Martina Montauti

We investigate the effectiveness of two types of impression management tactics implemented around negative attributes: egocentric (claiming the absence or low presence of a negative attribute in a focal organization) and alter-centric tactics (claiming the greater presence of a negative attribute in an organization’s competitor). We claim that the effectiveness of each tactic depends on the risk of audiences’ skepticism, which stems from the incongruence between the information conveyed in the tactic and audiences’ default expectations about the presence of the attribute among members of a given market segment. Audiences expect a conspicuous presence of the attribute, we propose, the more stakeholders contest a market segment for that very attribute. Thus, we advance that egocentric (alter-centric) tactics are less likely to be effective for contested (uncontested) attributes because the information conveyed in such tactics clashes with audiences’ default expectations, triggering skepticism. We find support for our predictions looking at the impact of nutrient content claims on product sales in the U.S. food retail industry between 2006 and 2015.

This paper aims to understand the mechanisms through which organizations, over time, manage competing logics within budgeting practices. We draw insights from new institutional studies in accountingto highlight the importance of practice-level negotiations for managing institutional conflicts, but we complement them with a focus on the organizational embeddedness of hybrid practices from organizational studies in accounting. More specifically, we build on the notion of ‘structured flexibility,’ according to which organizational structures frame and enable negotiations on hybrid practices, as critical to manage complexity in face of changing environmental conditions. We thus show how ‘structured flexibility’ is made possible by a number of characteristics of decision-making that have been widely studied by the behavioral theory of the firm, i.e. the decomposition of decision-making processes, the framing of local negotiations and the search for satisficing solutions. Our findings from a case study of a public university facing the conflict between a professional and a managerial logic shed light on how organizations may actively manage institutional complexity over time and suggest specific interventions to transform complexity into a source of strategic advantage.

Prior research has deemed products that span market categories a source of cognitive and institutional disruption. Portraying spanning products as purely disruptive elements, however, does not consider their large presence in markets and, consequently, the fact that producers and consumers continue to coordinate their activities on established categories despite pervasive spanning. Our paper addresses this gap by focusing on commercial success as an important condition under which spanning products, rather than being a source of disruption, sustain market coordination. From the producer side, an increasing number of commercially successful products spanning a focal category stimulates mimicry. From the consumer side, this mimicry, net of the overall level of spanning observed in the category, improves consensus. We test these arguments by focusing on the styles that map electronic music as the established categories of a market. Empirical analyses lend support to our hypotheses.

In this paper, we conceptualize categories as regions of a cognitive map that structure the market and guide the investment decisions of potential entrants—i.e., of new and established organizations. We advance that, as a category appears altered via incumbents’ acts of recombination, potential entrants face market-specific uncertainty and are discouraged to invest in that category. These negative effects of recombination on market entries are, however, mitigated at increasing values of category status. We test our arguments in the market for electronic music. The analyses of product and organizational entries in music styles between 1978 and 2011 lend support to our arguments.

This article investigates the form of European universities to determine the extent to which they resemble the characteristics of complete organizations and whether the forms are associated with modernization policy pressure, national institutional frames and organizational characteristics. An original data set of twenty-six universities from eight countries was used. Specialist universities have a stronger identity, whereas the level of hierarchy and rationality is clearly associated with the intensity of modernization policies. At the same time, evidence suggests limitations for universities to become complete, as mechanisms allowing the development of some dimensions seemingly constrain the capability to develop others.

Budgeting—i.e. the decision on the level of expenditures and on the repartition of resources among organizational subunits—can be conceived as a critical organizational process, which is closely related to key choices concerning strategic priorities and to resources acquisition strategies. Overall, it is increasingly being recognized as one of the central places where steering and governance take place, and where higher education institutions are supposed to take initiative. Accordingly, this paper pursues two aims: first, it provides a review of existing studies about budgeting in higher education, according to the literature on changes in its organizational characteristics, and with a focus on approaches from Organizational Theory and Sociology. Second, it identifies some future directions of research, thus easing the integration of these two bodies of literature. This integration may help in providing researchers with a deeper understanding of the current functioning of budgeting processes, their variations across higher education institutions and countries, as well as their implications for organizational behavior.

By adopting a behavioral perspective on stakeholder activism, our proposal investigates the biases that the cognitive structure of a market may induce into the stakeholders’ propensity to attack a specific segment of that market. We claim that whether stakeholders perceive a focal segment to exhibit a disproportionate level of negative attributes, and therefore decide that it deserves to become a target of contestation, crucially depends on the benchmark that is used to compare with the focal segment. We test our theory in the US food retail industry and examine the extent of contestation in 35 food categories between 2006 and 2015. Our preliminary results support the argument that contestation emerges as the result of a boundedly rather than perfectly rational decision making process.