Working Paper Abstracts

Seo, Y., Pollock, T.G. & Park, C. “Navigating moral markets: How strategic sensegiving and category membership shape media sentiment in the U.S. food processing industry” Conditionally Accepted at Strategic Organization

Abstract: We explore how firms navigate evolving moral markets’ fuzzy boundaries by employing sensegiving to address interpretive uncertainty following their strategic actions. We specifically consider how acquirers’ acquisition announcements and post-acquisition communications influence media positivity about the acquirer in the food processing industry’s natural, organic, and healthy (NOH) moral market, contingent on the target’s category membership and acquirer/target category incongruence. We find that using more NOH language enhances media positivity when the target straddles or is fully part of the NOH category, announcing the target will retain its autonomy enhances media positivity regardless of the target’s category membership, and extreme misfits negatively influence media tenor, whereas misfits clarifying the acquirer’s commitment to the moral market moderate the sensegiving activities’ effects. We contribute to the moral markets literature by showing how firms sensegive to position themselves within evolving moral markets, and to the categories literature by considering how firms navigate a moral market’s fuzzy and potentially shifting boundaries in ways that reduce interpretive uncertainty.

Pollock, T.G., Beorchia, A., Crook, T.R. & Samba, C. “Which matters more? A meta-analysis of relative differences in the relationships reputation and status have with firm performance” Under Second Review at Strategic Management Journal

Abstract: Our knowledge about how reputation and status’s value creation differences relate to firm outcomes is limited, as scholars have not theorized or explored how differences in the way they create value can lead to varying relationships with different performance outcomes. Building on theory explaining the different ways they create value, we meta-analyze reputation and status’s relative relationships with accounting returns, market returns, and growth, and whether possessing high levels of both social evaluations have super-additive complementary effects. We find that reputation has positive effects on all three performance dimensions, whereas status yields more varied relationships; that reputation’s effects are larger than status’s effects; and that they have complementary, super-additive effects on performance. These results do not differ across a variety of measurement and sampling distinctions.

Kang, J., DesJardine, M. & Pollock, T.G. “Access denied: Examining the career consequences that await activist hedge fund-sponsored directors” Under Second Review at Administrative Science Quarterly

Abstract: It is widely assumed that individuals are highly motivated to attain directorships on better boards, but there is limited understanding of what constitutes a better board and the factors that grant some individuals access to those boards while denying others. We explore the careers of individuals who violate the business elite’s norms by agreeing to represent activist hedge funds (AHFs) in their boardroom campaigns, comparing their future directorships’ prestige to those of conventionally-elected directors. We find AHF-sponsored directors are relegated to less prestigious boards, and that AHF-sponsorship provides an interpretative lens that alters how these individuals’ human and social capital are viewed in the director marketplace. We find that industry experience has different relationships for conventional and AHF-sponsored directors, that director expertise does not appear to influence subsequent directorship prestige, and that AHF sponsorship weakens the relationship between status and subsequent directorship prestige. We also find that AHF-sponsorship has more negative consequences for directors who are community influentials than who are business experts or support specialists, and that status is affected more negatively than the human capital characteristics. We discuss various theoretical and practical implications of our theory and findings.

Kim, T. & Pollock, T.G. “The American idol next door: Conforming behavior, media attention, and achieving celebrity” Revise and Resubmit at Organization Science

Abstract: We draw on the celebrity and categories literatures to explore how unknown actors’ conforming and non-conforming behaviors affect their ability to advance in a celebrity certification contest, the media’s role in this process, and how the timing of their conforming and nonconforming actions affect their influence. We use data on competitors during the first fifteen seasons of American Idol to explore how the extent to which competitors’ song and costume choices conform to their initial musical genre affects their ability to advance in the competition. We also explore how this relationship is affected by the media coverage they receive, and when the behaviors and coverage occur. We find that conforming to a certain genre increased the likelihood they advanced in the competition. However, this base relationship was influenced by both the individual’s media visibility and the timing of when it occurred. We found evidence that media visibility attenuates, and can even reverse, the effect of conformity, but only during the early phase of audiences’ exposure to the actor. Our study contributes to our understanding of celebrity’s antecedents, how conforming behavior can enhance celebrity, and the importance of temporal considerations when assessing non-conforming behavior.

Han, J-H, Paruchuri, S. & Pollock, T.G. “The (un)usual suspects: Status, celebrity, and misconduct spillovers to bystanders” Under First Review at Organization Science

Abstract: Organizational misconduct can create negative and positive spillovers to uninvolved bystander firms. We argue that the perpetrators’ and bystanders’ status and celebrity, and their distinctive sociocognitive content, influence the direction and magnitudes of misconduct spillovers by creating perceptions that the routines associated with the misconduct are systemic or isolated to the perpetrator. Bystanders’ status and celebrity create their own interpretive frames, further shaping spillovers by enhancing or reducing interpretive uncertainty depending on their congruence or incongruence with the perpetrator’s interpretive frame, and on which actor possesses which asset. Our findings based on 24,765 corporate data breach pairs in 2018 showed that bystanders’ status amplified the positive spillover from celebrity firms’ data breaches, while their celebrity attenuated the negative spillover from high-status firms’ breaches and amplified the positive spillover from celebrity firms’ breaches. We contribute to research on misconduct spillovers by offering a generalizable framework that incorporates both positive and negative spillovers, and informs the range to which spillovers occur. We contribute to the social evaluations literature by showing how actor dyads’ social approval asset combinations can generate frame (in)congruence that affects outcomes in different ways.

