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The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds.

We induce a first-person conceptualization of entrepreneurial resilience. Our seven-year, two-study ethnography shows that entrepreneurs enact resilience as a four-step process of managing vulnerability: they richly experience episodes of adversity, self-monitor across episodes, reassess personal thresholds and reconcile challenges with coping skills. Entrepreneurs manage vulnerability by (1) modifying ( stretching and shrinking) objective time and (2) changing their subjective experience of time as working with or against the clock through temporal resourcing or temporal resisting. We extend the theory and practice of entrepreneurial resilience by elaborating the interplay of objective and subjective time in managing vulnerability in recurrent and unprecedented crises.

In countries where systemic inequality is pervasive, purposeful businesses that assume wider societal responsibilities try to counteract its effects by including marginalized social groups in their value creation processes. While current research documents a variety of business approaches for community inclusion, the nature, drivers and effectiveness of these inclusionary practices are not fully understood. We develop and empirically validate a framework of community inclusion that explicates the mechanisms through which purposeful businesses generate civic wealth – or economic and social benefits – to disadvantaged community groups. We differentiate between commercial practices that recast existent firm-centric processes towards creating value for marginalized groups and collaborative practices that aim to devise novel, participatory processes for engaging marginalized groups. Analysis of primary data from a sample of 430 small businesses in seven African countries confirms that the effect of social purpose on civic wealth is partially mediated by the two inclusionary practices. Businesses are more likely to extend the scope of their inclusion through collaborative practices when they receive favourable external validation and when institutional voids are low. We contribute to the literature by documenting the role of social purpose in motivating the pursuit of community-level goals and by unpacking the specific inclusionary practices used to achieve them.

We investigate the impact of B Lab certification—a rapidly growing type of third-party certification for organizations with social and/or environmental missions—on the short-term growth rates of ce...

The majority of studies on absorptive capacity (AC) underscore the importance of absorbing technological knowledge from other firms to create economic value. However, to preserve moral legitimacy and create social value, firms must also discern and adapt to (shifts in) societal values. A comparative case study of eight firms in the food industry reveals how organizations prioritize and operationalize the societal value health in product innovation while navigating inter- and intravalue conflicts. The value-sensitive framework induced in this article extends AC by explaining how technically savvy, economic value–creating firms diverge in their receptivity, articulation, and reflexivity of societal values.

Combining historical and longitudinal comparative case methodologies for nine nascent EMNCs over 12 years, we explain how their evolving relationship to a hyper turbulent home country motivates largely unplanned yet aggressive internationalization. Firms progressively mitigate the damaging effects of their rapidly deteriorating home context by pursuing a sequence of three institutional arbitrage modes. They first arbitrage rents to stabilize their rocky domestic operations, then arbitrage values to safeguard their threatened core identity, and finally arbitrage scales to transcend their limited growth prospects. The induced stepwise process of internationalization yields similar patterns for purely domestic firms, exporters, and foreign direct investors.

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.

Firms increasingly have access to information about the failure events of other firms through public repositories. We study one such repository that accumulates reports of adverse events in the medical device industry. We provide qualitative evidence that shows how firms select a sample of adverse events and then engage in inferential learning. We show that firms use the reports of others to extract new valid knowledge from the adverse events in other firms. We use quantitative evidence to explore how a public repository can be used to provide more direct evidence of vicarious learning. Our findings challenge some standard assumptions about vicarious learning. First, we show that the learning in a repository does not come from referent others. Instead, it emerges directly from failure events that might ordinarily be dismissed as noise. Second, we show that the learning does not come from copying others. Instead, it is constructed by firm members as they assemble individual failure events to identify possibilities they had not considered. Third, in contrast to vicarious learning, where the referent others and rare events provide the context, repository-based learning requires that actors impose their own context as part of the learning process. Our qualitative and quantitative evidence serve explanatory purposes by showing how firms use a repository of failure events to identify moments of valid learning, and they serve exploratory purposes by investigating how we can demonstrate reliable learning from a repository of failure events. The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1179 .

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.

We elaborate theories of indigenous innovation by explaining how internationalization choices help emerging market firms transition from dependence on external knowledge to self-reliance on internal knowledge. Using a 1998–2007 census dataset of Chinese manufacturing firms, we theorize and test the moderation effect of foreign equity and export orientation on the relationship between knowledge and indigenous innovation. We show that foreign equity dis-incentivizes, while export orientation incentivizes, investments in internal knowledge. We contribute by showing that internationalization choices may radically change indigenous innovation outcomes by shifting the locus of problem solving outside or inside the firm. Our study corroborates the negative direct and indirect effects of external knowledge on indigenous innovation at the firm level previously suggested by China-centric scholars but also shows how two types of internationalization choices may gradually relieve firm-level dependence on imported technology. We bridge the gap between Western research and Chinese thought and practice by introducing a do-it-yourself (DIY) explanation of how firms may implement China’s indigenous innovation ( zizhu chuangxin ) policy.

