How does the presence of domain experts on a corporate board—directors whose primary professional experience is within the focal firm's industry—affect organizational outcomes? We argue that under conditions of significant decision uncertainty, a higher proportion of domain experts on a board may detract from effective decision making and thus increase the probability of organizational failure. Building on exploratory interviews with board members and CEOs, we derive hypotheses from this argument in the context of local banks in the United States. We predict that the greater the level of decision uncertainty—due to rapid asset growth or operation in less predictable markets—the stronger the relationship between the proportion of banking expert directors and the probability of bank failure. Longitudinal analyses of 1,307 banks between 1996 and 2012 support this prediction, even after accounting for both the overall level of professional diversity among directors and banks' different propensities to have an expert-heavy board. We discuss implications for the key dimensions of board composition, the conditions under which the professional background of directors is more or less consequential, and the mechanisms whereby board composition affects organizational outcomes.

Social welfare, or the good society, is of central concern to the Academy of Management. In this paper, we review the concept of social welfare, suggesting that regardless of discipline, social welfare is defined as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. We then review the literature on the corporate objective within a market economy, where the dominant view is that of a single-objective function. Analyzing this view, we argue for a multi-dimensional objective for organizations in order to meet social welfare objectives: where decision making within a market economy better utilizes the benefits of markets. We suggest that improvements in social welfare are possible where markets are better-enabled to operate among stakeholders unconstrained by some single-valued objective. In doing so, we respond to the critics of stakeholder theory who argue that it is an untenable theory due to its inability to specify how stakeholder objectives are to be prioritized.

Agency theory-grounded research on boards of directors and firm legitimacy has historically viewed CEO power as de-legitimating, often taking this fact for granted in theorizing about external assessors' evaluations of a firm. With few exceptions, this literature has focused exclusively on capital market participants (e.g., investors, securities analysts) as the arbiters of a firm's legitimacy and has accordingly assumed that legitimate governance arrangements are those derived from the shareholder-oriented prescriptions of agency theory. We extend this line of research in new ways by arguing that customers also externally assess firm legitimacy, and that firms potentially adjust their governance characteristics to meet customers' norms and expectations. We argue that the cultural-cognitive institutions prevalent in customers' home countries influence their judgments regarding a firm's legitimacy, such that firms competing heavily in high-power distance cultures are more likely to have powerful CEOs, with CEO power a source of legitimacy—rather than illegitimacy—among customers. We also argue that the more dependent a firm is on its customers and the more salient cultural power distance is as a demand-side institutional norm, the greater this relationship will be. Data from 151 U.S. semiconductor and pharmaceutical firms over a 10-year period generally support our predictions.

Despite the extensive research into the effects of reputation, virtually all of this research has examined the effect of one type of reputation on one or more specific outcomes. In this study we ask the question: How do the reputations of analysts, CEOs, and firms individually and jointly affect firm outcomes? To answer this question we focus on a context where reputations are particularly relevant - changes in analyst recommendations and the effect of those changes on stock market reactions. Our study makes contributions to the growing reputation literature by being one of the first studies to recognize and measure how the market accounts for multiple reputations. Further, we argue and find that the reputations of different actors interact with each other when determining particular firm outcomes. We find that different actor's reputations influence the reactions of observers.

The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However its potential remains unfulfilled: the authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies, organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: history as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies - dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity and theoretical fluency - and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and micro-history. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor, afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary and future-directed social realities.

In order to acquire resources, new ventures need to be perceived as legitimate. For this to occur, a venture must meet the expectations of various audiences with differing norms, standards, and values as the venture evolves and grows. We investigate how the organizational identity of a technology venture must adapt to meet the expectations of critical resource providers at each stage of its organizational life cycle. In so doing, we provide a temporal perspective on the interactions between identity, organizational legitimacy, institutional environments, and entrepreneurial resource acquisition for technology ventures. The core assertion from this conceptual analysis is that entrepreneurial ventures confront multiple legitimacy thresholds as they evolve and grow. We identify and discuss three key insights related to entrepreneurs' efforts to cross those thresholds at different organizational life cycle stages: institutional pluralism, venture-identity embeddedness and legitimacy buffering.

