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We consider how the commercialization of social ventures may result from their founders’ personal experiences of commercial organizing. Building on theories of individual imprinting, we theorize that the commercialization of social ventures is influenced by two types of commercial experience: parental imprinting from the commercial work experience of a founder’s parents, and work imprinting from a founder’s professional experience within for-profit organizations. We find support for our theory based on analysis of a novel dataset of over 2,000 nascent social ventures and their founders. We further find that the marginal effects of additional work imprinting from a founder’s commercial experience decline with the longevity of this experience. We discuss implications of our findings for literatures on social ventures, imprinting, and hybrid organizations.

Seeking an answer to the question “how does organizational identity change?” we analyze the visual identity marker of universities, namely logos, as time-related artifacts embodying visual scripts. Engaging with the Stinchcombe hypothesis, we identify five processes to the creation of visual identities of organizations: In addition to (1) imprinting (enactment of the contemporary script) and (2) imprinting-cum-inertia (persistent enactment of epochal scripts), we also identify (3) renewal (enactment of an up-to-date epochal script), (4) historization (enactment of a recovered older epochal script), and (5) multiplicity (simultaneous enactment of multiple epochal scripts). We argue that these processes work together to produce contemporary heterogeneity of visualized identity narratives of universities. We illustrate this, first, with a survey of the current-day logos of 814 university emblems in 20 countries from across the world. Second, drawing on archival and interview materials, we analyze the histories of exemplar university logos to illustrate the various time-related processes. Therefore, by interjecting history – as both time and process – into the analysis of the visualization of organizational identity, we both join with the phenomenological and semiotic analysis of visual material as well as demonstrate that history is not merely a fixed factor echoing imprinting and inertia but rather also includes several forms of engagement with temporality that are less deterministic. Overall, we argue that enactment engages with perceptions of time (imaginations of the past, present, and future) and with perceptions fixed by time (epochal imprinting and inertia) to produce heterogeneity in the visualization of organizational identity.

Drawing on the notion of imprinting, we develop a framework for understanding category emergence and durability by suggesting that the durability of a category reflects its emergence conditions. We propose four ideal-typical mechanisms – consensus, proof, fiat, and truce – that arise from differences in the degree of agreement and the centralization of the authority regarding category definitions. Our framework not only relates category durability to emergence but also highlights the role of category promoters and constituencies in an ongoing process of category maintenance. We discuss implications for understanding the dynamics of the categorization process in various social and product market contexts.

Over the last several decades, the question of the import of firms’ social and environmental responsibilities has taken center stage. While once companies’ obligations to stakeholders and to sustainability were framed as normative issues, these criteria are taking on instrumental worth. Most recently, advocates of Responsible Investment have suggested that firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance possesses critical implications for companies’ creation and capture of long-term economic value. Employing textual analysis, this chapter analyzes the accounting, rating, and reporting standards that have been developed by which companies are expected to measure, communicate, and be evaluated for their ESG performance. Drawing from literature on organizational imprinting, this chapter finds significant differences across these standards, in terms of the determination of materiality and firms’ desired stakeholder relations. The divergence present in the meaning and measure of Responsible Investment across these standards possesses important strategic implications for managers in this field who must consider the implications of each guideline for internal and external purposes.

This chapter aims to answer whether foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) operating within the Chinese context differ from indigenous firms on several essential labor standards indicators: white- and blue-collar salaries, pension insurance, and working hours. In drawing upon neo-institutional and organizational imprinting theories and applying these to the Chinese context, the study addresses competing arguments regarding the expected effects of ownership type on these indicators. We employ seemingly unrelated regressions (SURs) to empirically examine a novel national survey of 1,268 firms in 12 Chinese cities. The regression results show that foreign MNCs do not provide uniquely beneficial labor practice packages to workers when compared with various indigenous firm types, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs), affiliate businesses of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and domestic private enterprises (DPEs). Specifically, although MNCs provide relatively higher wage rates, they underperform relative to SOEs concerning social insurance. However, DPEs consistently underperform relative to MNCs across most indicators. The mixture of the results contributes important nuances to the application of neo-institutional and organizational imprinting theories to the Chinese context.