Research summary: Strategy scholars increasingly conduct research in nontraditional contexts. Such efforts often require the assistance of third-party intermediaries who understand local culture, norms, and language. This reliance on intermediation in primary or secondary data collection can elicit agency breakdowns that call into question the reliability, analyzability, and interpretability of responses. Herein, we investigate the causes and consequences of intermediary bias in the form of faked data and we offer Response Pattern Analysis as a statistical solution for identifying and removing such problematic data. By explicating the effect, illustrating how we detected it, and performing a controlled field experiment in a developing country to test the effectiveness of our methodological solution, we encourage researchers to continue to seek data and build theory from unique and understudied settings. Managerial summary: Any form of survey research contains the risk of interviewers faking data. This risk is particularly difficult to mitigate in Base-of-Pyramid or developing country contexts where researchers have to rely on intermediaries and forms of control are limited. We provide a statistical technique to identify a faking interviewer's ex post data collection, and remove the associated data prior to analysis. Using a field experiment where we instruct interviewers to fake the data, we demonstrate that the algorithm we employ achieves a 90 percent accuracy in terms of differentiating faking from nonfaking interviewers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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...

This All Academy Symposium endeavors to broaden the sight of management research by highlighting the central nature of embodiment and embodied experience to understanding human interactions. We use...

Organizational ethics has attracted increasing attention, but how individuals make sense of themselves as ethical subjects is a yet to be explored domain. The few empirical articles on ethical subjectivity have focused on how people within organizations seek to find a balance between a sense of ethical selfhood and dominant organizational discourse. We are interested in the role of the body and embodied experiences in constructing the entrepreneurial self and how this process unfolds over time. Viewing entrepreneuring as an ethical practice, we rely on a larger study of 58 entrepreneurs and a smaller multi-modal ethnography of three entrepreneurs in the ethical fashion industry. Drawing on the Deleuzian four folds of subjectivity that we employ as an analytical device, the data analysis reveals how our protagonists use the body as sensor, source, and processor in constructing themselves as ethical subjects. Our study complements rational perspectives on ethical decision making in entrepreneurship and establishes the body as a primary mechanism for one’s formation as an ethical subject. Through connecting the body with ethics, we aim to disclose the continuous subtle interaction between morality and materiality in the process of entrepreneuring. Our abductive framework discloses how one’s body prompts and informs the development of moral actions and material artifacts.

© 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.

We explore when and why MNCs invest more in collaborative R&D than domestic firms. The received wisdom in R&D research is that firms invest more in R&D when strong capabilities lead them to expect higher returns. Yet the stronger firms’ capabilities get, the greater their incentives to specialise and the lesser their incentives to collaborate. Prior research resolved this paradox by concluding that firms with strong capabilities do their own R&D, while those with weak capabilities partner with others. However, some firms choose to invest in collaborative R&D despite having strong capabilities. We discuss a multinationality-asymmetry: MNCs and domestic firms invest differentially in collaborative R&D depending on their approach to learning. Using a random sample of manufacturing firms in Japan, we hypothesise and find that MNCs invest less than domestic firms in collaborative R&D when they learn anticipatorily, more when they learn experientially, and equally when they learn vicariously. These differences are significant when and only when firms are motivated to (re)build capabilities.

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.

Using comparative case histories of 12 firms over 12 years we theorize how emerging market multinational companies (EMNCs) born or based in hyper turbulent contexts internationalize by sequentially...

The symposium uses a hybrid paper-panel format to sample ""living mechanisms"" operating at the interface between organizations and their natural ecological systems. Eight papers demonstrate a wide...

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 paper explores the development of market roles and transactions in fuel-efficient stoves in Darfur from 1997 to 2008 as a grounded example of how subsistence markets are socially constructed in post-conflict settings. Using a combination of archival texts, interviews, and real-time discourses by protagonists, this study explains the who, what, why and how of emergent marketplaces by showing how development interventions come to imbue market participants and transactions with socially (re)constructed meanings. The fitful emergence of subsistence marketplaces for fuel-efficient in Darfur is punctuated by development interventions which at times under- or misrepresent market participants and by successes and failures in bringing together trainers, producers, sellers, consumers and users of fuel-efficient stoves. Subsidies and handouts delay and distort the emergence of grassroots demand, choices, and prices; a plurality of competing development interventions re-shape the supply. By the end of 2008, the subsistence market for fuel-efficient stoves catches momentum, engaging over 52% of the Darfuri communities in market transactions for the product. As market participants gain voice and influence they reshape the market to favour mud stoves over metal stoves. Reports by several development organizations suggest that among fuel-efficient stove users, 90% use mud models, and 49% of women who own both mud and metal stoves prefer mud stoves.

