EXPRESS: The Best Broths are Cooked in the Oldest Pans: An Empirical Test of the Practice-based View in the Wine Industry

The practice-based view (PBV) has recently been proposed as a counter to the resource-based view of the firm (RBV). Unlike the RBV, the PBV contends that performance differences among firms can accrue from readily available practices. Using a large sample of wines over a 20-year period, I find evidence of a significant relationship between the implementation of practices and performance. Findings also indicate that the strength of this relationship is contingent on the possession of valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable (VRIN) resources (a firm-level moderator) and the prevalence of practices (an industry-level moderator). The impact of practices on performance is less pronounced when firms possess VRIN resources. It also declines as they become more widespread in an industry.

EXPRESS: Conflict or Alignment? The Role of Return-oriented Foreign Shareholders and Domestic Relational Shareholders in Mitigating Earnings Management

This study investigates the effects of foreign return-oriented shareholders and domestic relational shareholders of Japanese companies on the earnings management behavior of their invested firms when stock option pay is adopted. We theorize that foreign shareholders seek short-term returns and do not engage in close monitoring due to an information disadvantage while domestic shareholders prevent managerial behavior that distorts information disclosure. Our findings show that managers of firms that use stock option pay engage in earnings management to increase their private financial benefits and meet capital markets’ expectations, which allows them to enhance their own reputation. However, this managerial behavior is contingent on the firm’s ownership structure. Our results show that while foreign shareholders enhance the positive impact of stock options on earning management, domestic shareholders and affiliated directors mitigate this positive effect. Our empirical analyses support the argument that ownership heterogeneity is a key determinant of managerial propensity to engage in earnings management when Japanese firms adopt stock option pay.

EXPRESS: Coauthoring collaborative strategy when voices are many and authority is ambiguous

In interorganizational teams, processes are more complex and structures less clear than in intraorganizational settings. Different perspectives come together and authoritative positions are often ambiguous, which makes establishing what to do problematic. We adopt a ventriloquial analytical lens and pose the question: How exactly do interorganizational team members build a collaborative strategy under these conditions, in their situated interactions? Our findings show how many different voices (individual, organizational, team, and other) shape members’ strategy-making and reveal these voices’ performative authoritative effects: Members established their team’s strategy and produced the needed authority to do so through three coauthoring practices, namely the proposition, appropriation, and expropriation of voices. When members switched between the practices and different voices, these voices were either woven together or moved apart. We sketch a conceptualization of strategy as a relational assemblage and develop a process model of strategy coauthoring to illuminate these dynamics.

EXPRESS: REPUTATION BELONGS IN MORE STRATEGIC DECISION MODELS (AND SOME DATA TO MEASURE IT)

Organizational reputation is compelling to layman audiences, it is critical for firm performance and myriad organizational phenomena, and recent theory articulates how it shapes the very managerial discretion underpinning strategic decisions. Yet, reputation is still excluded from much of mainstream strategic organization research. We make the case for reputation’s wider inclusion in studies of managerial discretion or strategic decision-making. We first demonstrate reputation’s potential theoretical importance in explaining nuances or non-findings in such studies, detail ways to measure reputation accurately, provide five sources of data for readers to facilitate the inclusion of reputation in their studies, and illustrate how scholars can use freelancers to collect their own archival data for their own, context-specific purposes. By shedding light on reputation’s unique role in shaping managerial discretion and, thereby, strategic decisions, we hope this essay helps scholars better account for decision-making patterns that might otherwise defy the predictions of other organizational theories.

Communicative Perspectives on Strategic Organization

While in the past, perspectives that focus on language and communication have perhaps not received the attention they deserve in the mainstream literature in strategy and organization, interest in this area has been growing in recent years. The present essay serves to introduce a collection of insightful papers (independently submitted and reviewed, but brought together in this themed issue) that offer an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of a rich variety of research perspectives on communication to research in strategic organization. Building on the seven contributions featured in this issue, we show how communicative perspectives speak to questions of the who, how, what, and what then, of strategy. We then discuss dualisms that underpin research on strategic organization adopting a communicative lens and propose directions for future work that might bridge these divides.

