While the importance of a supportive context for entrepreneurship is widely acknowledged, its antecedents are rarely investigated. We apply the concept of organizational climate to higher education institutions and examine the drivers of students’ perceptions of the entrepreneurial climate in their university. Combining data from two unique datasets and using multilevel techniques, we analyze the relationship between university characteristics and such climate perceptions of 8009 students at public universities in Germany. We find university entrepreneurship measures to have a positive effect on students’ climate perceptions, which also depend on students’ background and gender. In addition, we find evidence for different peer effects, depending on students’ affinity for entrepreneurship. For the general student population, including entrepreneurship content in their normal studies seems to be required to initiate a social process of sensemaking. However, students’ perception of the entrepreneurial climate only depend to a certain degree on intentional entrepreneurship measures. In our study, general university characteristics have the strongest influence on climate perceptions. Overall, our study adds to our understanding of which parameters are important for establishing a more favorable and inspiring climate for becoming an entrepreneur at higher education institutions.
In this paper, we provide an introduction to the Special Issue entitled ‘Divide and Rule? The Emergence and Implications of Increasingly Disaggregated and Dispersed Headquarters Activities in Contemporary Firms’. The purpose is two-fold. First, we propose a conceptualization of headquarters activities as a dynamic system in which activities can be distributed organizationally and spatially. We explicitly break with the dominant view of the prior research on ‘the headquarters’ as a single, identifiable unit in one specific location. Second, building on the manuscripts accepted for publication in this Special Issue, we outline research implications and put forward an agenda for research on the emergence and continuous management of disaggregated and dispersed headquarters systems.
Firms have different ways of addressing issues emerging from outside their regular calendar-driven strategy processes. These practices tend to be unstructured, organization specific, and highly dependent on the characteristics of the strategic issues themselves. Building on three dimensions of cognitive load—intrinsic, germane, and extraneous cognitive load—we extend existing research on strategic issue management by showing how different team-level choices in strategic issue processing and organizational congestion interact in their effects on a firm's strategic issue management performance. Based on an in-depth analysis of all 92 strategic issue decisions in a large multinational firm during a three-year period, we find that organizational disturbances influence strategic issue initiation by top management, which in turn influences the quality of strategic issue management practices and subsequent performance outcomes. We conclude by providing recommendations for managers on how they can decrease the sensitivity of their companies' strategic issue systems to external disturbances.
We study the changing explanations of success and failure over the course of a firm’s history, building on a discursive approach that highlights the role of narrative attributions in making sense of corporate performance. Specifically, we analyze how the Nokia Corporation was framed first as a success and later as a failure and how these dimensions of performance were explained in various actors’ narrative accounts. In both the success and failure accounts, our analysis revealed a striking black-and-white picture that resulted in the institutionalization of Nokia’s metanarratives of success and failure. Our findings also reveal a number of discursive attributional tendencies, and thus, warn of the cognitive and politically motivated biases that are likely to characterize management literature.
We provide a comparative analysis of acquirer returns in acquisitions of public firms, private firms, and divested assets. On the basis of a sample of 5,079 acquisitions by U.S. software industry companies during 1988–2008, we find that acquisitions of divested assets outperform acquisitions of privately held firms, which in turn outperform acquisitions of publicly held firms. While the higher returns for acquisitions of divested assets relative to stand-alone acquisition targets can be explained by market efficiency arguments, seller distress and improved asset fit further enhance the positive returns of acquirers of divested assets consistent with the relative bargaining power explanation. Finally, we find that the effects of these buyer bargaining advantages are mutually strengthening and that they also hold for longer-term acquirer Performance.
While there is an extensive body of work on how organizational routines emerge and evolve over time, there is a scarcity of research on what happens when routines are disrupted or disbanded through the elimination of key individuals involved in them. This study is the first to theorize and empirically examine the relationship between the magnitude of workforce downsizing and firm performance applying an organizational routine perspective. Consistent with prior research on organizational routines, we posit that small-scale downsizing leads to efficiency improvements without disrupting the existing routines. While larger routine disruptions occur in both medium- and large-scale downsizing, we further argue and find that large-scale downsizing tends to be more beneficial than medium-scale downsizing. Building on prior research on routines, we reason that in medium-scale downsizing employees try to salvage the impaired, partially functioning routines, while large-scale downsizing requires a more fundamental rethinking and re-creation of routines leading to more positive outcomes. Our study contributes to downsizing research through the application of the organizational routine perspective to explain the financial outcomes of downsizing. In doing so, we depart from the widely held assumption in the downsizing literature that the relationship between the magnitude of downsizing and firm performance is linear. Our study also extends prior research on organizational routines by highlighting the usefulness of conceiving routines as mindful accomplishments where the pressure to engage in path-breaking cognitive effort may lead to better results than path-dependent repairing of routines.
This article contributes to an improved understanding of the effects of subnational regional corruption on the external growth strategies of emerging economy firms. We examine the acquisition activity of firms in their home regions, in other parts of the country, and internationally. We consider four mechanisms through which a corrupt regional home context can affect firms’ acquisition behaviors: (a) corrosive deal deterrence, (b) deal facilitation, (c) corruption escape into less corrupt contexts, and (d) enhanced corruption ability to acquire in similarly corrupt environments. Based on an analysis of the acquisition activity of 2,981 Russian firms established in 40 regions in Russia from 2001 to 2008, we find evidence for the existence of both deal facilitating and escaping effects of home region corruption.
The attention-based view (ABV) has highlighted the role of organizational attention in strategic decision making and adaptation. The tendency to view communication channels as “pipes and prisms” for information processing has, however, limited its ability to address strategic change. We propose a broader role for communication as a process by which actors can attend to and engage with organizational and environmental issues and initiatives and argue that such a view can significantly advance understanding of strategic change. On this basis, we offer suggestions for future research on communication practices, vocabularies, rhetorical tactics, and talk and text in shaping organizational attention in strategic change. We also maintain that this enhanced view of the ABV can help advance research on dynamic capabilities, strategy processes, strategy-as-practice, and behavioral strategy.
Building on our review of the strategy process and practice research, we identify three ways to see the relationships between the two research traditions: complementary, critical, and combinatory views. We adopt in this special issue the combinatory view, in which activities and processes are seen as closely intertwined aspects of the same phenomena. It is this view that we argue offers both strategy practice and strategy process scholars some of the greatest opportunities for joint research going forward. We develop a combinatory framework for understanding strategy processes and practices (SAPP) and based on that call for more research on (a) temporality, (b) actors and agency, (c) cognition and emotionality, (d) materiality and tools, (e) structures and systems, and (f) language and meaning.
