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As a business executive and philanthropist, Mary Kay Ash is legendary as a glass-ceiling breaker. With the belief that Mary Kay Ash is both modern and relevant, while simultaneously legendary, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Mary Kay Ash as an influential entrepreneur. This research responds to the call by Cogliser and Brigham (2004) for an increased understanding of how entrepreneurial leaders influence, challenge, inspire and develop followers.

Following on research by Hoppe (2013), this objective was accomplished via a pentadic analysis of Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric aimed to influence the mental mindset of readers (followers) over the course of generations. Burke’s pentad was the sense-making tool used for examining Ash’s rhetoric of influence as an entrepreneurial leader. The data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.

Based on the analysis of her written work, Mary Kay Ash resided at the intersection of leadership and entrepreneurship and, in so doing, was an influencer. Her primary rhetorical approach to influencing was idealism. Interwoven in her writings, she also exhibited both pragmatism and realism. She knew that she had to start the business to have the future she desired and that she needed to train her team appropriately for success to be forthcoming. The motivation in Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric was that of influencing people so they would be the best that they could be.

Qualitative research brings with it an array of inevitable research problems. Pentadic analysis cannot be judged by the basic objective standards of reliability and validity because objective reality does not exist in personal interpretation. That is, one person as a critic cannot be impartial because the interpretation is only one personal way of viewing the data and another critic might view the same pentads and come up with different ratios. With this subjectivity in mind, however, the data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via LIWC and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.

The findings from this research denote clearly that Mary Kay Ash was a forerunner of the modern day influencer. As a primogenitor of the influencer marketing phenomenon, Mary Kay Ash’s entrepreneurial legacy is expected to continue through generations of followers. This finding speaks to the importance of today’s entrepreneurs using the spoken and written word to influence others and create a lasting organizational legacy.

Countless scholars have used pentadic analysis, with a variety of artifacts, to examine the motives behind the rhetoric. However, rhetoric as a means of persuasion and influence has received little attention within the context of the written works by management gurus (Jones et al., 2009), and, aside from the exploration by Berglund and Wigren (2012), the narrative of entrepreneurial influence has not benefitted from close examination.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to explore the strategic priorities of unicorn ventures as pursuers of market disruption. This study approaches this task by drawing on the positive deviance concept for studying outliers with the intent of understanding the strategic priorities of these ventures.

This is a comparison study of the priorities of 75 unicorn ventures, 37 early-stage ventures and 45 Fortune 500 organizations. The authors use computer-aided text analysis to conduct within-sample and between-sample means comparison tests of 12,487 newswires from 2022.

Where early-stage ventures emphasize their mission, and Fortune 500 companies emphasize financial results, unicorn ventures, occupy the middle of the spectrum, balancing their priorities between pursuing market disruption and achieving financial results. These high-growth outliers indicate their priorities by using significantly less positive tone, affective and prosocial language, and focusing less on corporate social responsibility initiatives, compared to early-stage ventures (and using more of this language compared to Fortune 500 ventures). An additional finding emphasizes that public Fortune 500 companies focus significantly more on money than their topic of interest.

This work has implications for understanding the strategic priorities of entrepreneurial ventures in different development stages. The results suggest that unicorn ventures actively work to balance their startup mission, which allows them to experience high-growth and achieve market disruption, with the financial demands of venture capital investors. This novel conclusion demonstrates the value of using positively deviant outlier cases, such as unicorn ventures, as a viable sample for studying market disruption.

This study aims to focus on automated text analyses (ATAs) of sustainability and integrated reporting as a recent approach in empirical–quantitative research.

Based on legitimacy theory, the author conducts a structured literature review and includes 38 quantitative peer-reviewed empirical (archival) studies on specific determinants and consequences of sustainability and integrated reporting. The paper makes a clear distinction between analyses of reports due to readability, tone, similarity and specific topics. In line with prior studies, it is assumed that more readable reports with less tone and similarity relate to increased reporting quality.

In line with legitimacy theory, there are empirical indications that specific corporate governance variables, other firm characteristics and regulatory issues have a main impact on the quality of sustainability and integrated reporting. Furthermore, increased reporting quality leads to positive market reactions in line with the business case argument.

The author deduces useful recommendations for future research to motivate researchers to include ATA of sustainability and integrated reports. Among others, future research should recognize sustainable and behavioral corporate governance determinants and analyze other stakeholders’ reactions.

