We draw on a detailed grounded theory study of the reactions of Dutch food firms to the recent introduction of genetically modified foods to inductively identify the capabilities that firms develop in response to reputational threats. Central to the view on capabilities we propose are the...

This study shows that different types of associations regarding a company have different effects on customers' product evaluations. Associations with a company's ability influenced quality perceptions of products marketed by the company's subsidiaries, but not intentions to actually buy those...

This study presents a method to establish empirically what drives organization members in their day-to-day behavior. The method starts from the sense employees make of their own actions. The approach consists of two steps: qualitative laddering interviews to determine the most central means and...

To date, the field of non-market strategy has little to offer in the way of an integrated perspective on the simultaneous management of strategic issues and corporate stakeholders. This paper employs social network analysis to make a number of theoretically grounded conjectures about the...

Dysfunctional auditor behaviors (DABs), defined as all acts or omissions by auditors that negatively affect audit quality and reduce the reliability of audit-based opinions, have proven an endemic and persistent feature of the contemporary business environment. Although the dominant response to...

Some centers of gravity are finally emerging in the field of business ethics after a decades-long search for action-guiding theories. Amongst the foremost of these are contractualism and virtue ethics. The former focuses on the morals of economic exchange, the latter on the moral qualities of...

The field of organization studies harbors two types of theories of the firm: why and how theories. The former seek to explain why firms exist despite the availability of institutional alternatives, whereas the latter explore how firms meaningfully connect the actions of many interdependently...

We develop a grounded neo-institutional theory explaining the occurrence of misconduct in professional service firms. The theory harbors two novel insights. First, parallel governance structures, which are presently the norm in many professional fields, aggravate rather than dampen misconduct....

Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) is arguably the most promising theory of business ethics to date, but is often criticized for its inability to produce substantive, action guiding norms. The gist of the problem is that the contractualist argument central to this theory may justify many...

In this study, we use meta-analytical techniques to quantitatively synthesize and evaluate the sizeable body of empirical work that has been conducted under the banner of neo-institutional theory. We find strong support for the influence of mimetic pressures on organizational isomorphism, but...