We argue that employees who perceive that they are provided with a safe climate at work within which to voice their concerns and suggestions about work-related issues or problems will not only be more engaged employees but will also be likely to be more engaged and involved members of their communities. By focusing on the importance of employee voice opportunities, in work organizations, we seek to build our understanding of how to create "positive" organizations that contribute to the building of human potential, both inside the organizational setting and outside in our communities and societies. We also consider how employee voice opportunities in for-profit organizations may be influenced by the law and prevailing attitudes about corporate governance.

Effectively capturing opportunities requires rapid decision-making. We investigate the speed of opportunity evaluation decisions by focusing on firms' venture termination and venture advancement decisions. Experience, standard operating procedures, and confidence allow firms to make opportunity evaluation decisions faster; we propose that a firm's attentional orientation, as reflected in its project portfolio, limits the number of domains in which these speed-enhancing mechanisms can be developed. Hence firms' decision speed is likely to vary between different types of decisions. Using unique data on 3,269 mineral exploration ventures in the Australian mining industry, we find that firms with a higher degree of attention toward earlier-stage exploration activities are quicker to abandon potential opportunities in early development but slower to do so later, and that such firms are also slower to advance on potential opportunities at all stages compared to firms that focus their attention differently. Market dynamism moderates these relationships, but only with regard to initial evaluation decisions. Our study extends research on decision speed by showing that firms are not necessarily fast or slow regarding all the decisions they make, and by offering an opportunity evaluation framework that recognizes that decision makers can, in fact often do, pursue multiple potential opportunities simultaneously.

We examine how top management team (TMT) misfit, defined as discrepancies between the TMT's functional roles and the qualifications of the managers who fill those roles, affects the evolution of TMT composition and structure in a longitudinal study of entrepreneurial ventures. We distinguish two types of misfit - overqualification and underqualification - and study how each is associated with TMT changes. We further consider the moderating effect of firm development. Results reveal that underqualified TMTs hire new managers to reinforce existing capabilities whereas overqualified TMTs elaborate their role structures. However, achieving developmental milestones (i.e., obtaining venture capital funding and staging an initial public offering) is a critical contingency to TMT change: absent these milestones, firms neither hire new managers nor add roles, even when they seemingly need to do so. These findings contribute to knowledge of how TMTs and new ventures evolve by underscoring the importance of simultaneously attending to TMT composition and structure.

This article extends the understanding of what impels buyers to contact particular sellers in online business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces, which are typically characterized by sparse social structures and concomitant limitations in observing social cues. Integrating an institutional perspective with signaling theory, our core argument is that offline seller characteristics that are visible online—in particular, geographic location and legal status—convey credible signals of seller behavior because they provide buyers with information on sellers' local institutional quality and the institutionally-induced obligations and controls acting on sellers. Using unique data from a large Italian online B2B marketplace between the fourth quarter of 1999 and July 2001, we find that both sellers' local institutional quality and their legal statuses affect a buyer's likelihood of contacting a seller. Moreover, consistent with the idea that a buyer's own local institutional quality generates a relevant reference point against which sellers are evaluated, we find that a buyer is progressively more likely to contact sellers the higher their local institutional quality relative to the buyer. Jointly, our findings imply that in online B2B marketplaces, signals conveyed by sellers' geographic locations and legal statuses may be substantive sources of competitive heterogeneity and market segmentation.

The law of requisite variety is widely employed in management theorizing, and is linked with core strategy themes such as contingency and fit. We reflect upon requisite variety as an archetypal borrowed concept. We contrast its premises with insights from institutional and commitment literatures, draw propositions that set boundaries to its applicability, and review the ramifications of what we term "complexity misalignment." In this way, we contradict foundational assumptions of the law, problematize adaptation- and survival-centric views of strategizing, and theorize the role of human agency in variously complex regimes.

