Liminal Spaces: Literal and Conceptual Borderlines in Whitman\u27s Civil War Poems

Reads Whitman’s Civil War poems “in the context of liminality, a cultural discourse that calls attention to margins and borderlines as transitional points but also focuses specifically on the ‘limen’ or the spaces between, as literal and conceptual sites of potential and illumination” and suggests that “in the more photographic poems, liminality provides Whitman with a framing technique, allowing him to sharpen his focus on the verisimilitude of a scene by delineating the outlines and interstices of the natural landscape,” while another use of liminality “calls attention to hospital spaces as literal and figurative symbols of transition for wounded or dying soldiers,” and yet another “mystical use of liminality allows Whitman to further define his role as an interpreting agent from the borderlines and margins of the war, the poet who gives meaning to the ultimate passage from life into death for all the nation’s dead.

An Identity-Based Approach to Social Enterprise

Social enterprise has gained widespread acclaim as a tool for addressing social and environmental problems. Yet because social enterprises integrate social welfare and commercial logics, they face the challenge of pursuing frequently conflicting goals. Studies have begun to address how established social enterprises can manage these tensions, but we know little about how, why, and with what consequences social entrepreneurs mix competing logics as they create new organizations. To address this gap, we develop a theoretical model based in identity theory that helps to explain (1) how commercial and social welfare logics become relevant to entrepreneurship, (2) how different types of entrepreneurs perceive the tension between these logics, and (3) what implications this has for how entrepreneurs recognize and develop social enterprise opportunities. Our approach responds to calls from organizational and entrepreneurship scholars to extend existing frameworks of opportunity recognition and development to better account for social enterprise creation

Masters of Disasters? An Empirical Analysis of How Societies Benefit From Corporate Disaster Aid

Corporations are increasingly influential within societies worldwide, while the relative capacity of national governments to meet large social needs has waned. Consequentially, firms face social pressures to adopt responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to governments, aid agencies, and other types of organizations. There are questions, though, about whether this is beneficial for society. We study this in the context of disaster relief and recovery, in which companies account for a growing share of aid, as compared to traditional providers. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities literature, we argue that firms are more able than other types of organizations to sense areas of need following a disaster, seize response opportunities, and reconfigure resources for fast, effective relief efforts. As such, we predict that, while traditional aid providers remain important for disaster recovery, relief will arrive faster and nations will recover more fully when locally active firms account for a larger share of disaster aid. We test our predictions with a proprietary data set comprising information on every natural disaster and reported aid donation worldwide from 2003 to 2013. Using a novel, quasi-experimental technique known as the “synthetic control method,” our analysis shows that nations benefit greatly from corporate involvement when disaster strikes

Funding Financial Inclusion: Institutional Logics and the Contextual Contingency of Funding for Microfinance Organizations

Microfinance is a promising tool for addressing the grand challenge of global poverty. Yet, while many studies have examined how microfinance loans affect poor borrowers, we know little about how microfinance organizations (MFOs) themselves finance their lending activities. This is a significant oversight because most MFOs do not self-fund their lending, but, rather, rely on loans from external funders. To better understand microfinance funding, we apply and extend the institutional logics perspective to analyze the lending practices of commercial and public funders, who together provide most of the capital for global microfinance. We argue that these funders adhere to financial and development logics, respectively, and that this leads them to invest in different types of MFOs. Yet, in the face of uncertainty, we suggest that the practices motivated by these logics will start to converge in ways that are problematic for a nation’s microfinance sector. Using a proprietary database of all traceable loans to MFOs from 2004 to 2012, we find strong support for our hypotheses. In particular, our findings show that the relationship between institutional logics and organizational practices is contextually contingent, and this insight contributes important understanding about the efficacy of microfinance as a poverty-reduction tool

Hybrid Vigor: Securing Venture Capital by Spanning Categories in Nanotechnology

This study develops and tests a set of novel theoretical predictions about the conditions under which category spanning is rewarded by external audiences. To do this, we revisit the assumption that comprehensible organizational identities are associated with individual categories. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, we suggest that category spanning does not necessarily lead to confusion, but, rather, to interpretations that rely on a “header–modifier” structure where one category anchors cognition but is modified by features of the other. Audiences may have clear understandings about how categories fit together and cognate schema for evaluating firms that hybridize by spanning between them. An empirical examination of venture capital in the carbon nanotechnology industry supports our approach: start-ups were rewarded or punished for hybridization contingent on how they mixed “science” and “technology” in their patents, top management team, and collaborations. As such, we show that the category a firm starts in, how it hybridizes, and the degree to which this affects core versus peripheral identity markers may all affect how it is perceived