EXPRESS: The Logic of Strategic Entrepreneurship

In this essay I attempt to clarify the construct of strategic entrepreneurship from a new angle. By comparing the ideal-type theory of strategy without entrepreneurship with the ideal-type theory of entrepreneurship without strategy, I shed light on what it means to combine the logics of entrepreneurship and strategy and illustrate the value of their complementarity. Entrepreneurship is blind without strategy and strategy is paralyzed without entrepreneurship. I further argue that many proponents of strategic entrepreneurship and action-based theories of strategy have prematurely given up on the idea of sustained competitive advantage. Disequilibrium and uncertainty do not automatically mean that no predictable and stable patterns can be relied upon for sustained competitive advantage.

EXPRESS: Where are the entrepreneurs? A call to theorize the micro-foundations and strategic organization of entrepreneurial ecosystems

The “entrepreneurial ecosystem” (EE) has become the dominant metaphor in theories explaining how location-specific forces influence entrepreneurship. Despite the progress made by scholars studying EEs, in this essay we contend that the ecosystem metaphor has created an implicit tendency in entrepreneurship theory to emphasize macro-, ecosystem-level dynamics rather than the causal and mediating mechanisms linking entrepreneurs and their local ecosystems. To accompany the macro-dynamics focus in EE theory, we call for a micro-foundations approach that emphasizes the bi-directional connections between entrepreneurs’ strategizing and organizing activities and their ecosystems. We offer an agenda of theory development opportunities at the intersection of strategic organization and EEs.

Seeking input when the train has left the station: The decoupling of participative strategic decision-making processes and the role of new technology in symbolic management

We examine the symbolic management of participative strategic decision-making programs that purportedly use crowdsourcing technology to solicit strategic input below the executive suite, but are often decoupled from actual strategic decision making. Specifically, top management may decide on a strategic option before soliciting input under the program. The first portion of our theoretical framework explains why disclosure of a participative strategic decision making program in communicating with security analysts is associated with more positive analyst appraisals, despite decoupling, and why the benefits of disclosure are amplified to the extent that leaders highlight the use of crowdsourcing technology in the program. The second portion of our framework addresses the antecedents of symbolic adoption. We suggest that firms are more likely to adopt and decouple a program when the CEO has a personal friendship tie to the CEO of another firm that has adopted and decoupled, especially following relatively negative analyst appraisals. Analysis of a unique dataset that includes longitudinal survey data from executives supported our predictions.

Organizational reputation: In search of lost time

Organizational reputation has been an important concept in management research for more than 30 years. In this essay, we elaborate on the relationship between the notion of time and organizational reputation. We first review research on reputation in strategic management, highlighting the importance of the construct and how time has traditionally been conceptualized. We then build on existing organizational research on time as a way to advance the understanding of reputation as a more processual and socially constructed phenomenon; we argue that reputation formation, maintenance, and repair could be understood as a form of socio-symbolic work. Based on this foundation, we set out a research agenda providing a path for the investigation of the temporal features of reputation and reputation work.

Intrinsic speed capabilities and alliance partner attractiveness

This study focuses on the role of intrinsic speed capabilities, which refer to the ability to execute investment projects faster than competitors, in the attractiveness and selection of alliance partners. We predict that intrinsically faster firms have a higher likelihood of being selected as alliance partners due to the potential of accelerating the realization of future revenue streams of an alliance project as well as of preempting slower competitors. We also expect that intrinsic speed capabilities substitute for deficiencies in alliance experience and firm innovativeness. Using data on construction projects in the global Liquefied Natural Gas industry, we find empirical support for our theoretical expectations. Our results suggest that firm speed plays an important role in alliance partner selection and has the potential to facilitate the generation of future growth options for firms due to greater partner attractiveness in the market for alliance partners.