British Journal of Management最新文献

We investigate the relationship between operational leanness and institutional ownership. Based on a sample of 12,291 firm-year observations of US manufacturing firms from 1998 to 2020, we find leaner firms to attract significantly more institutional investors – both in terms of the fraction of shares held and the number of institutional investors holding shares of the firm. This finding holds in several tests addressing endogeneity concerns. Contrary to studies investigating the relationship between operational leanness and operating performance or credit ratings, our results do not provide consistent evidence that this relationship is also of a concave shape. However, we provide evidence that the relationship is stronger (i) for firms with weak corporate governance and high firm-specific monitoring costs and (ii) for active institutions, suggesting that not only firm performance considerations but also perceived lower agency costs are important mechanisms explaining why institutional investors prefer lean manufacturing firms. Taken together, these findings contribute to our understanding of institutional investors’ preferences in general and across institution types.

With ChatGPT being promoted to and by academics for writing scholarly articles more effectively, we ask what kind of knowledge does ChatGPT produce, what this means for our reflexivity as responsible management educators/researchers, and how an absence of reflexivity disqualifies us from shaping management knowledge in responsible ways. We urgently need to grasp what makes human knowledge distinct compared with knowledge generated by ChatGPT et al. Thus, we first explain how ChatGPT operates and unpack its intrinsic epistemological limitations. Using high-probability choices that are derivative, ChatGPT has no stake in the knowledge it produces and is thus likely prone to offering irresponsible outputs. By contrast, genuine human thinking—embodied in a contingent socio-cultural setting—uses low-probability choices both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the box of training data, making it creative, contextual and committed. We conclude that the use of ChatGPT is wholly incompatible with scientific responsibility and responsible management.

Unlike previous generations of artificial intelligence (AI), AI assistants today can autonomously perform actions without human input or intervention. Several studies have proposed but not tested the notion that increased levels of AI autonomy may ultimately conflict with consumers’ fundamental need for autonomy themselves. Across five experiments (N = 1981), including representative samples and pre-registered hypotheses, we investigate consumer responses to high (vs. low) AI autonomy in the context of online shopping. The results show a pronounced negative effect of high AI autonomy on consumers’ adoption intentions – an effect mediated by consumers’ relative state of powerlessness in the presence of high AI autonomy. However, when consumers face situations characterized by scarcity, such as when preferred options are being sold out rapidly (e.g. Black Friday), the aversive aspects of high (vs. low) AI autonomy are attenuated. Together, these findings offer novel insights regarding whether, when and why consumers are willing to adopt high (vs. low)-autonomy AI assistants in online shopping settings.

This paper examines the relationship between board diversity and firms’ decisions to voluntarily disclose information about their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We focus on board ancestral diversity as a relatively new dimension of (deep-level) board structure and document that it has a positive and statistically significant effect on a firm's scope and quality of voluntary GHG emission disclosure. The effect goes beyond the impact of more common (surface-level) dimensions of board diversity and remains robust after addressing endogeneity concerns. In line with the theoretical conjecture that diversity enhances a board's advising and monitoring capacity, we find that the impact of diverse boards is stronger in more complex firms and in firms with low levels of institutional ownership. Overall, our findings provide evidence for board diversity being a relevant governance factor in corporate environmental decision making.

This paper shows that the American Inventor's Protection Act, which introduced the disclosure of patent applications after 18 months, that is, before a grant decision is taken and, hence, before it is known whether the respective technology will receive legal protection, is associated with a reduction of family firms’ research and development (R&D) investment. This suggests that early disclosure of patent applications is perceived as a threat to family firms’ innovation activity and discourages their R&D investment. This finding deserves our attention because family firms account for a large share of the US economy, and a reduction in their R&D investment can have long-term consequences.

Consistent with the monitoring function played by financial analysts, we find that greater analyst coverage leads to the same extent of improvement in the quantity and quality of environmental information disclosed by the firm. This result is remarkably robust after conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that exploits brokerage closures and mergers as an exogenous decrease in analyst coverage, as well as using an instrumental variable approach. The positive influence of analyst coverage on corporate environmental disclosure is particularly evident for firms that cause high environmental damage, firms with low information asymmetry and those followed by analysts with superior experience, accuracy and reputation. Taken together, our empirical findings provide new insights into the bright side effect of analyst coverage on corporate environmental-related activities.

This paper offers methodological and theoretical contributions to the field of management at the so-called ‘turn to matter’ postulated within new materialist perspectives. It discusses more-than-human perspectives in management research and provides some methodological directions to support new materialist empirical investigations. Theoretically grounded on new materialism and posthumanism, the paper applies the assemblage approach that focuses on understanding the redistribution of agency to the network of people, things and discourses. In developing three exemplars of assemblages, it shows how it is possible to methodologically encompass the entanglement of the material, the organic, the human and the more-than-human to explore a phenomenon such as working from home. The paper concludes by reflecting on what new materialist qualitative research in management could become in order to generate new ways of imagining management, organizations and working lives, as more-than-human entanglements.

We examine fund managers’ mobility across different funds and the factors associated with their moving to new posts. Based on a comprehensive and unique dataset of open-ended funds of the booming Chinese mutual fund industry, we model the duration of a fund manager's service as a time-to-event counting process and examine how the prevailing market conditions, the manager's performance and the risk profile of the fund determine how long the manager will remain in post. Our study establishes that managerial performance and rising rather than falling markets are the two main factors that make managers less likely to remain in their posts. In contrast, the riskier the profile of the fund with respect to the market, the less likely it is that a manager will move. When all factors are considered, it appears that open-ended fund managers leave their posts when offered better employment prospects rather than when confronted by market adversity. Our study provides a novel insight into the optimization of investment decisions and encourages regulators to scrutinize the disclosure of appropriate information to investors regarding fund manager changes.

Nowadays, more and more firm chief executive officers (CEOs) are using social media to join online conversations and interact with stakeholders. As this social media presence shows their social participation tendencies, such CEOs have been described as ‘social CEOs’. Building on an upper-echelon perspective of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this study examines whether social CEOs and the implications of their social media engagement have an impact on corporate social performance by developing a needs–affordances–consequences approach. Our approach explores the motives and ability of social CEOs, suggesting the positive influence of CEO sociability on CSR and also the moderating effect of CEOs’ social evaluation. Using data on Chinese publicly listed firms from 2009 to 2020, we find that firms with social CEOs have a higher level of social performance than firms without, and higher CEO status or better CEO reputation can further amplify the positive impact of CEO sociability on corporate social performance. This work makes important contributions to research on the determinants of CSR, as well as the social media and leadership literature.

Whether proxied by the amount raised or the probability that this amount exceeds the soft cap, the factors driving the fundraising success of token offerings have changed considerably over the past 4 years. Possible factors include target market capitalization for the token, genuine signals of the venture's public credibility, price and momentum of ether, domicile of the venture and distribution of the token. There is a large previous literature on this topic, rooted in the entrepreneurial finance and crowdfunding literature, with numerous hypotheses based on signalling theory in its broadest sense. But due to substantial differences in samples, which end before 2020, the results are not only mixed but out of date. We have built the largest and most complete dataset on token offerings, spanning 2017 and 2022. The determinants of the amount raised were robust to different subsamples until the market virtually disappeared during the Covid pandemic. But it resumed in early 2021 and within 12 months had reached an all-time high in terms of number if not market capitalization of new offerings. During this period the market changed completely, with success now depending mostly on the type of token offering and the choice of launchpad platform.