British Journal of Management最新文献

This study explores the third type of agency problem concerning the tension between shareholders and stakeholders. It does so by analysing whether small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) eligible for a temporary debt suspension programme favour the short-term interests of their shareholders or stakeholders, or the firm's long-term competitiveness. Using information from an Italian debt moratorium programme aimed at alleviating the financial pressure on SMEs during the financial crisis, we built a rich database of 37,465 limited liability companies eligible for the programme between 2006 and 2015. We then used a difference-in-differences model to analyse the data. Our findings indicate that the debt suspension programme, designed to help eligible firms survive temporary financial constraints, did promote their long-term competitiveness. However, it also produced some undesirable consequences, such as benefiting shareholders in the short term at the expense of other key stakeholders.

This study investigates whether accelerators attract the highest-performing FinTech ventures. Drawing on countersignalling theory, we present a model of accelerator participation that predicts high-quality FinTech ventures will avoid accelerator programmes. Using a unique financial reporting dataset of FinTech accelerator participants and a propensity score-matched sample of comparison firms, we find support for the prediction from our countersignalling model. FinTech accelerator participants have worse performance, both before and after completing a programme, when compared to peer non-accelerator ventures. Overall, our results indicate that FinTech ventures are less suited for accelerators due to the current breadth of outside funding options available, which provides little incentive for participation from high-quality ventures. This research has important implications for entrepreneurs, accelerators and investors.

This research documents that a firm's bankruptcy risk increases with its climate change exposure. This study further investigates the underlying mechanisms and finds that this effect is stronger for firms with lower operating cash flows or tighter financial constraints. Consistent with the agency theory of debt, the evidence suggests that improving the protection of creditor rights can mitigate the adverse impact of climate change. In addition, two distinct sets of quasi-natural experiments are exploited to establish causality and eliminate alternative explanations. Specifically, the positive effect of climate change exposure on bankruptcy risk is weaker after the 2015 Paris Agreement, which raised public awareness of climate issues, and stronger for firms headquartered in countries that are more severely affected by natural disasters. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that the main effect is more pronounced among loss firms, firms with higher levels of asset tangibility, cash flow volatility or profit volatility, and firms with worse solvency performance. Overall, the collective evidence indicates that climate change has real consequences for firm financial conditions.

The purpose of this introduction and Special Issue (SI) is to offer a unique and timely opportunity to explore, revisit and critically examine key methodological debates and tensions with the purpose of advancing diversity and novel theorizing in the field. We join voices with the authors of the five papers of this SI to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions and research traditions and pave the way for inclusive and novel theorizing in management scholarship. We revisit four long-lasting debates that hinder methodological pluralism and diversity in management scholarship: (a) the quantitative-qualitative research divide, (b) the legitimacy of mixed-methods research, (c) the rigour versus relevance tension and (d) the lack of methodological innovation. We suggest that these debates are at least partly counterproductive because they create silos and opposing camps, thereby inhibiting an appreciation of different worldviews and collective learning. The dominance of functionalism and positivism in quantitative research and the inappropriate transfer of quantitative logics in qualitative research have led to a lack of diversity in empirical methodologies. The field's limited methodological diversity is further proliferated by a strict adherence to quality standards that have inadvertently promoted homogeneity. This introduction highlights the challenges and potential of mixed methods, which are gaining momentum owing to calls for methodological pluralism. We also call for a re-evaluation of quality standards to encourage more innovative and diverse research methodologies.

Existing studies on bond covenants have focused primarily on firm-level factors and have largely overlooked the influence of the external environment, including the media. Furthermore, previous research on media coverage has failed to consider its impact on the bond market. This study attempts to fill these gaps by examining the impact of media coverage on bond covenants for a sample of Chinese corporate bonds from 2007 to 2017. Our findings reveal a negative relationship between media coverage and the number of bond covenants. Further analysis demonstrates that this negative impact is more pronounced for non-state-owned firms, in highly competitive industries, and in regions with a weak legal environment. Additionally, media coverage with a non-negative tone leads to a reduction in the number of bond covenants. Notably, government-controlled media exerts a more significant influence than market-oriented media on bond covenants. Furthermore, both media coverage and bond covenants contribute to lower debt costs and are found to be interchangeable in their effects. Our analysis is robust to corrections for the endogeneity of the relationship between media coverage and bond covenants.

