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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.

The paper aims to investigate the imprinting effect on working capital (WC) management as higher-level managers' transition to chief executive officer (CEO) positions. This paper proposes that WC management defined as a shorter cash conversion cycle (CCC) can be carried forward to the new firm when the managers are appointed as a CEO.

The authors employ a multivariate regression approach. The data in this study come from two sources: Execucomp which provides data for corporate managers of the largest 2,000 USA firms including S&P 1,500 US and Compustat which provides financial information of firms.

The authors find a positive imprinting effect of “new” CEOs on WC outcomes – proxied by the CCC. CCC shortens by approximately 16 days when CEOs are efficient managers at previous institutions, predominantly derived from improvements in inventory and payables. The effect is sensitive to individuals' age, familiarity with the industry and high-pressure circumstances.

The paper includes important implications of WC management for firms to consider, especially during economic crises when liquidity management is a priority.

This paper extends the literature on the imprinting effect on managerial decision-making. The paper offers evidence of cooperative yet dynamic efforts in managing WC during CEO turnover events, which are unique findings.

There is consensus among scholars on how political institutional imprinting interprets the unique management and practice phenomenon of Chinese enterprises. However, little scholarly attention has been given to the different political institutional imprints that shape firms’ internationalization. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how communist and market logic political institutional imprintings influence firms’ initial ownership strategies in outward foreign direct investment.

Based on the propensity score matching difference in difference method and a sample of 464 foreign investments from 2009 to 2020 for 310 Chinese private firms.

The results show that private firms with market logic political institutional imprintings tend to adopt higher ownership and vice versa. As institutional differences increase, private firms with market logic imprintings are more risk-taking and adopt higher ownership, whereas private firms with communist imprintings are more conservative and choose lower ownership. When diplomatic relations are friendlier, private firms with market logic imprintings prefer higher ownership to grasp business opportunities and vice versa.

This study not only identifies the net effect of political institutional imprinting on private firms’ initial ownership strategy but also investigates the different moderating effects of current institutional forces to respond to the call for research on bringing history back into international business research and the fit between imprinting and the environment.

The purpose of this study is to explore to what extent passionate family chief executive officers (CEOs) increase the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of the family firm. More specifically, the authors investigate the impact of the family CEO’s entrepreneurial passion (EP) on the firm’s EO and explore whether the generational stage of the family CEO alters this relationship.

A multiple moderated regression model was used to test the hypothesized relationships, based on a unique sample of 140 private Belgian family firms. All respondent CEOs are members of the controlling family, meaning they are in a unique position to influence firm-level outcomes.

The results reveal a significant positive effect of a CEO’s EP on the family firm’s EO. The generational stage of the family CEO moderates the EP-EO relationship, so the positive effect is strongest in first-generation family CEOs and becomes negative in third- or later-generation CEOs.

This research builds on insights from imprinting and upper echelon theory to explore how the EP of the family CEO impacts the family firm’s EO. This study thereby contributes to research regarding the antecedents of EO and introduces the concept of EP in a family firm context. The present study further contributes to the literature on imprinting, as it empirically shows how the EP-EO relationship differs depending on the generational stage of the family CEO. In a family firm context, the generational stage acts as a contingency variable, determining the dominant theory (i.e. upper echelon or imprinting theory) in explaining the EP-EO relationship.

Business model innovation (BMI) is an important channel of enterprise innovation, and BMI's antecedents have attracted extensive attention. The purpose of this paper is to address a substantial gap in the extant literature by developing a moderate model to explain the effects of boundary-spanning search on BMI as well as whether and how innovative cognitive imprinting (ICI) and environmental dynamics (ED) affect the above relationship.

A total of 239 usable questionnaires from different enterprises in China were collected to obtain firm-level data. Then multiple regression analyses were used by SPSS software to test hypotheses.

Boundary-spanning search extensity (BSE) and focus have inverted U-shaped impacts on BMI; ICI moderates the relationship between boundary-spanning search and BMI and steepens the curves; ED weakens the moderating role of ICI.

By identifying two antecedents of BMI, this paper contributes to the literature on the antecedents of BMI. Meanwhile, the joint moderating effect of ICI and ED is introduced into the emergent analysis framework of the relationship between boundary-spanning search and BMI and examined through empirical analysis for the first time.

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.