Masters of disasters? An empirical analysis of how societies benefit from corporate disaster aid

Corporations have become increasingly influential within societies around the world, while the relative capacity of national governments to meet large social needs has waned. Consequentially, firms are being asked to adopt responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to governments, aid agencies, and other types of organizations. There are questions, though, about whether or not this is beneficial for society. We study this in the context of disaster relief and recovery; an area where companies account for a growing share of aid as compared to traditional providers. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities literature, we argue that firms are better-equipped than other types of organizations to sense areas of need following a disaster, seize response opportunities, and reconfigure resources for fast, effective relief efforts. As such, we predict that—while traditional aid providers are important for disaster recovery—relief will arrive faster, and nations will recover more fully when locally active firms account for a larger share of disaster aid. We test our predictions with a proprietary dataset comprising information on every natural disaster and reported aid donation worldwide from 2003 to 2013. Our analysis uses a novel, quasi-experimental technique known as the synthetic control method and shows that nations benefit greatly from corporate involvement when disaster strikes.Accepted manuscrip

An identity perspective on coopetition in the craft beer industry

Research Summary: To further our understanding of how and why organizations engage in coopetition, we explore cooperative and competitive actions in the craft beer industry. Through an inductive field study, including interviews with craft brewery owners, we propose collective identity and collective norms play a critical role in the persistence of coopetition over time. Our process model suggests that (a) an oppositional collective identity, (b) the shared belief that a rising tide lifts all boats, and (c) the shared belief that advice and assistance should be paid forward, can lead to the persistence of coopetition beyond market category emergence. Managerial Summary: This paper develops a theory of how smaller, craft-based organizations (i.e., “Davids”) encourage cohesion and cooperation amongst themselves when operating against an incumbent market of mass-producers (i.e., “Goliaths”). An ideological opposition to existing players can lead to a shared belief that helping organizations like your own benefits everyone—the rising tide lifts all boats mentality. Similarly, when organizations first enter a market and receive help from established members, they can feel compelled to help others who enter the market after—the pay-it-forward mentality. Together, these mechanisms offer an explanation as to how and why coopetition might persist in a market category over time

Balancing “what matters to me” with “what matters to them”: exploring the legitimation process of environmental entrepreneurs

We extend current knowledge on new venture legitimation by focusing on how environmental entrepreneurs enact their values and beliefs during the legitimation process and on the resultant business and personal consequences. On the basis of our longitudinal analysis of six cases studies we develop a staged process model of legitimation. Our findings suggest three novel insights. First, the entrepreneur’s (i.e. the legitimacy seeker’s) own values and beliefs are found to anchor initial decisions about how to gain legitimacy (the “what matters to me” stage) but are then toned down as attention shifts to gain legitimacy from diverse audiences (the “what matters to them” stage). Eventually, the entrepreneurs arrive at an approach that balances “what matters to me and them”. Second, we are able to explain how and why these changes in legitimation take place. The entrepreneurs learned to adapt their legitimation work by engaging in reflection and reflexivity about both the business and personal consequences of their work in each stage. Finally, we detail the significance of dissonance to this process as a trigger for changes in behavior. Overall, our three insights allow us to extend the notion of what a skillful legitimacy seeker might be

Exploring environmental entrepreneurship: identity coupling, venture goals, and stakeholder incentives

On the basis of a qualitative study of 25 renewable energy firms, we theorize why and how individuals engage in environmental entrepreneurship, inductively defined as: the use of both commercial and ecological logics to address environmental degradation through the creation of financially profitable organizations, products, services, and markets. Our findings suggest that environmental entrepreneurs: (1) are motivated by identities based in both commercial and ecological logics,(2) prioritize commercial and/or ecological venture goals dependent on the strength and priority of coupling between these two identity types, and (3) approach stakeholders in a broadly inclusive, exclusive, or co-created manner based on identity coupling and goals. These findings contribute to literature streams on hybrid organizing, entrepreneurial identity, and entrepreneurship’s potential for resolving environmental degradation