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Recent Submissions
Item Drivers of Community Strength: An Institutional Logics Perspective on Geographical and Affiliation Based CommunitiesAlmandoz, Juan; Marquis, Christopher; Cheely, Michael (Sage Publications, Inc., 2016)Item The Chinese Collectivist Model of CharityMarquis, Christopher; Li, Qi; Qiao, Kunyuan (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2017)In the West, most wealthy entrepreneurs prefer to give to specific individual causes, by establishing their own foundation, family office, or donor-advised fund. Most Chinese entrepreneurs, by contrast, would rather work together and pursue philanthropy collectively. This article defines and describes this new model of charitable giving.Item Different shades of green: environment uncertainty and the strategies of hybrid organizationsAlmandoz, Juan; Lee, Matthew; Marquis, Christopher (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2017)How does environmental uncertainty affect the process of starting new hybrid organizations? Our comparative analysis of the formation of two “green” banks – with hybrid goals linked to banking and environmental logics – reveals that shifts in their strategic orientations resulted from attempts to align uncertain and changing resource environments with the composition and goals of the organizations’ top leadership. While the initial idea and goals of the founders were similar, the organizations they established ended up with divergent strategic orientations and senior leadership groups.Item State-Mediated Globalization Processes and the Adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in ChinaMarquis, Christopher; Yin, Juelin; Yang, Dongning (Management and Organization Review, 2017-03)Despite the prevalence of global diffusion, little is known about the processes by which international practices are adopted and adapted within organizations around the world. Through our qualitative research on the introduction of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting at two leading Chinese companies, we identify a unique set of political mechanisms that we label state-mediated globalization, whereby powerful nation-state actors influence the ways in which corporations adopt and adapt global norms and practices. We find that businesses’ needs for political legitimacy from a key stakeholder, in this case the government, leads them to deviate systematically from the global practice in both form and content. These intentional practice adaptations are then legitimized by the government to create internationalization tools and localized standards to aid adoption by other organizations. Our findings illustrate previously unidentified mechanisms by which powerful stakeholders such as the Chinese government may mediate, and thereby direct, the ways in which corporations adopt and adapt global CSR practices. Contributions to understanding the political processes of institutional translation in the context of globalization are discussed.Item Accounting to the Public: Internet Activism and Corporate Social Responsiveness in Emerging MarketsLuo, Xiaowei Rose; Zhang, Jianjun; Marquis, Christopher (Academy of Management Journal, 2016)Civil society’s inability to hold powerful businesses accountable in authoritarian regimes is a grand challenge in today’s global environment. We propose that the development of Internet activism provides a novel mechanism to pressure for corporate response in those societies. Internet activism is dispersed, fast moving, and interactive, and hence can effectively focus public attention and potentially undermine a company’s public image by generating social comparison. In addition, firms with public image vulnerability may experience magnified pressure from Internet activism, as well as more intense social comparison. We explore this framework in the setting of corporate donations made in the wake of the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan Province of China, which triggered Internet activism that challenged corporations to contribute to the good of the community. Analysis based on 613 large publicly listed Chinese firms supports our framework.Item Institutional Equivalence: How Industry and Community Peers Influence Corporate PhilanthropyMarquis, Christopher; Tilcsik, Andras (2016)This paper explores how organizations respond to simultaneous institutional influences from two distinct sources: the industry in which they operate and the local geographic community in which they are headquartered. We theorize that the existence of institutional equivalents—other organizations at the same intersection of different fields, such as the same industry and the same community—provides a clear and well defined reference category for firms and thus shapes which subset of peers the focal organization imitates most closely. We develop hypotheses about how the presence or absence of institutional equivalents affects organizations’ responses to behavioral cues from different peer groups, how these effects vary when peers in different fields exhibit inconsistent behaviors, and how organizational characteristics, such as size and performance, strengthen or weaken the influence of institutional equivalents. We test our propositions through a longitudinal analysis of philanthropic contributions by Fortune 1000 firms from 1980 to 2006. Our framework illuminates how simultaneous presence in multiple fields affects organizations and introduces to institutional theory the concept of institutional equivalence, which we argue is a critical factor in determining how organizations respond to multiple institutional cues.Item Do Political Connections Buffer Firms from or Bind Firms to the Government? A Study of Corporate Charitable Donations of Chinese FirmsZhang, Jianjun; Marquis, Christopher; Kunyuan, Qiao (Organization Science, 2016)Do political connections buffer firms from or bind firms to the government? To examine this theoretical puzzle, we distinguish two types of managerial political connections, ascribed and achieved, and theorize that these different types of ties either buffer firms from or bind firms to government demands. Furthermore, we propose that these effects are contingent on both industrial and regional institutional conditions. We test our framework with a unique panel data set of privately controlled listed firms’ charitable donations in China from 2001 to 2012. We find that firms whose executives have ascribed bureaucratic connections are more likely to use their connections as a buffer from governmental donation pressure, particularly in competitive industries and less market-oriented regions, whereas in state-monopolized industries this buffering effect is reduced. In contrast, achieved political connections are more likely to serve a binding function that facilitates donation, particularly in state-monopolized industries and more market-oriented regions, but in less market oriented regions, they buffer firms from the pressure to donate. Our research contributes to the literatures on the effects of political connections, the institutional contingencies of political connections, and the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate political activities (CPA).Item Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of GreenwashingMarquis, Christopher; Toffel, Michael; Zhou, Yanhua (INFORMS, 2016)Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We theorize circumstances under which firms are less likely to engage in such selective disclosure, focusing on organizational and institutional factors that intensify scrutiny and expectations of transparency and that foster civil society mobilization. We test our hypotheses using a novel panel data set of 4,750 public companies across many industries that are headquartered in 45 countries during 2004–2007. Results show that firms that are more environmentally damaging, particularly those in countries where they are more exposed to scrutiny and global norms, are less likely to engage in selective disclosure. We discuss contributions to research on institutional theory, strategic management, and information disclosure.Item Shared Value with Chinese Characteristics: An Interview with Shen GuojunMarquis, Christopher; Zhang, Ying; Yang, Shiyu (2015-10)Item The Double-edged Sword of Bureaucratic ConnectionsMarquis, Christopher; Qian, Cuili (2015-10)