As both stakeholders’ demands on sustainability and integrated reporting have increased since the financial crisis of 2008–2009, firms should increase the quality of reporting processes.

This analysis makes major contributions to prior research by including both sustainability and integrated reporting, based on ATA. ATAs play a prominent role in recent empirical research to evaluate possible drivers and consequences of sustainability and integrated reports. ATA may contribute to increased validity of empirical–quantitative research in comparison to classical manual content analyses, especially due to future CSR washing analyses.

Managerial “awareness” of supply chain management (SCM) principles is a key antecedent of SCM adoption. However, supply chain awareness (SCA) provides fertile ground for further development. The authors combine extant research with the attention-based view of the firm to further develop SCA and theorize about its effect in an understudied context.

The authors combine SCA with supply chain orientation, of which awareness is central. The authors combine qualitative and archival data for a 10-year period to test SCA in nonprofits. SCA was measured unobtrusively to avoid respondent bias; then, the authors explore how SCA relates to revenue generation from services provided.

SCA correlates positively with revenue generation. Drawing on a contingency perspective, the authors test two moderators relevant to nonprofits. The positive effect of SCA on revenue is stronger for nonprofits collocated in cities with corporate headquarters but weaker for those with larger boards.

The study further advances the notion of awareness for studying SCM phenomena and provides evidence of its relevance in the unexamined context of human services nonprofit organizations (NPOs). This work has implications for how attention to SCM principles shapes organizational outcomes, the factors that moderate these relationships and the importance of unobtrusively measuring awareness in SCM research. The authors used WayBack Machine to harvest websites. However, the quality and depth of text obtained prior to 2008 were lower than those of later years. Additionally, archival data for NPOs are limited.

Findings inform about the fit between nonprofit resources, type of board and fit with how to fund operations. This research provides an alternative way for policy makers to assess NPO capacity by focusing on the fundamental SCM concepts.

The authors contribute to the dialogue about NPOs developing financial independence through revenue generation from services sold to end customers.

NPOs are seldom studied in SCM. This is an attempt to study NPOs by combining qualitative and quantitative data.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the technology-focused and technology-supported dilemmas that firms have encountered and their digital orientation from a nuanced perspective to answer the following research questions: What digital orientations do companies take in launching digital initiatives? How does the choice between a proactive digital orientation (Pro-DO) and a reactive digital orientation (Rea-DO) influence firm value?

The authors adopted machine learning and a quantitative research approach using observations from China’s listed companies from 2010 to 2020 and applied statistical techniques and regression analysis to examine the effect of digital orientation alternatives on firm value.

The findings of this study indicate that firms with a Pro-DO exhibit a positive effect on firm value. In contrast, firms with a Rea-DO do not demonstrate the same positive relationship with firm value. Additionally, this study reveals that firms with better corporate governance practices and lower financing constraints are more responsive to the positive effects of Pro-DO on firm value.

We elucidate two primary perspectives of digital orientation: Pro-DO and Rea-DO. Additionally, we empirically showcase their nuanced influences on firm value, thereby enriching knowledge in the fields of strategic orientation and digital transformation. Moreover, our findings underscore the importance of corporate governance and financing constraints as moderators.

The increasing awareness and adoption of technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), reshapes industries and daily life, fostering a proactive approach to risk management and leveraging advanced analytics, which may affect the stock price crash risk (SPCR). The main objective of the current study is to explore how AI adoption influences SPCR.

This study employs an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) fixed-effect regression model to explore the impact of AI on SPCR in Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020. Further, number of robustness analysis (2SLS, PSM and Sys-GMM) and channel analysis are used to validate the findings.

The primary findings emphasize that AI adoption significantly reduces SPCR likelihood. Further, channel analysis indicates that AI adoption enhances internal control quality, contributing to a reduction in firm SPCR. Additionally, the observed relationship is notably more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Similarly, this distinction is heightened in nonforeign enterprises (non-FEs) as opposed to foreign enterprises (FEs). The study finding also supports the notion that financial analysts enhance transparency, reducing the SPCR. Moreover, the study results consistently align across different statistical methodologies, including 2SLS, PSM and Sys-GMM, employed to effectively address endogeneity concerns.

Our study stands out for its distinctive focus on the financial implications of AI adoption, particularly how it influences firm-level SPCR, an area that has been overlooked in previous research. Through the lens of information asymmetry theory, agency theory, and the economic implications of integrating AI into financial markets, our study makes a substantial contribution in mitigating SPCR.

