Knowledge that Transforms

AbstractMeaningful work has been identified as an important antecedent of an array of positive outcomes for both workers and their employers. However, many work roles involve harming others, an experience that has previously been linked to negative outcomes such as dissatisfaction and burnout. How does meaningfulness emerge when one's work includes such challenging circumstances? Drawing on interviews and observations in the veterinary industry, we elucidate new theory about the relationship between harm‐doing and the experience of meaningful work. Workers' interpretations of the worthiness of the harm, as well as the types of actions they take to remediate it, influence whether their involvement in harm‐doing episodes undermines or heightens their sense of meaningfulness. We further detail how dimensions of harm‐doing episodes shape opportunities for remediation, as well as whether the episodes ‘stick’ in workers' memories and hence figure into their ongoing, holistic accounts of work meaningfulness. Based on these findings, we introduce a novel ‘work‐bounded, worker‐centric’ view of meaningfulness that incorporates both the nature of work and workers' interpretations of it. Our research has implications for the work meaningfulness and workplace harm literatures, as well as for the many individuals whose work involves doing harm.

AbstractAdopting an international sustainability standard (ISS) helps firms improve their sustainability performance. It also acts as a credible market ‘signal’ that legitimizes firms' latent sustainability practices while improving their market value. But how do these signals function when firms adopt multiple ISSs? We show that the relationships between firms' ISSs adoption and their market value and their sustainability performance appear positive. However, beyond a tipping point of 2 ISSs, firms' market gains decline, even though their sustainability performance continues to improve until a tipping point of 3 ISSs. Differing tipping points create a gap that we refer to as the ‘penalty zone’ – the place where market value declines, even though firms' actual sustainability performance continues to improve. The penalty zone arises because of imprecisions in market signals and serves as a significant barrier to firms wishing to further their sustainability agenda through additional ISS adoption.

AbstractAccording to the ‘Point’ essay, management research's reliance on corporate data threatens to replace objective theory with profit‐biased ‘corporate empiricism’, undermining the scientific and ethical integrity of the field. In this ‘Counterpoint’ essay, we offer a more expansive understanding of big data and algorithmic processing and, by extension, see promising applications to management theory. Specifically, we propose a novel management metaphor: organizations as algorithms. This metaphor offers three insights for developing innovative, relevant, and grounded organization theory. First, agency is distributed in assemblages rather than being solely attributed to individuals, algorithms, or data. Second, machine‐readability serves as the immutable and mobile base for organizing and decision‐making. Third, prompting and programming transform the role of professional expertise and organizational relationships with technologies. Contrary to the ‘Point’ essay, we see no theoretical ‘end’ in sight; the organization as algorithm metaphor enables scholars to build innovative theories that account for the intricacies of algorithmic decision‐making.

AbstractWe conduct a multidisciplinary review of how sustainable investing impacts the environment and society. Our review starts from the insight that shareholders can create impact not only through (1) portfolio screening and (2) shareholder engagement (two impact strategies most used by mainstream shareholders) but also through (3) field building (an impact strategy most used by shareholders at the periphery of the financial sector). Based on this framework of three impact strategies, we integrate insights from four disciplines (management, finance, sociology, and ethics/sustainability) to reconstruct how each impact strategy influences corporate sustainability. We identify 15 impact mechanisms through which the impact strategies produce three types of impact: portfolio screening and shareholder engagement mostly create direct impact on companies, while field building creates indirect impact via other shareholders and indirect impact via the institutional context. Our review suggests that shareholder impact emerges gradually as different types of shareholders build on each other's efforts, which we use to outline a research agenda on shareholder impact as a distributed process.

AbstractThis study examines the effect of performance feedback on strategic change with a focus on internal social comparison in a business group context. We argue that group affiliates are more responsive to internal social comparison with group peers than to external social comparison with industry peers. However, the salience of internal social comparison is subject to institutional contingencies. We test these arguments using panel data from 1449 group affiliates in China during the period 2005–12. We find that internal social comparison has a greater effect on a group affiliate's strategic change than does external social comparison. Moreover, this effect differential is smaller in groups located in regions with more developed market institutions but larger in state‐owned groups and groups managed by internally promoted CEOs.