Uncertainty is a daily presence in the real world. It affects our decision making and may have influence on cooperation. Often uncertainty is so severe that we can only predict some upper and lower bounds for the outcome of our actions, i.e., payoffs lie in some intervals. A suitable game theoretic model to support decision making in collaborative situations with interval data is that of cooperative interval games. Solution concepts that associate with each cooperative interval game sets of interval allocations with appealing properties provide a natural way to capture the uncertainty of coalition values into the players' payoffs. This paper extends interval-type core solutions for cooperative interval games by discussing the set of undominated core solutions which consists of the interval nondominated core, the square interval dominance core, and the interval dominance core. The interval nondominated core is introduced and it is shown that it coincides with the interval core. A straightforward consequence of this result is the convexity of the interval nondominated core of any cooperative interval game. A necessary and sufficient condition for the convexity of the square interval dominance core of a cooperative interval game is also provided.

This study extends the literature on entrepreneurship in developing countries by offering a two-stage explanation for the paradoxical observation that enterprise activities often flourish under extreme adversity. Our findings complement the base-of-pyramid and peace-through-commerce attention to the growing role of business in international development by fleshing out the functions of enterprise resilience under terrorism. We first explain how terrorism conditions (outbreak, escalation, and reduction) may create psychological incentives for enterprise resilience; then we show that, controlling for ex ante terrorism conditions, enterprise resilience yields more favorable economic payoffs at higher levels of terrorism, especially for informal entrepreneurs.

The (re)distribution of collective gains and costs is a central question for individuals and organizations contemplating cooperation under uncertainty. The theory of cooperative interval games provides a new game theoretical angle and suitable tools for answering this question. This survey aims to briefly present the state-of-the-art in this young field of research, discusses how the model of cooperative interval games extends the cooperative game theory literature, and reviews its existing and potential applications in economic and operations research situations with interval data.

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.

This article fuses variance generation and suppression arguments with the micro-underpinnings of collective learning to bring the socio-emotional context of learning to the foreground. We take a practice-based perspective on cross-level learning distortions to explore non-recursive trade-offs between variance generation and variance suppression as newcomers adapt to established groups and as groups react to newcomers. Our typology first disaggregates the effects of sociality and emotionality to describe four patterns of context-contingent individual practicing: experimenting, emulating, bracketing and impersonating. We then explain why groups operating in distinct contexts may systematically ignore or discount two specific types of individual departures from collective norms: outliers (infrequent, significant deviations) and clusters (frequent, incremental changes). Our theoretical predictions add value to managers by unpacking the contextual contingencies that systematically pattern individual and collective learning and by suggesting specific interventions for preventing or alleviating learning disorders.

This study develops a culture-contingent model of trust formation in emergent relationships by comparing how trust-warranting signs shape attributions of trustworthiness to unfamiliar trustees in collectivist versus individualist cultures. We predict and find that the effectiveness of dispositional and contextual signs varies systematically depending on trustors’ national culture. Collectivists tend to rely less on dispositional signs and more on situational signs than individualists. This difference fosters distinct trust-building pathways. Individualists bestow trust based on a trustee’s perceived ability and integrity, collectivists’ trusting choices depend to a greater extent on predictable, benevolent interactions with a potential partner. These findings suggest that, in cross-cultural encounters, signs aligned with trustors’ cultural expectations hasten trust production. Mismatched signs are impotent, even off-putting.

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 study examines how Chinese firms began responding to worsening environmental concerns in the late 1990s. Combining predictions from control theory, escalation of commitment, and goal theory, we seek to explain how leaders' cognitions shape the formation of novel responses to the value-laden issue of corporate greening. We propose an iterative model that links leaders' principles with corporate actions and test it using survey data gathered from 360 firms. The model views strategy organically, as a set of adaptive goals and behaviors, and highlights the role of systemic and local feedback loops in strategy formation. We find that top executives who champion new strategic initiatives monitor early success or failure, and adjust their efforts to match early performance feedback. Perceptions of satisfactory performance strengthen leaders' efforts towards their initial target, while perceptions of unsatisfactory performance diminish them. This feedback relationship is invariant throughout favorable or unfavorable expectancies of success, contrary to the contingent prediction of control theory. The model also examines how top-down and bottom-up strategic initiatives combine to help firms maintain a positive momentum of change when champions' efforts decline in the face of premature failure signals. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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...

International audience; Sustainable entrepreneurship is a vital and growing area of entrepreneurship studies. Although charged with multiple potentially conflicting discourses, sustainable entrepreneurship is usually viewed from a binary logic of business versus sustainability. This article uses an aesthetic process approach to sustainable entrepreneurship to move beyond this binary logic and unearth the tensions between multiple discourses. The authors introduce the construct of embodied multi-discursivity that addresses this issue methodologically as well as conceptually. By combining discourse analysis with aesthetic inquiry, the article pushes the boundaries of “traditional” qualitative methods. The aim is to encourage sustainable entrepreneurship scholars to expand their methodological horizon to capture the emotionally charged, value-laden processes they study. Embodied multi-discursivity shows how multi-discursive processes of entrepreneurship come into being, how they are disrupted, and how they can break into a duality that ignores the variety of discourses. The authors conclude by drawing some implications for sustainable entrepreneurship.