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Socially responsible investing (SRI) funds depart from mainstream finance by incorporating environmental, social, and governance considerations, but their success varies across regions. By using a historical comparative case design, we identify an empirically puzzling phenomenon in China: despite an initially favorable resource environment and the presence of socially skilled institutional entrepreneurs, SRI wanes over time in Hong Kong but survives in Mainland China where initial resource endowments and actors’ social skills were inferior. By comparing four periods of SRI development, we reveal how state sustainable development policies, a change in the institutional context, led unintentionally to a shared orientation and a public pool of resources, which sustained the SRI niche. Our paper contributes to research on market emergence, institutional change, and cultural entrepreneurship.

In the late 1970s, the much beloved tradition of Asilomar began. But then, of course, it was not even located at Asilomar. Rather it was a much smaller event that was held at Pajaro Dunes. Nonetheless, it featured what ultimately became the traditional blend of informal sessions that mixed students and faculty from around the University. The most memorable conference of that time featured working papers by Jeff Pfeffer and Jerry Salancik, John Meyer and Brian Rowan, and Mike Hannan and John Freeman. Each of these pairs of authors presented fledgling work that would go on to become keystone statements for three highly influential theories: resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), “new” institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977).

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we show how the emergence of an economic democracy frame in post-war Sweden generated different efforts to define that frame with concrete ideas and practices linked to different logics – socialism and neoliberalism. We show how socialists tried to define economic democracy as requiring a radical transformation in the nature of ownership and control embedded in the innovative financial practice of wage earner’s funds. In contradistinction, conservatives drew on neoliberal ideas and extant mutual fund practices to construct alternative meanings and practices related to economic democracy that enrolled citizens in Capitalism without challenging extant Capitalist ownership structures. While mutual funds and wage earner’s funds initially existed in a state of parabiosis – existing side by side without much interrelationship – struggles over the meaning of economic democracy led these practices to become competing solutions in a framing contest. Implications for the study of institutional logics, frames and the social organization of society are discussed.

We extend the literature on network perception by introducing a novel view of how this perception is structured. We propose the concept of Cognitive Aggregated Social Structures (CASS) as a framework to capture perceptions of opaque networks – that is, networks where relations are difficult to observe due to their features, their members, and the characteristics of the environment in which they operate. We argue that actors simplify their perception of opaque network structures via “chunking,” that is, by cognitively representing network ties as between categories of actors rather than between specific network members. We test the validity of the CASS construct and its predictive power by showing how these representations affect actors’ perceptions of relevant network outcomes. Using data from a major inter-organizational technology consortium, we show that perceived density among “chunks” in the knowledge transfer network is positively related to perceived consortium performance. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the strategic management literature, highlighting potential contributions to strategic formulation and implementation, category emergence, industry evolution, and cognitive barriers to entry.

Theories of platform strategy and adoption have been largely derived from studies of their application in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. These platforms vary in openness, with the model of open source software providing the best-known exemplar for open platforms.

This exploratory field study examines the degree to which nine attributes of ICT platforms are applicable to open platforms in biotechnology. Using a combination of interview and secondary data, it identifies three patterns of such biotechnology platforms – IP commons, hackerspaces, and crowdsourced patient registries – and the degree to which these nine attributes apply. It shows the impact of ICT platforms and open source software on open source approaches to biotechnology, and how the latter are affected by the technical, legal, and institutional differences between information technology and biotechnology.

Instead of open source software platforms organized around modular interfaces, complements, ecosystems, and two-sided markets, this study instead suggests a model of open source knowledge platforms which benefits from economies of scale but not indirect network effects. From this, it discusses the generalizability of the ICT-derived models of open source platforms and offers suggestions for future research.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate performance and Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAICTM) on the one hand, and the relationship between the variations in market value and the variations in VAIC on the other hand.

Starting from the VAIC model, 23 Italian listed companies were examined with the aim of investigating the relationship between VAIC and the performance of the firms in the sample. The analysis was divided into two stages. In the first stage, eight models of linear regression were estimated to verify the presence of a positive and statistically significant relationship between M/BV and VAIC and between accounting performance indicators (ROE, ROI, ROS) and the VAIC. In the second stage, six other models were tested, considering as an independent variable the variations in VAIC and the variations in profitability indicators.

The outcomes of the application stress the importance of VAIC in the explanation of the variations in MV and its role as “additional coefficient” in the analysis of equity performance.

This methodology highlights some very interesting aspects. In particular, whereas the relationship between M/BV and VAIC and between profitability indicators (ROI, ROE, ROS) and VAIC is statistically insignificant, the subsequent analysis highlights the importance of VAIC as a variable capable of increasing the explanatory power of the regression in a cross-sectional perspective.