We draw on the historiographical concepts of "generational units" and "collective memories" as a framework for understanding the emergence of entrepreneurially oriented cohesive groups within regions. Generational units are localized subgroups within generations that have a self-referential, reflexive quality, by virtue of the members' sense of their own connections to each other and the events that define them. Collective memories are shared accounts of the past shaped by historical events that mold individuals' perceptions. The two concepts provide a valuable point of departure for incorporating historical concepts into the study of entrepreneurial dynamics and offer a framework for understanding how entrepreneurs' historically situated experiences affect them. Our framework breaks new theoretical ground in several ways. First, we synthesize disparate literatures on generational units, collective memory, and organizational imprinting. Second, we specify mechanisms through which imprinting occurs and persists over time. We develop analytical arguments framed by sociological and historiographical theories, focusing on the conditions under which meaningful generational units of entrepreneurs may emerge and benefit from leadership and legacy building, technologies of memory, and institutional support that increases the likelihood of their persistence.

Growing workforce diversity increases the likelihood that supervisors and subordinates will differ along demographic lines, a situation that has important implications for their relationship quality and individual outcomes. In a sample of 1,253 employees from 54 work-units, we investigate the effects of differences in disability status between supervisors and subordinates on leader-member-exchange (LMX) quality and subsequent performance ratings, and find that incongruence in general is related to lower LMX quality and lower performance. In addition, we propose and find an asymmetrical effect of disability incongruence, such that LMX quality is worse in dyads in which the supervisor has a disability than in dyads in which the subordinate has a disability. Furthermore, we investigate the moderating role of unit-level climate for inclusion on this relationship and find support for a buffering effect of inclusive climates on the negative incongruence-LMX relationship for scenarios in which the supervisor, but not the subordinate, has a disability. We build relevant theory for the relational demography, disability, LMX, and organizational climate literatures by predicting these effects on the basis of status mechanisms. These findings have important practical implications, as they provide companies with a feasible way to manage their diverse workforce.

This paper examines when firms pursue structural realignment through the recombination of business units. Our results refine and extend contingency theory and studies of organization design by drawing on theories of decision avoidance and delay to describe conditions when firms pursue or postpone structural realignment. Our empirical analysis of 46 firms from 1978 to 1997 operating within the U.S. medical device and pharmaceutical sectors demonstrates that while decision makers initiate structural recombination during periods of industry growth (i.e., munificence), they reduce their recombination efforts during periods of industry turbulence (i.e., dynamism) and managerial turbulence (i.e., growth in top management team size). We also find evidence that firms delay realignment and bide their time for better environmental conditions of declining turbulence and industry growth before pursuing more structural realignment. Together, these findings suggest that decision makers often delay initiating structural recombination until they can effectively process information and assess how structural changes will help them realign the organization to the environment.

We augment transaction cost economics' (TCE) bounded rationality assumption with heuristics (framing) and cognitive biases to expand the understanding of hierarchical governance in the theory. TCE traditionally puts opportunism in the frontseat, while primarily relegating bounded rationality to the support role of invoking incomplete contracts. The theory also suggests that hierarchical governance effectively mitigates opportunism-based transaction costs, making it difficult to explain why hierarchies are not always used. However, when an augmented bounded rationality assumption is incorporated into TCE, we argue, first, that bounded rationality is a separate source of transaction costs, and, second, that these costs are not equally mitigated by all forms of hierarchy. Instead, different hierarchical forms are associated with particular frames and social referents that naturally enhance specific bounded rationality-based conflicts, allowing certain hierarchical forms to mitigate bounded rationality-based transaction costs better than others. As a result, bounded rationality takes a frontseat in the theory, addressing prior critiques of TCE, expanding the governance questions addressed by the theory and creating a new moderating role for asset specificity in internal exchanges.

Labor codes have been voluntarily adopted and used by manufacturers in emerging economies for the past two decades, as a means of ensuring minimally acceptable or core labor standards for workers. However, far too little is known of the potential benefits from the voluntary adoption of labor codes to the manufacturer, and prior human resource management research has been virtually silent on the business implications of their use for emerging economy manufacturers participating in global supply chains. Drawing on previous work across multiple disciplines and proposing a framework that extends human resource management theory more explicitly and rigorously to the context of emerging economy manufacturing, I theorize and demonstrate that the voluntary adoption of a labor code may constitute an effective human resource investment in emerging economies in improving establishment-level employee outcomes and operational and financial performance. The hypotheses are tested using longitudinal data on a sample of apparel manufacturing plants in Sri Lanka. Implications of this study include providing insight into how to expand the scope and relevance of human resource management theory to better understand research and practice in emerging economies.