This paper addresses the burgeoning interest in management studies concerning methodologies that generate societal or organizational impact. While much research has focused on tackling major societal and environmental challenges, less is known about how management research can benefit research participants. A promising approach involves developing novel methodologies that prioritize theoretical contributions through self-reflections by both researchers and participants. Drawing, as a participatory methodology, holds considerable potential since it can express feelings and embodied experiences that may be hard to put into words. This study advocates for a participatory visual methodology using drawing, inspired by Gestalt art therapy, as a means to create a caring relationship with the participant and promote self-reflection. The study offers three contributions that broaden the methodological scope of management studies: explaining the interplay between drawing, reflecting and theorizing; demonstrating how visual analysis can integrate the individual and their environment by drawing on Gestalt therapy's concept of contact boundary; and explaining how drawing can promote accountability in research with participants. To illustrate the contributions, the paper draws on two research projects that highlight the significance of self-reflection in relation to embodied experiences and explain why it is important for both researchers and participants.

This study explores how entrepreneurs’ extent of experience of business failure affects the level of negative emotional response (NER) they experience, moderating the level of personal growth that occurs after business failure. Contrary to common assumption, the study finds no significant relationship between the extent of failure experience and the level of NER. The results show that many entrepreneurs demonstrate personal growth following business failure, however, the extent of failure experience and the level of NER. This interaction moderates the level of personal growth for the entrepreneur and suggests that high levels of failure experience interfere with the level of personal growth obtained. The study contributes to theory by providing insights into the processes and consequences of entrepreneurial failure. In particular, the study brings together key threads of debate on personal growth and failure to develop and test conceptual arguments, and further explores the way entrepreneurship scholars think about emotion, business failure and its impact on the individual and society.

Previous research has stressed the importance of the relationship between foreign divestment and subsequent firm performance. Yet, controversy remains, as some authors suggest that foreign divestment has a positive effect on firm performance, and others propose that foreign divestment has negative performance effects. To help reconcile this controversy, we first explicate existing arguments and argue that in the context of retail (de-)internationalisation, foreign divestment will have a predominantly negative effect on retailers’ financial performance. We then draw on organisational learning theory to argue that this negative performance effect of foreign divestment is contingent on (a) the spatial dispersion of previously divested foreign operations (i.e. the extent of geographical diversity of the foreign divestments the multinational enterprise [MNE] has conducted over a specified period of time), and (b) the temporal dispersion of previously divested foreign operations (i.e. the time between prior divestment episodes). Drawing on a panel of some of the largest retail MNEs over the 20-year period 1997–2016, we find that foreign divestment has a negative effect on retailers’ subsequent performance. Our results also indicate that the negative performance effect of foreign divestment is effectively mitigated by retailers’ prior divestment experience in spatially diverse and temporally dispersed settings.

Recent studies suggest that greater exposure to the market for corporate control matters for managers and shareholders since it affects firms’ ex-post risk of experiencing a stock price crash. The findings though question the direction of the effect. In contrast, in this study, we are the first to examine the effects of firms’ ex-ante risk of experiencing a stock price crash, a likely antecedent of which is managers’ concealment of news on aspects of the market for corporate control. We find that higher crash risk leads to greater takeover target likelihood. This relationship, which is robust to duly circumventing reverse causality, depends to a significant extent on inferior managerial quality and greater managerial discretion around financial accruals, affording richer insight into the notion that correction of managerial behaviour is a stimulus for the market for corporate control, but one that depends on the likely extent of managers’ concealment of news. We also concurrently find that actual takeover targets with higher crash risk generate a lower bid premium and receive more payment with stock. Overall, our findings strongly suggest that decision-making in the market for corporate control is at least partially explained by incentives linked to opportunistic prices and takeovers of lemons.

Blockchain has emerged as a key Industry 4.0 technology, enabling novel forms of governance and coordination mechanism among organizations and markets. However, extant literature has largely focused on the technical aspects of blockchain, with limited attention to the behavioural and institutional aspects. In this paper, we argue that blockchain-based smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations represent the potential for a radical departure from traditional forms of contractual governance and hierarchy, carrying profound implications for the design and governance of economic transaction and organizational structures. We elucidate how blockchain technologies, characterized by transparency, immutability, programmability and decentralization, reduce transaction costs and establish an industrialized and trustless transactional governance system. Finally, we present an agenda for future research, highlighting the need for new theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence to understand the impact of blockchain on organizational design and forms.