AbstractDespite the centrality of research phenomena, the process of their definition is often neglected and reduced to a simple choosing of pre‐established subjects of interest. However, good research not only includes empirical work aimed at more or less ‘given as fact’ phenomena. It also involves phenomena construction: that is, the process of generating and establishing phenomena to investigate and theorize. We contend that phenomena construction is not separate from, but integral to, both the empirical and theorizing phases in research. As few phenomena are truly ‘given’ or straightforward to observe, good research calls for careful and creative construction of the phenomenon under investigation. We propose and elaborate a framework that enables researchers to generate and establish research phenomena beyond those currently available in their specific area of interest and, based on this, to produce more imaginative and impactful research.

AbstractHow does CEO political ideology influence the pay disparity between a CEO and typical firm employees? Drawing on the upper echelons theory, we postulate that politically liberal CEOs are more inclined to address within‐firm vertical pay disparity versus conservative or neutral CEOs, because liberals attend more closely to potential inequality issues and are more open to social changes. We furthermore contend that the effect of CEO political ideology varies across certain contextual factors. Results based on a sample of United States public firms support our arguments. Our study contributes to the literature on income inequality by highlighting CEO political ideology as a crucial determinant and investigating the boundary conditions.

AbstractWhen common‐pool resources such as freshwater, clean air, and fisheries span national borders, the collective action problems encountered are particularly severe. This study explores the role of polycentric governance systems in overcoming these pressing problems, which frequently underlie global grand challenges. Integrating political economy and management research, we hypothesize about how two governance mechanisms – international treaties and multi‐stakeholder organizations – shape the likelihood of cooperation and conflict between countries. Leveraging unique, longitudinal data capturing interactions of countries bordering international river basins, our empirical analysis reveals two main findings. First, we find that the specification of multi‐stakeholder organizations enhances water‐related cooperation and reduces water conflict among countries, while the specification of international treaties enhances cooperation but does not affect conflict. Second, we find that leaving one of these governance mechanisms less specified than the other actually improves, rather than harms, relationships between countries. Our findings point to a superior governance configuration that simultaneously enhances cooperation and constrains conflict. This configuration combines: (1) treaties that establish property rights but leave procedural rules and uncertainty management provisions less established with (2) multi‐stakeholder organizations that define processes for making decisions, sharing information, engaging the public, and resolving disputes.

AbstractThe future of theory in the age of big data and algorithms is a frequent topic in management research. However, with corporate ownership of big data and data processing capabilities designed for profit generation increasing rapidly, we witness a shift from scientific to ‘corporate empiricism’. Building on this debate, our ‘Point’ essay argues that theorizing in management research is at risk now. Unlike the ‘Counterpoint’ article, which portrays a bright future for management theory given available technological opportunities, we are concerned about management researchers increasingly ‘borrowing’ data from the corporate realm (e.g., Google et al.) to build or test theory. Our objection is that this data borrowing can harm scientific theorizing due to how scaling effects, proxy measures and algorithmic decision‐making performatively combine to undermine the scientific validity of theories. This undermining occurs through reducing scientific explanations, while technology shapes theory and reality in a profit‐predicting rather than in a truth‐seeking manner. Our essay has meta‐theoretical implications for management theory per se, as well as for political debates concerning the jurisdiction and legitimacy of knowledge claims in management research. Practically, these implications connect to debates on scientific responsibilities of researchers.

AbstractIn this article, we contribute to the recent direction in the organizational stigma literature that focuses on stigma as providing opportunities for organizations. Drawing on a qualitative abductive study of 90 social enterprises in the menstrual products industry, we extend the literature by showing how the organizational form of social enterprises allows them to put the societal issue of menstruation stigma at the core of their ventures. Specifically, we find that these social enterprises take a disruptive strategy, and we elaborate on the tactics of normalization and moralization on which they draw by highlighting the essential role of multimodality in the process of destigmatizing menstruation. In light of the tabooed nature of menstruation, this multimodal approach is key to challenging existing hidden, taken‐for‐granted norms around menstruation and supplanting them with alternative ones. Our study has important implications for the literatures on organizational stigma, social enterprises, and multimodality and points to their strong conceptual complementarity for understanding processes of societal change.