This book centers on the author's discovery, and moral disapproval, of expedient arrangements adopted by American firms in China, through which 'middlemen', operating as independent agents, pay bribes as part and parcel of the troublesome process of negotiating and clinching business deals there.

Over the past decade, the terms "crisis" and "crisis management" have become increasingly popular topics of interest for business professionals and management academics alike. According to the Institute for Crisis Management (2013), "Newsworthy business crises have been on a steady upward trend since 2009.

In Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility (3rd edition) (SCSR), David Chandler and William B. Werther Jr. advance the view that the ability of firms to create value for a range of stakeholders over the medium- and long-term requires that they embed CSR into their strategies and operations. Its focus on the integration of CSR into strategic planning and implementation distinguishes SCSR from competing business and society textbooks, which tend to survey the field or focus on the management of the firm's relationships with stakeholders and society.

We examine when and why creative role identity causes entitlement and unethical behaviors and how this relationship can be reduced. We found that the relationships among the creative identity, entitlement, and dishonesty are contingent on the perception of creativity being rare. Four experiments showed that individuals with a creative identity reported higher psychological entitlement and engaged in more unethical behaviors. Additionally, when participants believed that their creativity was rare compared to common, they were more likely to lie for money. Moreover, manipulation of rarity of creative identity, but not practical identity, increased psychological entitlement and unethical acts. We tested for the mediating effect of psychological entitlement on dishonesty using both measurement of mediation and experimental causal chain approaches. We further provide evidence from organizations. Responses from a sample of supervisor-subordinate dyads demonstrated that employees reporting strong creative identities who perceived creativity as rare in their work-group rather than common were rated as engaging in more unethical behaviors by their supervisors. This paper extends prior theory on negative moral consequences of creativity by shedding new light on assumption regarding the prevalence of creativity and the role psychological entitlement plays.

Why are some serious cases of corporate irresponsibility collectively forgotten? Drawing on social memory studies, we examine how this collective forgetting process can occur. We propose that a major instance of corporate irresponsibility leads to the emergence of a stakeholder mnemonic community that shares a common recollection of the past incident. This community generates and then draws upon mnemonic traces to sustain a collective memory of the past event over time. In addition to the natural entropic tendencies toward forgetting, collective memory is also undermined by instrumental 'forgetting work', which we conceptualize in this paper. Forgetting work involves manipulating short-term conditions of the event, silencing vocal 'rememberers' and undermining collective mnemonic traces that sustain a version of the past. This process can result in a reconfigured collective memory and collective forgetting of corporate irresponsibility events. Collective forgetting can have positive and negative consequences for the firm, stakeholders and society.

We study the interplay between regulatory mandates and competition on a focal firm's new resource investments. While prior literature has separately pointed to the influence of competition and regulatory policy on a focal firm's resource decisions, less is known about how the policy effect interacts with the competitive effect. Studying how regulatory mandates moderate the effect of competition on a focal firm's new resource investments, we show that resource redeployment is not simply a function of internal firm decisions but a response to external forces. We find that regulatory mandates dampen the effect of competitors' new resource investments on a focal firm's new resource investments. Distinguishing between different clean technology types, we show that this dampening effect is the stronger, the more distant the new resource is from incumbents' old resource base, and the more established the mandate is. We test our hypotheses in the context of renewable energy investments in waste-to-energy, wind, and solar in the U.S. electricity industry. Our data comprises 1542 utilities and private energy firms and their renewable investments from 1999 to 2010.

