Corporate reputation is becoming more important to managers and scholars around the world. However, little is known about how much or why reputation differs across countries. We use institutional theory to fill this gap. We focus on institutional development, reflecting the expansion of formal...

The basis of this teaching is a small nursery and landscape business in northern United States. The case describes how the company attempted to implement a decentralization and employee empowerment program to move relevant decision-making closer to the work site. It illustrates shifting from a...

This paper addresses the performance consequences of firm-level strategic similarity. Past research observed that firms face pressures to be different and to be the same. By differentiating, firms reduce competition. By conforming, firms demonstrate their legitimacy. Both reduced competition and...

A company often must manage its reputation with multiple stakeholders in different ways. This paper develops an interdisciplinary model for reputation management based on a historical case study of Wal-Mart. The model draws on impression management, stakeholder and game theories. We find...

Research into accounting risk-return relations largely relied on reference-based models of managerial choice. This focus ignores other explanations that may contribute to our understanding. Our study extends prior research by incorporating agency theory and implicit contracts theory into models...

The resource-based view proposes that reputation is a resource leading to competitive advantage. Past research tested this by using Fortune ratings to measure reputation, but these ratings are theoretically weak. This paper integrates mass communication theory into past research to develop a...

Growing interest in knowledge as a competitive asset suggests the benefit of studying professional service firms (PSFs). These firms are highly successful examples of organizations whose ability to manage knowledge is critical to their success. Furthermore, they are worthy of study because they...

Understanding the effects of ownership upon organizational performance is a well-established theme in organization theory, but comparison across ownership forms has been neglected. We develop hypotheses comparing public corporations, private corporations and partnerships and test them in a...

When do organizations decide to ‘adopt’ a given social issue such that they come to acknowledge it in their patterns of action and communication? Traditional answers to this question have focused either on the characteristics of the issue itself, or on the traits of the focal organization....