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While the effect of category spanning on the success and survival of organizations has been studied extensively, there are comparatively few studies that address factors that influence organizations to do category spanning. Our study addresses such antecedents of category spanning focusing on category density and the moderating effects of regional density, category fuzziness and the founding number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business Model Innovations (BMI) are central decisions of the top management team and crucial for companies aspiring to establish enduring competitive advantages. However, there has been limited research focused on elucidating the factors influencing on top managers' decision-making processes regarding BMI. Our study adopts a cognitive perspective, delving into the dynamics between the prevailing contextual dynamics (opportunities and threats) that influence the decision to innovate a business model, prior BMI experiences (failures and successes), and a manager's temporal orientation. Empirically, we conducted a behavioral experiment involving 400 C-level and C-1-level executives from Forbes 2000 companies. Our findings show that both current threats and past failures inhibit BMI. Additionally, a temporal focus on the past and present increases the likelihood of deciding against a BMI. However, when combined with negative prior experiences with BMI, a focus on the past intensifies this effect, whereas a future-oriented temporal focus mitigates this negative impact. Our findings contribute to research on BMI and top management decision-making in this context. Moreover, we also add to the behavioral theory of the firm, offering insights into the cognitive and temporal dimensions that influence strategic decision-making in the realm of BMI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past is a central element in crafting an organizational identity. However, the past is interpreted subjectively, resulting in ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretations. This study investigates the use of rhetorical history in crafting an organizational identity by analyzing differences between an organization as an actor and organizational members in applying rhetorical history. Our analysis is grounded on the self-representations of 28 watchmaking firms located in two watchmaking clusters in Germany based on their Web pages and interviews with 75 current and former members of watchmaking firms in these two clusters. Our results reveal that there are differences between the organization as an actor and its members not only regarding which claims of rhetorical history they emphasized but also with respect to the temporal and content-wise past to which they refer. While they share a pattern in terms of temporal structure, the organization as an actor emphasizes both near and distant history, creating a kind of "valley of oblivion," while the members of the organization show a stronger focus on near-history aspects. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of rhetorical history, showing that the use of rhetorical history is strongly influenced by rhetoricians of the past. With a focus on the importance of rhetorical history for crafting an organizational identity, our findings also allow us to draw conclusions about sources of multiple identities and how such identities can emerge--namely, through differentiated rhetorical interpretations of the past by groups of actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational identity research emphasizes that multiple identities can coexist in an organization. With a qualitative study of four firms in the German watchmaking industry, we analyze how and why multiple identities emerge. Our findings show that the orchestration of organizational identity claims differs regarding the organization as a social actor and the organizational members. Moreover, we find that differences in the conceptualization of identity claims by both levels of actors are less competing but rather have a symbiotic relationship in the sense of reinforcing the firm's uniqueness. Exploring this finding in more detail, we observe that rhetorical history is not only applied by incorporating different episodes but also that episodes are emphasized differently with respect to the rhetorician. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities face by increasing institutional pressures to conform to market demands. Following these demands, universities conform to a market-oriented institutional logic, such as by adopting management concepts that are common in the business world. Within this study, I will analyze the factors that influence the likelihood of adopting diversity management among 112 German universities. The results show that imprinting-i.e., the influence of the founding institutional environment-does not affect the overall adoption of diversity management. However, by taking into account different administrative levels at which diversity management may be introduced, the findings show that imprinting affects the adoption of diversity management at higher-level structures. By discussing these findings, the study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the diffusion of diversity management in universities as well as a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying processes of imprinting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study analyzes how the predominant and taken-for-granted type of governance structure within the organizational field of German foundations erodes due to the diffusion of a more corporate-like governance practice between 1870 and 2013. Moreover, we study how the period of 51 years of socialism in the former GDR-in which the government nearly exterminated the organizational form of foundations-affect the diffusion of this practice in the aftermath of the reunification. Results on the analysis of 9,780 German foundations confirm that governance structures that are common in the corporate world have diffused throughout the foundation sector over time with much higher rates for East German foundations after the reunification of Germany in 1990. This later finding is particular interesting as foundations established after 1990 in East Germany could easily adopt the successful West German governance model. Instead, however, they act like modern organizations influenced by forms well established in wider organizational circles rather than the distinctive and more corporatist forms predominant in Western Germany. We discuss this finding in the context of institutional legacy and the diffusion of practices in organizational fields, arguing that radical institutional change may be a key factor that leads to isomorphism across and not within organizational fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]