibodies (anAbs) after acute/early ARTi is relevant but is poorly understood.METHODSWe characterized antibody responses in a cohort of 23 participants following ARTi in acute HIV (

Marketing scholars have recently embraced the study of the corporate upper echelons-the executives and board members atop the organizational hierarchy. However, management scholars have researched the upper echelons for decades, with frequent forays into the marketing strategy domain. As a result of progressing in two separate disciplines, the literature on marketing strategy and the upper echelons is fragmented and disjointed. We develop an organizing framework to review extant research and assess and synthesize the knowledge in the upper echelons marketing strategy domain. Our review covers the 14 most influential marketing and management journals from 1984 through February, 2020. Given the relative newness of this research within marketing, we develop a conceptual model fusing existing theory in the upper echelons and marketing strategy literatures, and use this to identify key blind spots and underdeveloped areas of knowledge caused by the two fields' independent evolutions. Finally, we also examine challenges associated with conducting research in this area and provide recommendations to help researchers and reviewers navigate these challenges to advance theory and practice., Author(s): Kimberly A. Whitler [sup.1] , Ben Lee [sup.2] , Ryan Krause [sup.3] , Neil A. Morgan [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.27755.32, 0000 0000 9136 933X, Department of Marketing, University [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every boardroom in the world. However, neither the extant leadership literature nor the corporate governance literature offers succinct guidance on what constitutes effective board leadership during such a calamity. To address this theoretical and practical need, we develop a moderated mediation model, in which directive leadership from the board chair promotes competitive simplification at the onset of the crisis, which in turn promotes firm financial performance during the crisis. Using survey responses from 120 directors of U.S. public firms in Spring of 2020, combined with firm-level archival data from multiple sources and time periods, we find support for this mediated relationship—but only if the chair is not CEO. If the chair is CEO, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between directive leadership and either competitive simplification or firm financial performance; rather, we find some evidence of a negative relationship. We explore the implications of these findings for the theory and practice of corporate governance and crisis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on CEO political ideology has demonstrated the construct's impact on many firm outcomes. Yet, political ideology does not exist in a vacuum; beyond representing a CEO's values, political ideology also affects the CEO's perception of the political environment. It remains unclear how a difference between the national political climate and the CEO's own political ideology might affect strategic decision-making. Applying upper echelons and threat response perspectives, we propose that divergence between the national political climate and the CEO's own ideology provokes a threat response, leading CEOs to cut research and development spending and increase retained earnings. We then examine two boundary conditions for this relationship. First, we propose that CEO wealth tied to the firm in the form of vested stock options will increase the perceived threat of ideology divergence, strengthening the threat response. Second, we propose that industry regulation will dampen the threat perceived from divergence, as well as hindering the CEO's ability to respond to the threat at all, because of greater stability and lower discretion, respectively. We test these predictions on a sample of Standard & Poor's 500 CEOs from 2004 to 2017 and find support for our hypothesized relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The single-minded pursuit of a short-termshareholder value maximization "mantra" by top managers often results in long-term value destruction for shareholders. We explain this paradox and develop an alternate, market-based approach labeled "competing for essential stakeholders" (CES). CES provides levers that promote long-term value creation for shareholders and for other essential firm stakeholders. Top managers using CES act as "operators" of the firm as a multisided marketplace. Increases in value creation for members on one side of the market make membership more attractive to those occupying the other sides, and vice versa. The result is increased value creation for all essential stakeholder groups. We discuss benefits of and barriers to CES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional agency theory views the proper role of the board chair exclusively as providing independent oversight to monitor and control the CEO. Recently, firms have introduced innovations in board leadership that have confounded these theoretical expectations. One notable innovation is the executive board chair, a corporate governance hybrid responsible for both oversight and strategic decision-making, challenging agency theory's prescription that the two activities remain separate. In this study, we argue that an executive board chair position can resolve the trade-off between independent oversight and involvement in strategy and therefore generate a performance advantage. We also predict that, owing to the blurring of lines between the CEO and board chair roles that the executive board chair position creates, the relationship will be stronger the greater the need to monitor and control the CEO but weaker when organizational complexity and board leadership demands are greater. Analysis of S&P 1500 firms from 2003 to 2017 provides general support for our arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Human coding of unstructured text can enable scholars to measure complex latent constructs for use in empirical analysis, but also requires substantial time and resources that limit the number and sample sizes of studies using this approach. We demonstrate how supervised machine learning (ML) can overcome these constraints by allowing scholars to scale human‐coded data. Using board leadership as an illustrative context, we apply this method to create a large‐scale dataset (N = 22,388) from smaller scale human codings of CEO duality and board chair orientations from company proxy statements. We further demonstrate the potential value of this approach by using the resulting dataset to examine the relationships among board leadership, firm performance, and CEO dismissal. The ML code and dataset are available at 10.5281/zenodo.7304697. Managerial Summary: Manually converting unstructured text into usable data requires considerable time and resources. This article outlines a replicable process for applying supervised machine learning (ML) to overcome these constraints by scaling manually coded data. While ML is often used to identify patterns or predict relationships within a given dataset, we show how scholars and practitioners can build valuable custom algorithms at an earlier stage in the process—when first building a dataset. We illustrate this approach by training ML algorithms to replicate human codings of CEO duality and board chair control and collaboration orientations from over 22,000 company filings. We then show how this approach can support new knowledge development by using these data to explore the relationships among board leadership, company performance, and CEO dismissal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has innovation in corporate governance consistently fallen short of expectations? Little progress has been made to improve corporate governance outcomes despite repeated calls for change from activist shareholders, arbiters of good governance, and government regulators. We argue that the problem lies in the need for any corporate governance innovation to be recognized as legitimate from the outset, which is unlikely given that innovation itself is inherently illegitimate. We examine the legitimacy shortcomings of a number of corporate governance innovations, assessing them according to the categories of pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy. Failure to achieve multiple categories of legitimacy destines the innovation to contention and limited application, while gaining two or more suggests that the innovation will be widely adopted. We close with a call for greater conceptual and functional flexibility to allow firms to experiment with various corporate governance innovations and react more dynamically to changing firm and environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors respond to an article that critiqued a previous article they had published regarding business enterprise reputation and the discretion of managers, particularly the link to outcome-based and behavior-based reputations. The article discusses the concept of reputation and their use of examples from the firms Toyota, Chipotle, and Apple.

Reputation is not always a "good thing." Despite the established benefits of a good reputation, recent research has elucidated the burdens and liabilities it can bring about, particularly following a crisis or stakeholder disappointment. However, managers spend much of their time avoiding such extreme events rather than responding to them, and we know very little about how reputation influences managers' everyday decisions. We address this issue by offering a theoretical framework to explain how reputation shapes managers' perceptions of their discretion as they attempt to navigate stakeholder expectations. In doing so we clarify and elaborate two forms of reputation—those rooted in a firm's behaviors and those rooted in a firm's outcomes—as well as two forms of discretion—managers' perceived latitude of actions and their perceived latitude of objectives—thereby synthesizing and extending recent work in both the reputation literature and discretion literature. The intersection of social evaluations and managerial decisions remains an exciting and fruitful avenue of research, and we aim to illustrate how the insights from the meticulous efforts of scholars in both fields would benefit from further cross-pollination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]