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This article suggests that both producers and analysts are strategic about categorization. Producers use categorization to maintain a balance of differentiation and legitimacy, whereas analysts seek to influence categorization and clarify boundaries. Ideas are explored for software producers and Gartner, the preeminent high-technology analyst. Findings show evidence of strategic categorization. Producers move to proximate market categories in response to competition. Gartner reports on large categories and those that receive investment and stops reporting on categories that have fuzzy boundaries. Compared to analysts, producers may be more influential in category creation than previous research has acknowledged.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of corporate governance (focused on some key mechanisms as board size, board independence, managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and chief executive officer duality) on financial analysts’ behavior in US. Results from panel data analysis for 294 US listed firms observed from 2007 to 2014 show that several attributes of the board of directors and audit committee have no effects on the number of analysts who are following the firm and the properties of analysts’ earnings forecasts. Findings also suggest that firms with independent and large boards and blockholders ownership benefit of more analyst following. In addition, it is proven that analysts’ earnings forecasts are optimistic and more accurate for companies where blockholder ownership, either by managers or external entities have larger quoted spreads but of lower quality for the ones which have greater independent board members and institutional investor’s holding.

This chapter reviews traditional intelligence work, primarily how intelligence was perceived and conducted in the industrial economy. The review includes economic sectors with dedicated intelligence functions such as military, law enforcement, and national security. The review also includes secondary intelligence work in all other economic sectors. Looking across all these examples, the authors present a traditional life cycle model of intelligence work and highlight this traditional view of intelligence’s tactical and reactive approach. The chapter details the historical evolution and common intelligence elements in military, business, law enforcement, judicial forensics, national security, market, financial, medical, digital, and computer forensics.

Voluntary non-financial reporting aims at fairly reporting a firm’s non-financial performance. In particular, integrated reporting (IR) displays in a single report the contribution of different forms of capital to the firm’s value creation. Drawing on both legitimacy and voluntary disclosure theory, the main purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance affects the content and semantic properties of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) found in IRs.

To test theoretical hypotheses, content and tone analysis is used to assess the disclosure strategy associated with ICD, whereas a regression analysis tests the variation in semantic properties of ICD according to firms’ ESG performance. A total of 79 reports by European listed firms from 2011 to 2016 were downloaded via the Integrated Reporting Emerging Practice Examples Database and analyzed.

Results show that ESG performance contributing more to optimistic ICD tone is governance, although in mixed ways. Integrating vision and strategy positively contributes to ICD tone, whereas information on poor treatment of shareholders’ rights tends to be manipulated and associated with an optimistic tone of the ICD. Moreover, eco-efficient product innovation and healthy and safe job conditions play a positive role in enhancing optimistic ICD tone.

This chapter contributes to the current literature on voluntary disclosure by introducing new evidence on the disclosure strategy in IR. By analyzing the effect of the single dimensions of ESG performance on ICD tone, this study extends respectively ESG literature.

Using a managerial cognition lens, we investigate the organizational design issues facing multinational corporation (MNC) managers. We apply concepts hitherto untested in the international management (IM) literature to a longitudinal study of reconfiguration efforts within a large, Asian MNC. We focus on how organizational design outcomes can be affected through mental interventions that provoke changes in senior executives’ mental representations of what the MNC is and can be to achieve a strategic redirection and redesign. We draw on extensive interview and other qualitative data. Our study contributes to the literatures on MNC design and to our understanding of the important, but largely neglected, micro-foundational role of cognition in IM. This field research on executive judgment and decision-making in real time offers unique insights into the dynamics of MNC design.

Extant research presents firms’ purpose as a consensual and positive attribute. This paper introduces an alternative perspective, which sees firms’ purposefulness as defined in relation to specific audiences. A firm’s purposefulness to a focal audience can be either positive or negative. Audiences find firms with which they share a common prioritization of issues more purposeful in absolute terms. Audiences find firms with which they share a common understanding of issues positively purposeful. Conversely, audiences find firms with an opposite understanding of issues negatively purposeful. Audiences harness specific resources to support firms they find positively purposeful and to oppose firms they find negatively purposeful. This paper introduces topic modeling and word embeddings as two techniques to operationalize this audience-based approach to purposefulness.

Although two decades have passed since the publication of Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) seminal article on organizational memory, there has been only limited theoretical elaboration and application of this critical aspect of cognition in the strategic management literature. We remedy this gap by advancing the construct of competitive memory, which we define as a firm’s dynamic capability consisting of stored information from its past competitive interaction with a given rival that can be brought to bear on present or future competitive actions. We theorize that competitive memory is composed of both procedural and declarative elements and can be accessed automatically and deliberatively. Additionally, we suggest that competitive memory is relational: As rivals within a competitive set interact in the market, competitive memory drives not only their strategic actions, but also their expectations about their competitors. Last, competitive memory is also dynamic, which can be constructed and reconstructed over time by an organization’s enactment of its internal and external environments and by purposive memory trials with its competitive set.

This chapter explains the research design. An interpretive methodology was considered most suitable for the study. Informed by an institutional framework, the interpretive methodology was selected for this monograph for its strengths of focusing on the research context, interactive processes, and meanings that are not measurable by quantitative approach. The interpretive methodology is also consistent with the ontological and epistemological positions of the researchers. Data were collected from interviewing four groups of key persons and a document survey. The data triangulation and multiple perspectives helped increase the reliability and validity of the study. Also, conducting data collection in a natural setting produced a rich data source. This enabled the provision of an enhanced understanding of the operation and effectiveness of corporate governance and financial reporting practice in a real setting. In addition, the systematic set of data analysis procedures helped improve research rigor and develop conceptual and theoretical understanding of issues of interest.