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Drawing from legitimacy and institutional entrepreneurship theory, this study assesses the naming patterns of entrepreneurial firms in the US biotechnology industry.

The authors use a mixed-methods design of content analysis and regression to analyze a sample of 441 entrepreneurial biotechnology firms, for which data were obtained from Net Advantage. The authors track changes to the proportion of firms with naming attributes, such as name length and type of name. The authors also examine variability in those characteristics during the industry's evolution, comparing freestanding to acquired start-ups.

Start-ups select names that are longer, more descriptive, begin with rare sounds or hard plosives and have stronger discipline- or technology-specific links during nascent years of the industry. As the industry evolves, entrepreneurs are more likely to select names that are shorter, more abstract, begin with hard plosives and have stronger industry-specific links. The naming patterns of freestanding and acquired companies differ, and companies that conform to industry pressures tend to remain independent.

Unlike extant studies that assess established industries, the current study identifies shifting trends in the naming patterns of entrepreneurial firms in an emerging industry. By focusing on start-ups, the authors expand research on organizational naming practices, which focuses traditionally on name choices and name change patterns of incumbents. By using marketing and linguistics methods when analyzing organizational name attributes, naming patterns in these attributes are identified, including name length, name type, starting letter of the name and link to the industry.

The provision of value, as a marketing issue, is receiving increasing attention from managers and scholars. This attention, in combination with strong calls for better quantification and stronger measures in marketing, has lead to increased interest in the assessment, quantified where possible, of the provision of value through buyer–seller relationships. This paper identifies dimensions of value provision through relationships in business markets with specific emphasis on the intangible aspects of value, which are important to long-term competitive advantage. The provision of value to the seller is the prime focus in this paper. The paper discusses the meaning of both tangible and intangible relationship value and the interplay between them and notes the importance of assessing the intangible part of the value, particularly the part which derives from the human aspects of the relationship. Despite their importance, the human aspects of relationships and their contribution to value is a sparse topic among researchers. The paper compares and evaluates potentially useful relationship and value conceptualizations. The paper discusses studies of relationship value and then outlines the results of a recent line of empirical research into the provision of value by a buyer to a seller that utilizes a framework synthesized from the intellectual capital literature. This recent research conceptualizes the potential for a seller's relationship with a buyer to provide intangible value to the seller in terms of, first, the resources available in the buyer and second, the capabilities of the buyer's boundary personnel to aid in facilitating the flow of those resources to the seller. The paper also includes the softer human aspects in the dimensions of value. These latter aspects are important to a full assessment of value. The paper concludes with a discussion of aspects of intangible relationship value that need further elucidation and will thus provide opportunities for future research.

Two primary approaches have been used to study employment brands and branding. First, there is a long history of the study of organizational attraction. Second, in the past 10–15 years, there has been growth in a hybrid stream of research combining branding concepts from the consumer psychology literature with I/O psychology frameworks of organizational attraction and applicant job search behavior. In this chapter, we take an entirely different approach and suggest that the theoretical models built around product/service brand knowledge can readily accommodate employment brands and branding without hybridizing the framework with I/O psychology. This merging of employment brand with product and service brands is accomplished simply by recognizing employment as an economic exchange between workers and employers and recognizing workers as cognitive and emotional beings that vary in their talents and have their own vectors of preferences for the employment offering. After developing a testable model of the components, antecedents, and consequences of employment brand knowledge, we review the existing employment brand and organizational attraction literature and identify multiple opportunities for additional research.

This paper presents the major findings of recently completed research in the UK concerning the attributes of information as an asset and its impact on organisational performance. The research study employed an automated information asset- and attribute-scoring grid exercise and semi-structured open-ended interviews with 45 senior UK managers in four case study organisations. The information asset-scoring grid was developed to provide a simple visual representation of information assets and attributes using Excel charts. The semi-structured open-ended interviews aimed to identify the attributes of information assets considered significant by 45 senior UK managers and to explore relevant issues such as the value of information and organisational effectiveness.