Contemporary business schools are expected to educate their students to embrace ethical and pro-social values. But can business schools rise to this challenge? Comparing a business school to another professional school that encourages pro-social values, social work, we investigated value profiles as reflected in school websites and among their students. The findings show that the business school expresses self-enhancement values (power and achievement) more, and pro-social values (benevolence and universalism) less than the social work school. We further investigated self-selection and socialization as complementary organizational processes that may lead to, and sustain, the value profile of each school. Our findings show that as early as the first week of studies, freshmen's values are congruent with the value profile of their department, indicating a value-based self-selection process. To investigate socialization, we compared freshmen and seniors and conducted a yearlong study among freshmen. The findings revealed a small change in students' values throughout their training, providing only some support for value socialization. Altogether, our findings suggest that business schools that are interested in pro-social students should attract and select students that emphasize these values, rather than rely on socialization attempts.

The burgeoning economic inequality between the richest and the poorest is a cause of concern for social, political, and ethical reasons. While businesses are both implicated and affected by growing inequality, business schools have largely neglected to subject the phenomenon to sufficient critique. This is, in part, because far too many management educators rely on orthodox economic perspectives—often represented by neoliberal capitalism—which have dominated the curricula and the teaching philosophy of business schools. To address this issue, this article underscores the need for business schools to critically examine the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and economic inequalities, and to overtly engage with this nexus in pedagogical practice. The article concludes by revisiting the concepts of relationality and answerability as paths by which to address the current predicament. Relationality and answerability collectively offer: i) conceptual and reflexive tools by which to re-imagine business school education, and, ii) space for business schools to debate important questions about the taken-for-granted, but problematic, assumptions underlying the ideology of neoliberal capitalism

Many firms seek to manage their legal and regulatory environments by influencing policymakers. Typically, researchers have focused on how firms use nonmarket actions, including lobbying, campaign contributions, and related activities, to gain policy influence. We argue that firms may also seek to change the effects of policies through market actions. Market actions may lead to both formal policy change (i.e., transformations of codified rules) and interpretive policy change (i.e., transformations of the effects of rules without changes in their codified form). We identify two pathways by which firms' market actions may produce interpretive policy change: implementation and innovation. Implementation-driven change occurs when firms' interpretations of incomplete laws alter and clarify the meaning of those laws. Innovation-driven change occurs when firms engage in novel activities that are difficult to interpret within existing regulatory frameworks, and thus alter the effects of those regulations. We then theorize how firms' market actions may complement traditional, nonmarket political mobilization in an analysis of sequences of formal and interpretive policy change.

Female corporate leadership has drawn increasing attention from academia and practitioners. We contribute to the literature by examining the impact of CEO succession with gender change—i.e., a male CEO succeeded by a female or vice versa. We propose that due to gender differences in executive leadership positions, CEO succession with gender change may amplify the disruption of the CEO succession process and thus adversely affect post-succession firm performance and increase the likelihood of successor early departure. Using data from 3,320 CEO successions in companies listed in China's Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 1997 to 2010, we find evidence to support this argument. We also find that the negative (positive) impact of male-to-female succession on firm performance (the likelihood of successor early departure) may be weakened by positive organizational attitudes toward female leadership as indicated by the presence of other female leaders on the firm's board of directors and/or top management team, and the successor's inside origin.

What are the long-term consequences of initially beneficial high-reputation workplace ties? Under uncertainty, acolytes (i.e., subordinates with work connections to high-reputation industry leaders) are likely to benefit in terms of signaling fitness for promotion in the external job market. Analysis of promotion outcomes of coaches in the NFL over 31 years showed that the acolyte effect was reduced for individuals for whom uncertainty was the least (acolytes with considerable industry experience or high centrality in the co-worker industry network). There was no support for either a knowledge-transfer or an intrinsic quality explanation for why acolytes initially gained advantage. Rather, the evidence supported the idea that ties to high-reputation leaders were somewhat randomly distributed so that acolytes faced ex post settling up consequences after their promotions: fewer further promotions or lateral moves, more demotions. Thus, acolytes initially benefited from a loose-linkage between their unobservable quality and signals offered by their industry-leader ties, but they also suffered as the unreliability of social network signals became evident. The results suggest that a competitive job market may exhibit self-correction over time. We offer countervailing theory and evidence to the prevailing view that high-reputation third-party endorsements perpetuate a rich-get-richer social structure resistant to performance outcomes.