This study underscores the pivotal role of AI adoption in influencing stock markets for enterprises in China. Embracing digital strategies, fostering transparency and prioritizing talent development are key for reaping substantial benefits. The study recommends regulatory bodies and service providers to promote AI adoption in strengthening financial supervision and ensure market stability, emphasizing the importance of investing in technologies and advancing talent development.

The highly uncertain and turbulent environments nowadays intensify the paradoxical effects of supply base concentration (SBC) on improving cost efficiency while increasing idiosyncratic risk (IR). Digitalization is regarded as a remedy for this paradox, yet digitization's potentially curative effect has not been empirically tested. Leveraging the lenses of paradox theory and information processing theory (IPT), this study explores how two distinct dimensions of digitalization, i.e. digitalization intensity (DI) and digitalization breadth (DB), reconcile the paradoxical effects of SBC.

Using a panel dataset of 1,238 Chinese manufacturing firms in the period of 2012–2020, this study utilizes fixed-effects regression models to test the proposed hypotheses.

The authors discover that SBC enhances a firm's cost efficiency but induces greater IR. More importantly, there is evidence that DI restrains the amplifying effect of SBC on IR. However, DB weakens the enhancing effect of SBC on cost efficiency and aggravates the SBC's exacerbating effect on IR.

This study advances the understanding of the paradoxical effects of SBC on cost efficiency and IR from a paradox theory perspective. More importantly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the authors' study is the first to untangle the differential roles of DI and DB in reconciling the paradox of SBC. This study also provides practitioners with nuanced insights into how the practitioners should use appropriate tactics to deploy digital technologies effectively.

This paper aims to examine how and why consumers respond to chief executive officer (CEO) activism on social media. The authors developed a conceptual model that proposes impression management as a mechanism for consumer response to CEO activism.

In Study 1a, the authors examined 83,259 tweets from 90 CEOs and compared consumer responses between controversial and noncontroversial tweets. In Study 1b, the authors replicated the analysis, using a machine-learning topic modeling approach. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors used experimental designs to test the theoretical mechanism.

On average, consumers tend to respond more to CEO posts dealing with noncontroversial issues. Consumers’ relative reluctance to like and share controversial posts is motivated by fear of rejection. However, CEO fame reverses this effect. Consumers are more likely to engage in controversial activist threads by popular CEOs. This effect holds for consumers high (vs low) in public self-consciousness. CEO fame serves as a “shield” behind which consumers protect their online image.

The study focused on Twitter (aka “X”) in the USA. Future research may replicate the study in other social media platforms and countries. The authors introduce “shielding” – liking and sharing content authored by a recognizable source – as a tactic for impression management on social media.

Famous CEOs should speak up about controversial issues on social media because their voice helps consumers engage more in such conversations.

This paper offers a theoretical framework to understand consumer reactions to CEO activism.

The UK government has taken the lead in accelerating the capacity of higher education to engage with sustainability accounting and adopting a novel systematic approach toward a collective implementation of and contribution to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN SDG 16 “Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions” promotes the (re)building of effective and accountable institutions. In line with the institutional logics metatheory, we provide empirical evidence on how the alignment between social mechanisms alongside the reputation of higher education institutions (HEIs) and SDGs on transparent and responsible service (SDG 16) affect the students' overall experience. Using a sample of 142 UK HEIs, interpretative content analysis and ordinary least squares, the results show that integrating HEIs' responsible-oriented research agenda proactively with high sustainability reputation adds significantly to greater student satisfaction.

We investigate the relationship between Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) and the internationalization pathways of Brazilian franchises. Our aim is to unravel the patterns of firm-level entrepreneurial characteristics vis-à-vis their corresponding processes of internationalization.

We extracted and curated data from the directories of the Brazilian Franchising Association (ABF). Additionally, we scrutinized the International Intensity, International Complexity and EO degree of 27 Brazilian franchises engaged in international activities. Associations between these dimensions were assessed through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

Our findings suggest that franchisees can enhance their international activities by adopting various configurations of EO attributes. This discovery illuminates the intricacies of EO and its association with firms’ operations and performance. Accordingly, we empirically demonstrate that EO is not a monolithic element. Instead, it should be perceived as a multifaceted and dynamic construct.

This study aimed to examine the internationalization process of franchises through the EO lens, a perspective that has not been explored in the existing literature. This unique approach offers novel insights about the internationalization processes of this particular business model. Furthermore, our research delves into the intricate relationship between firm-level EO and the trajectories of firm-level internationalization.