Knowledge that Transforms

Inspired by the Attention‐Based View of the firm, organizational research has illuminated how organizations learn, adapt, and perform, yet recent theorizing risks diluting attention's explanatory force by compromising its ontological integrity. In this Counterpoint , I argue that attention must be preserved as a scarce, selective, and situated mechanism linking cognition, structure, and behaviour. I clarify the ontological attributes that follow from the definition of attention and show how efforts to re‐ontologize attention as ‘crescive’ risk collapsing causal explanation into phenomenological description. I then argue that many persistent gaps in the literature are misdiagnosed as limitations of the Attention‐Based View when they in fact stem from the field's failure to fully exploit the ontology inherent in attention's definition. I develop this claim through two such gaps, limited normative theorizing and insufficient theorization of situations, and advance three research agendas: developing attention patterns that manage scarcity, revealing the costs of selective attention, and designing information environments that condition returns on attention. By preserving rather than dissolving its ontological core, this Counterpoint shows that attention's enduring power lies not in expanding its boundaries but in fully exploiting the scarcity, selectivity, and situatedness it already affords.

Whereas extant studies have mostly treated multi‐stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as instruments of private authority that interact with public governance in various spheres, this study offers an alternative view of MSIs as important regulatory intermediaries, specifically in times of regulatory flux. Building on an in‐depth case study of the German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles in the context of the emerging German Supply Chain Act, we explore how MSIs can support firms in navigating the transition from voluntary governance to mandatory due diligence legislation. Our analysis reveals the evolving and multi‐faceted intermediary roles that MSIs can enact, documenting the fine‐grained practices whereby MSIs can support firms in managing the challenges related to changing regulatory landscapes. We also highlight several role‐based tensions fuelled in this context and indicate how MSIs can manage those. Our findings contribute to theory on regulatory intermediation by illuminating a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between regulatory events, firm challenges, role‐based tensions, and role adaptation. Extrapolating from our case, we theorize MSIs as actors that can effectively mediate business–government interactions and help build constructive institutional relationships in emerging regulatory fields.

The extent to which governments should intervene in state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), and the consequences of such intervention for firm performance, remain subjects of ongoing scholarly debate. Building on competing perspectives that view the state as either a strategist or a liability, we argue that the effects of state intervention depend on the government's political ideology and the dimension of performance considered. We test this argument using a quasi‐experimental difference‐in‐differences design and panel data from Polish SOEs. On average, the shift from a liberal to an interventionist regime was associated with significant gains in scale‐related performance, although not with improvements in profitability. Our panel regression results further show that these effects varied with the depth of state involvement in individual SOEs. State ownership and state‐appointed board members were positively associated with scale‐related performance following the regime shift, while the latter were also marginally negatively associated with profit‐based performance. Taken together, these findings suggest that the state may simultaneously function as a strategic driver of expansion and a liability for profitability, depending on the prevailing political ideology.

We theorize how state ownership reweights organizational objectives when political and market conditions shift. Using a mixed‐method, history‐to‐theory design, we examine 160 state‐owned and 132 private Brazilian firms from 1973 to 1993. We argue that two mechanisms – appointment politicization and constituency‐protection salience – alter managerial discretion and the political costs of visible job losses. Panel tests show that CEO turnover is higher in SOEs than in private firms and that this ownership gap widens under democracy. By contrast, SOEs are not uniformly job‐protective: they exhibit selectively lower probabilities of large layoffs under democratic regimes and recessions, while downturns do not materially change the SOE–private firm difference in CEO turnover. Archival evidence and elite interviews trace these patterns to shifting coalitions that politicize appointments and heighten employment‐protection salience, channelling adjustment towards leadership replacement or employment buffering. We synthesize that these findings in a framework that maps SOE responses in a continuous space defined by pressures to curtail managerial discretion and to protect constituencies, offering a portable lens for comparing state capitalism across contexts. The study replaces fixed‐mandate views of SOEs with a contingent, coalition‐based account of how state ownership shapes adaptive objectives over time.

Firms under regulatory threat often have a collective interest in influencing policy outcomes through market behaviour. However, when coordination is prohibited and collective benefits are non‐excludable, such efforts are constrained by coordination and outcome uncertainty. While prior research emphasizes firm influence through the public policy arena, much less is known about how firms navigate collective action problems in the market arena, where interdependent incentives and uncertainty about rivals' behaviour make coordination difficult under legal constraints. We address this gap by theorizing that multimarket contact (MMC) creates the conditions under which coordination and sanctioning mechanisms become feasible. Using data from the Indian pharmaceutical industry's response to a 2013 price‐control regulation, we show that firms with higher MMC are more likely to raise prices in regulated markets, thereby participating in collective efforts to shape the average market price used to set price ceilings. Our findings extend the MMC framework by showing how firms can activate it selectively for cooperative purposes under regulatory pressure, even when assumptions like competitive parity are violated. More broadly, we identify MMC as a contingency that enables firms to overcome collective action barriers in the market arena, offering new insights into the interplay between market and non‐market strategy.

