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This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

More pluralistic approaches have recently emerged in entrepreneurship, yet the discipline remains disinterested in the ideological influences underpinning its research and teaching practices. Following Louis Althusser’s work on interpellation, the process by which ideology enrols and consummates its subjects, the chapter examines the interpellation of entrepreneurship-as-practice researchers and draws attention to the powerful nature of ideology. Critical reflexivity is put forward as an exercise to explore the researchers’ beliefs and identity and to tease out their relationship with the discipline. Finally, using three autoethnographic accounts, the chapter argues that the boundaries of the entrepreneurship discipline can only be shifted if and when researchers learn to recognise themselves as ‘the person in the mirror’. The reflexive spotlight also allows researchers to spot ideological breaks and engage in acts of ‘ideological resistance’.

The authors examine the role of CEO political ideology in the credit rating process.

This study adopts a quantitative method with panel data regressions using a sample of 5,211 observations from S&P 500 firms from 2001 to 2012.

The authors find that firms run by Republican-leaning CEOs, who tend to have conservative political ideologies, enjoy more favorable credit ratings than firms run by Democratic-leaning CEOs. In addition, the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with high operating uncertainty, low capital intensity, high growth potential, weak corporate governance and low financial reporting quality. Finally, the authors find that CEO political ideology affects a firm's cost of debt incremental to credit ratings, consistent with debt investors incorporating CEO political ideology in their pricing decisions.

Leveraging CEO political ideology, the authors document that credit rating agencies incorporate managerial conservatism in their credit rating decisions. This finding suggests that CEO political ideology serves as a meaningful signal for managerial conservatism.

The study suggests that credit rating agencies incorporate CEO political ideology in their credit rating process. Other capital market participants such as auditors and retail investors can also use CEO political ideology as a proxy for managerial conservatism when evaluating firms.

The paper carries practical implications for practitioners, firm executives and regulators. The results on the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings suggest that other financial institutions could also incorporate CEO political ideology in their evaluation in their evaluation of firms. For example, when evaluating audit risk and determining audit pricing, auditors may add CEO political ideology as a risk factor. For firms, especially those that have Democratic-leaning CEOs, the authors suggest that they could reduce the unfavorable effect of CEO political ideology on credit ratings by improving their corporate governance and financial reporting quality, as demonstrated in the cross-sectional analyses. Finally, this study shows that CEO political ideology, as measured by CEOs' political contributions, is closely related to a firm's credit ratings. This finding may inform regulators that greater transparency for CEOs' political contributions is needed as information on contributions could help capital market participants perform risk analyses for firms.

Credit rating agencies release their research methodologies for determining corporate credit ratings and identify managerial conservatism as an important factor that affects their risk assessments. The extant literature, however, has not empirically investigated the relation between credit ratings and managerial conservatism, which, according to behavioral consistency theory, can be proxied by CEO political ideology. This study provides novel empirical evidence that identifies CEO political ideology as an important input factor in the credit rating process.

Guided by the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS), this article identifies significant predictors that impact individuals seeking COVID-19 information. People with different political ideologies read contradictory information about the COVID-19 pandemic. However, how political ideology may affect COVID-19 information seeking remains unclear. This study explores the major information channels for individuals with different political ideologies to seek COVID-19 information. It further examines how political ideologies influence CMIS's effectiveness in predicting online health information-seeking.

This study collected 394 completed survey responses from adults living in the United States after the 2020 lockdown. ANOVA analyses revealed the differences in salience, beliefs, information carrier characteristics, utilities and information-seeking actions between Liberals and Conservatives. Regression analyses discovered variables that predict Liberals' and Conservatives' online health information seeking.

Results suggest that the internet is the top channel for COVID-19 information seeking. Compared to Conservatives, Liberals report more COVID-19 information-seeking actions. Liberals also express stronger salience, perceive higher trustworthiness of online COVID-19 information, are more likely to think of seeking online COVID-19 information as useful and helpful and report more substantial efficacy to mitigate the risk. Most CMIS variables predict Liberals' information seeking; however, only salience significantly predicts Conservatives' information seeking.

This article indicates that CMIS should include political ideology to refine its prediction of information seeking. These findings offer practical implications for designing health messages, enhancing information distribution and reducing the public's uncertainty.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2022-0436.

This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer communities in conjunction with ideological capacities.

The community of “presenteers” is conceptualized as a self-organized tribe with heterogeneous components that generate capacities to act. Netnographic observation was conducted on 18 presenteer accounts and lasted around six months. Real-time data were collected by taking screenshots of the posts and stories that these users created and publicly shared. Data were analysed by adopting assemblage theory, combining inductive and deductive approaches. Firstly, a qualitative visual-textual content analysis of the tribe’s defining components was conducted. Then, the process continued with the thematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the tribe’s enactments.

Findings shed light on the ways in which consumer communities interpret the entanglement of religious, political, and cultural ideologies in shaping their experiences. In the case of the presenteers tribe, findings reflect a novel ideological interplay between neo-Ottomanism, post-feminism and consumerism.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The recent pandemic disrupted the way in which businesses transact with each other. In response to maintaining cleanliness in business-to-business (B2B) settings, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled robots have been adopted as substitutes for cleaning personnel, yet their implications remain largely underexamined. This study aims to examine B2B buyer responses to cleaning information notices (human vs AI-enabled agent) placed at either the entry to the premises or the sales counter, thereby adding to the nascent literature in this line of inquiry.

