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The purpose of this paper is to untangle the impacts of a firm’s corporate reputation and its alliance partners’ social capital on its financial performance, drawing on the relational and the network points of view.

This paper explored the moderating effect of corporate reputation on the relationship between partners’ social capital (e.g. resource heterogeneity, structural relations and partners’ social ties) and a focal firm’s performance. An OLS three-step regression model (controls, main effects and interaction effects) was used to test the proposed hypotheses based on 265 US joint ventures.

The influence of partners’ social capital on a focal firm’s performance is negatively moderated by the focal firm’s reputation at the firm and network levels; larger and more prestigious firms listed in Fortune database tend to choose partners with a higher level of resource heterogeneity, whereas smaller firms tend to choose partners in similar industries to increase economies of scale. The social capital factors of the partners will have different effects on the focal firm performance.

The value of this paper is in providing insight into the importance and nuances of corporate reputation in offsetting the advantages of inter-firm alliances and their impact on firm performance. In particular, the performance benefits of inter-firm alliance partners’ social ties and heterogeneous resources are negatively affected by the corporate reputation of a firm.

While a radical innovation can be embedded in new products or new processes, most studies to date have concentrated on barriers to radical product innovations, with little insights available about the challenges for implementation of radical process innovations.

We theorize a set of barriers to radical process innovation based on a critical case study of an oil company. Our study employs data from 14 semi-structured interviews, one complete participant-observer in the process and access to all corporate documentation. The organization being studied was eventually unable to bring the new process technology to commercialization despite the technology having both technical feasibility and substantive cost savings potential.

We identify five groups of challenges that the company faced: (1) challenges in resource mobilization, (2) challenges in piloting strategy, (3) innovation leadership tensions, (4) tensions in managing shareholders' expectations and (5) product-process innovation tension (i.e. a unique situation when a company implementing a radical process innovation and simultaneously pursues the path to commercialize it as a product innovation).

Sustainable development is one of the major challenges in our era. Process innovations are crucial for achieving sustainability without changing the final product. By providing a list of challenges that executives face in the process of commercializing a radical process innovation, we can help them to achieve sustainability more effectively.

The paper responds to the call to increase our understanding of radical process innovations by utilizing a unique ethnographic research methodology of active participant-observation complemented by independent third-party face-to-face interviews.

The purposes of this paper are: to examine the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies related to environment protection by Chinese state oil companies; and to analyze the effects of global competitions and cooperation on the CSR adoption processes.

Based on a content analysis of 58 corporate reports and three interviews with senior managers from Chinese-Western joint ventures, the authors analyzed the environmentally-related CSR adoption strategies and the effects of global competition and cooperation in Chinese state oil companies.

The findings suggest that more cooperative CSR strategies related to environment protection have been adopted by Chinese state oil companies in the past decade. The main reasons are: the force of international and local environmental regulations; the pressures from partners of western oil companies and the desire to increase the global competitive advantage of the Chinese state oil companies.

Given that this study is based only on the analysis of corporate reports and three interviews, the authors' conclusions should be considered preliminary and inconclusive. Future studies should be done to collect more primary data by interviewing and surveying by questionnaire a significant number of managers from these companies to validate these conclusions.

This paper highlights the adoption of CSR strategies by three Chinese state oil companies and the effects of global operations which have been little studied academically so far.

The purpose of this paper is to extend our understanding of corporate governance, social issues and capital markets by distinguishing between the socially responsible investing phenomenon and mainstream investing with respect to social issues. It attempts to clarify the domain by casting it in the theoretical frame of prospect theory and mental modeling. With a qualitative study done among large institutional investors in the Canadian securities industry, the article derives a proposed mental model of these institutional investors' cognitive model of social issues as they impact investments.

The institutional investors in this study know exactly where value is derived from social investments suggesting that there may be more alignment between directors, investors and societal expectations than has been previously suggested.

The limited number of organizations in the study reduces the generalizability of the findings.

Managers and directors must have an understanding of how shareholder value and responsibilities intersect. In our research, we have found that these executives positioned their firms as leaders on the social responsibility front. Interestingly, their major shareholders also understood how responsibility and shareholder value intersected and as a result, financial performance was not sacrificed.

The findings from this research shed light on previous scholars' questions regarding the alignment of interests between managers, directors and social expectations. The firms analyzed make strategic investments that are considered to meet social expectations but that are also perceived to add value to the organization making the firm more attractive to institutional investors.