This paper develops a theory‐building argument about the limits of property rights theory (PRT) when applied to culturally embedded intangible assets. Integrating property rights theory, organizational sociology, and Indigenous theory, we examine historically informed contrasts between low and moderate tribal sovereignty to show why tangible and intangible assets differ analytically in their governability. We argue that Native imagery reveals a class of contexts in which the specificity assumed by classical PRT becomes difficult to satisfy because authority is plural, asset boundaries are ambiguous, and value is relational rather than fully alienable. Using Native imagery as an illustrative case, we specify how PRT can be extended to better account for culturally embedded intangible assets by incorporating collective guardianship, community consent, sacred and relational inalienability constraints, and multi‐sovereign enforcement. In doing so, the paper reframes property governance in settings where meaning, spirituality, and community relationships are integral to the asset itself.

Property rights theory holds that stronger ownership protection stimulates firm investment, yet whether such investment supports environmentally beneficial uses remains unclear. We develop a property rights perspective on corporate pollution control, arguing that stronger ownership protection promotes cleaner production when complementary institutional conditions make environmental upgrading both strategically valuable and financially feasible. Exploiting China's 2007 Property Law as a quasi‐natural experiment, we find that firms more exposed to the reform significantly reduce toxic emissions after the Law . Importantly, this emission‐reducing effect is concentrated among firms operating under stronger external monitoring and among financially constrained firms that experience improved credit access. Mechanism tests show that green innovation and abatement upgrading partially explain the emission reductions. These findings extend property rights theory by showing that ownership protection does not automatically lead to cleaner production; its sustainability effects depend on monitoring and financing conditions that shape firms' strategic investment choices.

Government orchestration describes regulatory settings in which governments delegate some governance functions to private actors; for instance, business conduct is monitored by stakeholders under CSR disclosure regulation. This article examines the impact of this type of regulation on stakeholder monitoring, which is a core yet little‐examined governance function. We analyse the effects of the European Union's Non‐Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) on stakeholder accusations and on the relationship between CSR and accusations across firms in 28 OECD countries (2007–2018) using a difference‐in‐differences design. The analysis shows that government orchestration significantly increases the number of stakeholder accusations by inducing a transparency dynamic. It also demonstrates a fundamental shift in how reported CSR relates to stakeholder accusations. In the past, companies were able to protect themselves from accusations by publicly reporting their CSR efforts. More recently, two patterns have emerged: where no disclosure regulation exists, CSR no longer buffers firms against accusations; under regulation, it produces a ‘backfire effect’ whereby CSR increases accusations. These findings advance research on the government–CSR nexus and social evaluations and offer a contextual explanation for previously inconsistent results on the link between CSR and stakeholder accusations.

Drawing on agglomeration theory, embeddedness theory, and the community assembly metaphor, this study examines how regional industrial ecosystems (RIEs) shape firm performance in China's manufacturing sector. Using longitudinal data on 1012 listed manufacturing firms across China between 2008 and 2019, we combine input–output analysis with geographic distance measures across low‐, medium‐, and high‐tech manufacturing industries to assess the effects of specialized (intra‐industry) and diversified (inter‐industry) agglomeration externalities on firm performance and technological innovation. We find that intra‐industry externalities are negatively associated with firm performance in RIEs, particularly through lower innovation and profitability, whereas inter‐industry externalities improve innovation, productivity, and market advantage. We argue that, in ecosystems shaped by market coordination and government industrial policy, specialized agglomerations do not necessarily enhance firm performance and may instead generate lock‐in, knowledge redundancy, and resource congestion, especially in low‐tech manufacturing. Our findings suggest that policymakers and firm managers should place greater emphasis on inter‐industry collaboration than on intra‐industry concentration in order to reduce resource competition and strengthen innovation within RIEs. These implications are particularly relevant for low‐ and medium‐tech firms, where resources are more constrained.

Large partners are critical for small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) seeking to overcome resource constraints in internationalization. However, as an SME's portfolio of size‐asymmetric alliances expands, governance costs can increase during post‐formation alliance management. We develop theory on the resource benefits and governance costs of asymmetric alliance portfolios, arguing that the net benefit of access to large partners' resources is bounded by a portfolio ceiling. Initial alliances with large partners provide knowledge, legitimacy and network support that facilitate foreign direct investment (FDI) entries. As the portfolio expands, however, cross‐partner interfaces, safeguarding demands and partner competition consume scarce managerial capacity, limiting SMEs' ability to mobilize large partners' resources. Using a 30‐year firm‐year panel (1990–2019) of Japanese SME trading companies and their equity alliances with business‐group‐affiliated general trading companies, we identify an inverted U‐shaped relationship between the number of large partners and FDI entries, consistent with this portfolio ceiling. In line with our theory, competition among large partners is negatively associated with FDI entries. Overall, our study shows that, for resource‐constrained firms, the net value of asymmetric alliance portfolios depends on the balance between partner resource benefits and portfolio‐level governance costs.