We study how one form of wrongdoing behavior – gender-based discrimination – evolved and steadily grew amongst longshoremen over seven decades (from 1947 to 2017), despite changes in the nature of work and technological innovations that made the occupation increasingly accessible to women. Using data collected from 72 interviews with retired and active longshoremen and their employers, supplemented with archival and observational data, we find that although women were permitted into the occupation at the beginning of the period (1947 to the 1960s), they were progressively, completely excluded by male longshore workers. We find that after experiencing imprinting (the idea that early experience exerts a crucial influence on later behavioral phenomena) (Immelmann, 1975) during early decades, longshoremen instrumentalized their fear of occupational decline and voluntarily engaged in organizational wrongdoing by discriminating against women. Men rationalized their exclusion of women through two means: first, by adapting the “Madonna vs temptress” paradigm of framing women, and second by strategically emphasizing self-serving justifications. This study contributes to the literature on gendered work and the difficulty of eliminating imprinted, entrenched behaviors in gendered occupations.

This paper introduces a conceptual framework to assess the foreign market entry behavior of emerging market multinationals (EMMs). By introducing strategic cognition as the underlying theoretical perspective, this paper postulates that different levels of institutional voids in home markets shape the strategic cognition of EMMs, influencing their market entry behavior due to the prevalence of organizational imprinting in the early stages of internationalization. The paper aims to contribute to the strategic cognition literature by introducing emerging markets as a relevant context in which to apply and extend current thinking. Additionally, it aims to contribute to the institutional voids literature by providing a cognitive framework of behavioral patterns that is rationalized by institutional voids. Finally, the paper contributes to the entry mode literature by proposing strategic cognition as a relevant moderator for foreign entry mode choices, particularly those of EMMs.

Alternative enterprises – organizations that operate as a business while still also being driven by a social purpose – are sometimes owned by workers or other stakeholders, rather than shareholders. What role does ownership play in enabling alternative enterprises to prioritize substantively rational organizational values, like environmental sustainability and social equity, over instrumentally rational ones, like profit maximization? We situate this question at the intersection of research on: (1) stakeholder governance and mission drift in both hybrid and collectivist-democratic organizations; and (2) varieties of ownership of enterprise. Though these literatures suggest that ownership affects the ability of alternative enterprises to maintain their social missions, the precise nature of this relationship remains under-theorized. Using the case of a global, social, and environmental values-based banking network, we suggest that alternative ownership is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to combat mission drift in enterprises that have a legal owner. A supermajority of this network’s banks deploy alternative ownership structures; those operating with these structures are disproportionately associated with social movements, which imprint their values onto the banks. We show how alternative ownership acts through specific mechanisms to sustain enterprises’ missions, and we also trace how many of these mechanisms are endogenous to alternative ownership models. Finally, we find that ownership models vary in how well they enable the expression and maintenance of these social values. A ladder of mission-sustaining ownership models exists, whereby the dominance of substantive, non-instrumental values over operations and investment becomes increasingly robust as one moves up the rungs from mission-driven investor ownership to special shareholder and member-ownership models.

Traditionally, organizational theory has been a receptacle of methods and mechanisms from network theory. In this paper, we argue that organizational theory can also be an active contributor to network theory’s conceptual development. To that end, we make explicit a theoretical strategy that has only been used informally by network theorists so far, which – following Vaughan (2002) – we refer to as analogical theorizing. Using the basic correspondence between dyadic relationships as the most minimal form of “organization,” we show that processes and mechanisms extracted from various theoretical strands of organizational theory can be mapped onto the dynamics of social relationships. This allows us to build novel theoretical insight as it pertains to issue of relationship emergence, maintenance, and decay in social networks.