As China's only ruling party, will the Communist Party influence corporate decisions? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the political ideology of CEOs affects the environmental responsibility of Chinese family firms and its effects on Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER), in addition to a cohesive set of corporate governance contingency factors.

This paper uses a series of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression estimates and two-stage approach to examine four main hypotheses, based on 7,824 observations corresponding to 1,919 family firms in China from 2004 to 2015.

The study's findings show that CEOs imprinted with communist ideology are significantly positively related to CER in family firms, that the moderating role of ownership concentration is not significant, that board independence positively moderates the focal relationship and that CEO duality negatively moderates this relationship.

The paper expands the research of CEOs' political ideology to the ecological context, which are of significance to both theory and practice.

Research on entrepreneurship toward poverty reduction has outlined how micro-level characteristics of entrepreneurs capture entrepreneurial opportunities in settings of poverty; however, little is known about the influence of previous military experience in this context. This paper investigates how previous military experience influences poverty-reduction entrepreneurship.

This study uses data from two main sources. First, individual-level and firm-level information come from a nationwide survey of founders of private enterprises. Second, province-level information is taken from the Marketization Index and the China Statistics Yearbook. An analysis of the Logit moderation model renders strong support for our conjectures.

Via novel integration of imprinting theory and research on previous military experience, we propose that entrepreneurs with previous military experience have a strong sense of self-sacrifice, and as a result, are better able to participate in poverty-reduction entrepreneurship. In addition, we build on the resource availability and stakeholder expectations arguments and predict that the main effect of previous military experience on poverty-reduction entrepreneurship will be strengthened by reduced corporate philanthropy and increased government intervention.

Our study adds to the extant literature in the following ways. First, it enriches the literature on entrepreneurship toward poverty reduction. Second, it contributes to imprinting theory in the entrepreneurial field. Third, it adds knowledge to the social entrepreneurship literature.

While the relationship between non-family CEOs and corporate innovation in China has been widely studied, the results remain inconclusive. This study explores the relationship between non-family CEOs and corporate innovation in the context of intergenerational succession. It considers the background and background characteristics of non-family CEOs in an attempt to provide a theoretical foundation for human resource management and innovative strategic management that can be applied in the transformation of family companies.

The authors develop, then test, a series of hypotheses using an econometric analysis of a large sample of Chinese listed family firms. To control for endogeneity problems, such as missing variables in the model and the selectivity bias of the sample, propensity score matching (PSM) model is applied to analyze the panel data of 452 listed family firms from 2009–2019.

This study first validates the mechanism by which non-family CEO background characteristics affect innovation performance in family firms. It then reveals the varying moderating effects of two stages of intergenerational succession (i.e. later-generation participation in management and later-generation take-over management) that influence the relationship between non-family CEOs and corporate innovation.

The study's findings based on upper echelon and imprinting theory complement and extend existing research by revealing the impact of non-family CEOs from different backgrounds, and also identifying the role of intergenerational succession in the relationship between non-family CEO background characteristics and innovation performance.

This paper aims to illuminate mechanisms through which memorable experiences with brands create lasting preferences. It is based on the proposition that intense positive (negative) affective consumption in the consumer’s youth creates powerful imprints, which influence brand preference (distaste) throughout life.

Autobiographical memories with Nutella are retrieved from three different user groups, i.e. heavy-, light- and non-users. The retrieved memory narratives are analysed using conditioning theory, i.e. operant, classical or no conditioning are identified and compared across groups.

The research’s central proposition is affirmed, yet the dominant form of conditioning mechanism differs per group. Operant conditioning outperforms classical conditioning in creating strong and lasting preferences. Heavy- and non-users predominantly exhibit in-tensely positive and negative operant conditioning, respectively. Light-users on the other hand recall less affectively intense consumption experiences, mainly featuring classical conditioning. The light-users’ recollections suggest a mere exposure effect to be more appropriate in describing the preference formation in this user group.

Users not having experienced affectively intense consumption, i.e. light-users, are likely to be influenced in their preference over time through other factors, which this paper does not focus on.

Memory elicitation and exploration provides valuable insights to shape both promotional as well as advertising strategies.

The study extends existing theory on conditioning in marketing by first using a novel qualitative approach to analyse conditioning procedures in real-life settings, and second, it highlights operant conditioning’s superior ability in creating lasting preferences.