Long Range Planning最新文献

This qualitative study examines the relationship between the mission statements of 161 Italian B Corps and their social impact performance, measured by the B Impact Assessment (BIA). The research combined different qualitative methods: content analysis, text mining, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) in a homogeneous research design to explore the content of B Corps mission statements and their influence on social impact performance. The results reveal that B Corps’ mission statements are compound in nature, combining elements related to philosophy and values, environmental protection, and social benefit with the drive toward market success and economic performance. Additionally, mission statements with rich content are associated with better social impact performance, highlighting the role of the mission statement in creating identity and imprinting differentiation for B Corps. Finally, this study offers practical recommendations for entrepreneurs and managers of B Corps to craft clear mission statements that promote positive social impact.

This study extends the literature on CEO replacement, top management change, and corporate turnaround by examining the sequence of top management team change events and turnaround outcomes among declining firms in industries affected by technological innovation and digitalization, including information technology, electronics, imaging and communications. This study focuses specifically on the top management change events before and after CEO replacement during the turnaround attempts. Using 12 cases of successful/unsuccessful turnaround matched pairs, we adopt a two-phase case study research approach, first generating insights from six cases (three pairs), and then cross validating our findings with additional six cases (three pairs). Through the qualitative examination of these cases, we uncover top management vacancy as a new theoretical construct and refine an existing construct, top management change, by differentiating between primary and support functions. We then observe distinct patterns of CEO replacement and top management changes separating successful and unsuccessful turnarounds. Our case findings indicate that successful turnarounds are characterized by top management vacancy in primary functions before the new CEO arrival and by top management stability in support functions after the new CEO arrival, and that unsuccessful turnarounds involve top management personnel replacement in primary functions after the new CEO arrival. Based on the case findings and related literature, we propose a theoretical model for CEO replacement, top management change, and corporate turnaround.

Choosing the right company name is challenging and may have major consequences for firm prospects. Drawing on the strategic conformity literature, we investigate the implications of “nonconforming” company names, i.e. foreign sounding and family-unrelated, for family firms’ performance. Consistent with the idea that such names endow the business with greater visibility and recognition, we find that nonconforming names are positively associated with financial performance. This association is stronger when the firm operates in an industry with a low share of nonconforming peers and a high share of eponymous peers, in a crowded product class, and is smaller than industry peers. Collectively, our analysis provides new evidence on the strategic implications of company names.

Event studies, which have significantly advanced mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research, obtain excess returns based on a theory linking a firm's shareholder returns to those of the market. For outcomes lacking such a theory, we propose an empirical approach using a synthetic control method with machine learning to link outcomes for the acquirer or target to those for a group of comparison firms. We discuss the method's assumptions, its close parallel to event studies, and its difference in weighting comparison firms (based on data versus derived from theory). We provide an illustration of Dollar Tree's acquisition of Family Dollar, by analyzing shareholder returns (to demonstrate consistent results with an event study), realized cost and sales synergies, and customer sentiment (derived from more than 52 million Twitter messages). We highlight this method's potential—for M&A and other areas of strategy research—to open up new lines of inquiry.

Building on recent international business research that embraces insights from economic geography, we hypothesise that MNEs locating a high share of the total number of their subsidiaries in global cities (which we conceptualize as global city location intensity) exhibit higher financial performance. We further argue that knowledge-intensive firms benefit more from global city location intensity than less knowledge-intensive firms. We also posit that multinationality (international geographic dispersion) negatively moderates the relationship between global city location intensity and financial performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 497 MNEs and find strong support for our predictions. We contribute to the literature by introducing the notion of intensity into the relationship between global city locations and financial performance and call for considering scale effects when examining locational decisions and their consequences.

When setting a new strategy for their firm, managers engage in a range of sensegiving activities designed to introduce the new direction and explain the reasons for the change. These communication events commonly involve the use of strategic management terms and concepts to explain and justify the prescribed strategy. Literature thus far assumes that audiences understand and agree that these terms and underlying concepts are appropriate and relevant. Yet such views fail to explain strategy sensegiving in contexts where audiences of strategy presentations are ignorant or skeptical towards strategy concepts and ideas. We examine sensegiving under such conditions by analyzing a manager introducing a new strategy in a creative agency which expressed skepticism towards the concepts and practice of strategizing. Using data from video recordings of a sequence of internal strategy presentations, we identify three strategies designed to overcome prejudice towards strategic thinking while at the same time encouraging its use: winning the right to lead, finding resonance, and enrolling the audience into the strategy. We further find how these three sensegiving strategies are supported by carefully crafted visuals to either emphasize or de-emphasize aspects of the strategy and its supporting rationale. Our findings extend the literature on the practice of strategy by illustrating how the visual supports sensegiving efforts to guide a firm's interpretation of a proposed new strategic direction.

We investigate the differential effect of time in terms of generation in control of the firm's management on family firm performance to address the call in the literature for a more nuanced treatment of family firms and their performance differences. By drawing on the mixed-gamble logic of the behavioral agency model, our work suggests that the family's socio-emotional wealth (SEW) varies across generations, resulting in complex performance relationships. We theorize and empirically find that earlier-generation family firms protect current SEW and perform increasingly worse while later-generation firms maximize prospective financial wealth and perform increasingly better. Additionally, we argue that high family control dispersion mitigates the negative effect on performance of earlier generations in control and increases the positive effect of later generations in control. Important theoretical and practical contributions emerge from this study.

We examine the linkages between firms' M&A activity and the information exchange between executives and analysts during quarterly earnings calls. Prior M&A research has mostly focused on the considerations presented by information asymmetry between buyers and sellers themselves in M&A. However, these concerns also exist between the buying firm's executives and capital markets. We examine whether firms' M&A activity results in an information exchange between executives and analysts that highlights corporate strategy as a discussion topic. Thus, we test whether there is consistency between firms' corporate growth agendas and the information released to the public by these firms. This question is relevant, as disclosure is central to firms' ability to raise capital and compete. We also investigate the degree to which these information exchanges affect analysts' earnings forecast errors.