Three field experiments were conducted across diverse B2B businesses (wholesalers in Studies 1–2 and a commercial business in Study 3). To achieve greater empirical rigor and generalizability, this research used diverse stimuli across different B2B settings. In addition, the results ruled out alternate explanations and shed light upon political ideology as a boundary condition. Finally, a single-paper meta-analysis confirmed H1, consolidating the established effect.

Featuring over 1,000 B2B buyers, the results show that politically liberal B2B buyers express greater preference for human over AI-performed cleaning while labor-orientated buyers are indifferent. Importantly, this effect is driven by greater relaxation associated with humans, which in turn, increases their future patronage and referral intent.

The results enrich the collective knowledge of the adoption of AI-enabled robots, reinforcing for marketing practitioners and businesses that the reliance on human-based outcomes remains a preferred touchpoint in B2B settings, particularly for liberals.

Through activism, brands participate in the sociopolitical controversies that shape society today. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to examine the moderating effects of consumer–brand identification (CBI) and political ideology in explaining consumer responses to brand activism. Furthermore, the role of perceived marginalization that can arise in the case of consumer–brand disagreement is explored.

The hypothesized effects were tested in three experiments. Study 1 (n = 262) and Study 2 (n = 322) used a moderation analysis, which was supplemented by a mixed design analysis with repeated measures in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 383), the mediating effect of perceived marginalization by the brand was tested using a moderated mediation model.

The results show that strong CBI as well as a conservative ideology buffer the negative effects of consumer–brand disagreement on brand attitude and word-of-mouth intentions. In the case of agreement with a brand’s stance, no direct or interactive effects of brand activism on consumer responses occur. Perceived marginalization by a brand mediates the effects of brand activism.

This study extends the “love is blind” versus “love becomes hate” debate to the realm of brand activism and finds evidence for the former effect. It also contributes to the research on political consumption by highlighting the role of political ideology as an important boundary condition for brand activism. Perceived marginalization is identified as a relevant risk for activist brands.

Drawing on research in the social psychology and political science literatures, this research aims to examine how political moderates perceive, and are perceived by, their co-workers with differing political ideologies in an organisational context, with a focus on the perceptions of social status.

To test the hypotheses regarding the social status perceptions of and by political moderates in the workplace, the authors conducted an online experiment in which working adults read a hypothetical workplace scenario and then assessed the social status of a co-worker based on the political ideology of that co-worker.

The results largely supported the two hypothesised asymmetries of social perceptions of and by political moderates in an organisational context. Specifically, political moderates were perceived to have higher social status by their moderate and conservative co-workers than by their liberal co-workers. In addition, political moderates perceived moderate co-workers to have higher social status than conservative ones.

This research investigates the influence of political ideology on social status perceptions in organisations by focusing on the previously underexamined political moderates. The findings illustrate the importance of political moderates, who tend to espouse a moderate level of resistance to social change, in the process of developing a functional hierarchy and balancing change and stability in organisations.

This study explores the politics of ideology in the process of sensegiving and sensemaking at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Studies on power and politics are scarce despite key role of power and politics in understanding the factors behind the conflict between the management's policy legitimization (sensegiving) and employees' policy interpretation (sensemaking). By using the three dimensions proposed in the critical sensemaking approach (discourse, rules and contexts), this paper explores the complex mechanism of power and politics in sensemaking and sensegiving.

Using 15 months of participant observation as a salesperson, this paper discusses how the Japan-centric customer service philosophy (dominant discourse), customer service policies and practices (organizational rules) and asymmetric power structure between the Japanese global headquarters and Hong Kong subsidiaries (formative contexts) are presented and perpetuated through the sensegiving–sensemaking process.

Dominant discourse was observed in the management's sensegiving, which placed the Japanese style of customer service over others. This ethnocentric dominant discourse informed the creation of customer service policies, although the realization of the discourse was determined by the employees' conflicting interpretations of the organizational rules. As a formative context, an asymmetric power structure was present that positioned the Hong Kong subsidiary as subservient to the global headquarters in Japan. This shows that the political process of sensegiving and sensemaking deeply implicates the dominant discourse, organizational rules and power structure as central forces that determine the level of perpetuating ideology.

This research illustrates the wider implications of power and politics in sensegiving–sensemaking studies and provides a complex picture of ethnocentric management.

Drawing upon theories of ethical ideologies (idealism and relativism) and work locus of control, this study aims to examine how ethical ideology in job seekers influences their use of deceptive impression management (deceptive IM) behavior during job interviews.

A time-lagged study was conducted with two measurement waves to test our hypotheses. AMOS-SEM, which included bootstrapping (5,000 re-sampling) procedures to analyze the data, was used.

Results indicate that a job seeker's relativistic ethical ideology influences their use of deceptive IM behavior during job interviews and work locus of control – internal [WLOC (internal)] mediates this relationship. Exploring the relationship between ethical ideologies of job seekers and their deceptive IM behavior at job interviews, this study found that relativistic individuals with WLOC (internal) were more inclined to engage in deceptive IM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to explore the role of ethical ideology in influencing deception IM behavior during job interviews. Knowledge of the relationship between job seekers ethical ideologies and deception IM behavior at job interviews would alert HR managers to adopt additional screening processes to detect candidates who indulge in deceptive IM behavior to exaggerate their image to influence the interviewer's perception.