Beorchia, A., Gras, D. & Pollock, T.G. “Strength in numbers? The contingent effects of social capital on ethnic business outcomes” Under First Review at Small Business Economics

Abstract: We ask the questions: How does ethnic social capital influence ethnic minority business ownership and business growth? And how do other community factors (economic, political, and cultural characteristics) strengthen or weaken ethnic social capital’s effect on these business outcomes? Based on an analysis of Latino-owned businesses in all U.S. counties, we find that the effects of ethnic social capital on ethnic minority business ownership and business growth differ—and are contingent on—the economic, cultural, and political environment in complex ways. Through this study, we contribute to the social capital literature by highlighting how a community’s environment can influence ethnic social capital’s efficacy for specific business outcomes, providing an important step in understanding the interplay between ethnic minority businesses and the environment in which they exist.

Mmbaga, N., Lashley, K., Williams, D. & Pollock, T.G. “Hurts so good: Stigma balancing in the payday loan industry”

Abstract: We explore how a core stigmatized industry navigates the benefits and emerging threats of multiple core stigmas in ways that provide it long-term access to the benefits they provide, while minimizing their associated threats. We conducted an inductive field study using grounded theory and participant observation techniques to understand how this dynamic process unfolded in the payday loan industry. This industry’s environment changed drastically over several decades; environmental shifts, the industry’s actions and its various audiences’ responses created new challenges the industry responded to with different levels of success. We find that the industry used an evolving portfolio of actions to influence different audiences’ perceptions of its immoral practices and impoverished customers—the sources of the industry’s stigmas—even while reinforcing its core customers’ stigma to maintain their resource value to the industry. This messy and multifaceted stigma balancing process highlights how industry actors employing multiple strategies to influence audience reactions and attempts to achieve a favorable balance of between the condoning and contesting of their stigmatized customers and practices. Our study has implications for research on stigma management.

Beorchia, A., Gras, D. & Pollock, T.G. “Riding the wave: Entrepreneurial responses to social movements”

Abstract: We explain how entrepreneurs are affected by identity movements—either adopting or abandoning a social mission to help solve a social movement problem. We use the extent to which entrepreneurs identify with and are embedded in a social movement community to propose three social movement-driven entrepreneur archetypes (i.e., originals, converts, and opportunists). We develop a framework explaining how different framing tasks used across a social movement’s life cycle affect entrepreneurs’ balancing of economic and social logics within their business.

Jung, J., Pollock, T.G., Smith, A.D., & Rindova, V.P. “Kitchen Invasion: Restaurants’ business model innovations during teh COVID-19 crisis”

Abstract: We explore how and why firms facing the same exogenous threats react differently, leading to different business model innovation (BMI) processes. Given the significant impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the restaurant industry, we conducted a longitudinal, inductive comparative case study of 14 restaurateurs in the same geographic region to explore how they responded to the pandemic and how their BMI unfolded over time. Through the analyses, we identified a new theoretical lens to explain how restaurateurs engage in BMI during a crisis: sensemaking. Using different sensemaking frames (opportunity and threat), restaurateurs in this study undertook different patterns of BMI actions. Specifically, those who adopted an opportunity sensemaking frame made significant changes to their business models, which we refer to as “leap.” Those who interpreted their environmental and organizational conditions through a threat sensemaking frame either “experiment” with their business models by making often short-term changes, or chose to maintain the “status quo” by taking no actions or removing prior changes. Thus, this study contributes to our understanding of BMI actions and processes by identifying the factors affecting BMI and explicating the dynamic processes BMI can take.

 Yan, J., Williams, D., Hunt, R. & Pollock, T.G. “Exploring the unknown requires leveraging uncertainty: A real options perspective on patterns and performance of entrepreneurial firms’ internationalization”

Abstract: Especially in this era of increasing trade tensions, uncertainty plays a major role in both entrepreneurial and internationalization processes. Yet, prior entrepreneurship and internationalization literature has not fully accounted for the nature of high and changing levels of host country uncertainty when predicting entrepreneurial firms’ internationalization patterns and outcomes. From a real options (RO) perspective, we re-conceptualize firms’ internationalization patterns, processes, and outcomes as the result of active uncertainty-management in the face of elevated and ever-changing levels of host-country institutional and economic uncertainty. Utilizing a representative sample of 680 new U.S.-based firms that exported goods to 147 different host countries from 2009 to 2019, we find that host country uncertainty positively relates to firms’ choice of “real options” entry (i.e., low initial investment combined with high collaboration). Importantly, although not all firms choose RO entry, those that do achieve superior performance under high uncertainty. In addition, firms employ RO entry enable relatively faster entries, enter more distant destinations, and allow flexibility to exit markets over time.