The double-edged sword of exemplar similarity

We investigate how a firm’s positioning relative to category exemplars shapes security analysts’ evaluations. Employing a two-stage model of evaluation (initial screening and subsequent assessment), we propose that exemplar similarity enhances a firm’s recognizability and legitimacy, increasing the likelihood that it passes the initial screening stage and attracts analyst coverage. However, exemplar similarity may also prompt unfavorable comparisons with exemplar firms, leading to lower analyst recommendations in the assessment stage. We further argue that category coherence, distinctiveness, and exemplar typicality influence the impact of exemplar similarity on firm evaluation. Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to analyze a sample of 7,603 US public firms from 1997 to 2022, we find robust support for our predictions. By highlighting the intricate role of strategic positioning vis-àvis category exemplars in shaping audience evaluations, our findings have important implications for research on positioning relative to category exemplars, category viability, optimal distinctiveness and security analysts

Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long Run Survival

Emerging markets are characterized by underdeveloped institutions and frequent environmental shifts. Yet they also contain many firms that have survived over generations. How are firms in weak institutional environments able to persist over time? Motivated by 69 interviews with leaders of emerging market firms with histories spanning generations, we combine induction and deduction to propose reputation as a meta-resource that allows firms to activate their conventional resources. We conceptualize reputation as consisting of prominence, perceived quality, and resilience, and develop a process model that illustrates the mechanisms that allow reputation to facilitate survival in ways that persist over time. Building on research in strategy and business history, we thus shed light on an underappreciated strategic construct (reputation) in an under-theorized setting (emerging markets) over an unusual period (the historical long run)

Dynamic Silos: Modularity in intra-organizational communication networks before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

Workplace communications around the world were drastically altered by Covid-19, work-from-home orders, and the rise of remote work. We analyze aggregated, anonymized metadata from over 360 billion emails within over 4000 organizations worldwide to examine changes in network community structures from 2019 through 2020. We find that, during 2020, organizations around the world became more siloed, evidenced by increased modularity. This shift was concurrent with decreased stability, indicating that organizational siloes had less stable membership. We provide initial insights into the implications of these network changes -- which we term dynamic silos -- for organizational performance and innovation.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figue

A Multi-Level Investigation of Corporate Political Influence

Studies of inter-corporate influence have focused on structural, rather than relational, modes of organizational interaction. That is, inter-corporate influence is assumed to be a function of relationships between firms’ industries rather than of dyadic relationships between the firms themselves. Our study critiques and expands on one such stream of research (Mizruchi 1992; Mizruchi & Marquis 2006) by focusing on relational predictors of influence in a study of similarity of corporate political action among large U.S. firms. We show that relational size is a key determinant of behavioral similarity, and that this mechanism varies across industry relationships. Implications of these findings, as well as the general importance of relational versus structural theories of influence, are discussed