Resource dependence theorists argue that boards of directors with political capital can benefit focal firms by reducing uncertainty and providing preferential resources. Here, we develop theory regarding the downside of board political capital. As the principal-principal agency problem characterizes many parts of the world, we argue that board political capital can exacerbate this problem by enabling large blockholders to undertake more appropriation of firm wealth. Further, we explore how this enabling effect is moderated by ownership-, industry-, and environment-level contingencies. We find empirical support for our arguments using 32,174 directors in 1,046 Chinese listed firms over the period 2008 - 2011. Our study sheds light on new ways in which resource dependence and agency theories can be integrated to advance the extant research on board governance and corporate political strategy.

Iperius is a complete backup utility for Windows that can be used by both home users and Company servers (without any time/license limitation). Iperius also has different paid editions available, which allow for making advanced backup types, su...

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. Among others, the features of FileZilla include the following: Easy to use Supports FTP, FTP...

Carlo Lipizzi’s Societal impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning offers a critical and comprehensive analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning’s effects on society. This book provides a balanced perspective, cutting through the

This rather difficult read introduces the programming language FSM and the programming platform DrRacket. The author asserts that it is a convenient platform to design and prove an automata-based software

The study shows that artificial intelligence (AI) has become highly important in contemporary computing because of its capacity to efficiently tackle intricate jobs that were typically carried out by people. The authors provide scientific literature that analyzes and

Money is a representation of wealth. A US dollar represents a fraction of the total wealth of the country. This definition underlies any discussion of currency, whether physical cash or digital tokens. Gold and silver have traditionally been used to represent a store of value that is intrinsic to a coin minted from

Wales scrum-half Tomos Williams is ruled out of the Autumn Nations Series match against Australia on Sunday.

Chancellor Scholz’s three-party coalition government has fallen apart

Hollie Peabody returns to work in the prisons service after getting to the semi-finals of The Voice.

Under cross-examination on Wednesday, Urfan Sharif unexpectedly said: “She died because of me.”

A new Trump administration will be far better prepared to restore Constitutional order than the first Trump administration.

As if gun rights activists have not had enough winning for one week, with the landslide Trump election win.  Now, a major victory for gun rights advocates has unfolded in Illinois...

If you have read any of the NRA’s magazines, watch American Rifleman, or have seen some shows on The Outdoor Channel or The History Channel, you have seen Mark Keefe for years.

Federal District Judge Stephen P. McGlynn has ordered a permanent injunction against enforcement of the Illinois "assault weapon" and magazine ban on November 8, 2024. The order will probably be appealed to the Seventh Circuit.

A thousand (1000) rounds of Sellier & Bellot 9mm ammo in 115gr for $248.99 shipped FREE for Club Members. That price is $0.25 a round.

Imagine a rifle that doesn't just shoot; it speaks to the soul of the hunter, the adventurer, the collector. Enter the Nosler Limited Edition M21 Carbon Rifle.

IN celebration of Earth Month, global prestige skincare brand, Origins, proudly announces the establishment of the Origins Green The Planet Fund and its inaugural non-profit partner, One Tree Planted, upholding the brand’s longstanding commitment to the well-being of people and our planet.

As a brand rooted in nature, Origins believes it is its responsibility to give back to the earth while also striving to make decisions that help limit our impact on the planet. Which is why, for over a decade, Origins has partnered with various environmental non-profit organisations to Green The Planet, planting one tree at a time to aid global reforestation initiatives and helping combat the effects of climate change.

In celebration of Earth Month 2021, Origins designed a limited-edition Dr. Andrew Weil for Origins Mega-Mushroom Relief & Resilience Soothing Treatment Lotion to help Green The Planet and support future tree-planting projects. One US dollar has been donated for every limited-edition Dr. Andrew Weil for Origins Mega-Mushroom Relief & Resilience Soothing Treatment Lotion available at Origins stores and online at Lazada Origins Flagship Store which allows one tree to be planted and cared for in partnership with Origins Green The Planet Fund.