Presents the results of a study in which judgement of quality and purchase value of three different product categories were obtained from 173 purchasing managers and 190 household consumers. The products varied according to the country where they were designed, the country where they were assembled, their brand name, their price and their warranty. In addition, the respondents rated 13 developed and newly industrializing countries by their capacity to design and assemble products in general. Indicates that the respondents′ perceptions of newly industrializing countries are more negative than their perceptions of developed countries. However, when additional information concerning the product′s brand name, price and warranty is available, their perceptual differences between developed and newly industrializing countries are considerably reduced. Shows significant differences between household and organizational buyers in the relative importance given to country‐of‐origin and other product cues. Discusses strategic implications of these findings for global marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the hypothesis that Whiteness is used as a normative standard when comparing a variety of first names.

Respondents (full- and part-time business students) evaluated names that sounded common, African-American, Russian, and unusual.

Results from two studies suggest that “common” or “neutral” names are perceived to be white, and to be more American than African-American, Russian or unusual-sounding names. Results also demonstrate that the common names have more positive attributes, including socio-economic class.

The study found that the basic comparison of American respondents will be to a white person. Second, the authors applied Critical Race Theory (CRT) to the research on names. Finally, the authors demonstrate that unless they are totally anonymous, virtual teams will still have the type of social categorization and stereotyping of team members found in ordinary teams.

Organizations and managers need to recognize that a “colorblind” approach simply reinforces the expectation that any differences in American organizations will be compared against the Whiteness standard. This can be a problem in any organizational setting, especially given the proliferation of virtual teams. This may be addressed with attempts to increase common in-group identity and strategies for identifying bias.

In this research the authors integrate concepts and theory from Virtual Teams, CRT and the Psychology of Names, providing both theoretical and practical implications.

Drawing from experiential theory and decision-making theory, this article aims to posit that workplace aesthetics acts as a driver for job choice when included with an employment offer. Whilst organisational literature has recognised that office experiential cues in general, and aesthetics in particular, affect employee performance and well-being, employer attractiveness scales have not yet incorporated office aesthetics as a component of job-offer choice.

A choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiment was conducted to estimate the weighted utilities of three aesthetic and three non-aesthetic employer attributes. Subsequently, the attributes' importance in the job choice decision was estimated.

The results indicate that aesthetic attributes in the workplace can be equally important in the decision-making process as non-aesthetic attributes and that aesthetic attributes deliver as much utility as non-aesthetic attributes in driving job choice.

These conclusions are relevant for Human Resource (HR) managers engaged in crafting job offers, who should consider that employees may improve their assessment of a job offer as a result of superior organisational aesthetics demonstrated during the recruitment process as well as in contexts where employees would be expected to combine remote and office-based work.

The present study represents a novel approach to understanding job applicants' preferences for aesthetic elements in the workplace. The results suggest that the workplace experience is relativistic and that considering applicants' latent preferences is crucial when designing efficient job offers.

To examine the organizational attributes that attract final-year management students towards organizations. The paper aims to study the already adopted employer branding strategies and the preferred channel through which organizations should promote employer attractiveness. Based on previous studies and current findings, a conceptual model on employer branding process has been developed and presented.

This article is based on semi-structured interviews, survey results and review of academic employer branding models.

It was found that among the students, most preferred organizational attributes were organizational culture, brand name and compensation. Students rated job portal to be the preferred channel for employer attractiveness. The study showed that there exists a significant and positive correlation between strong brand image and likelihood to apply.

The survey sample was limited to private business schools only.

One of the sources for hiring on which corporate rely heavily is private business schools. This study provides the employers an insight to make their strategies for employer branding more effective. In the process, it benefits the prospective employees as well.

The study provides valuable inputs for formulating effective employer branding strategies. The novelty of the study is the conceptual model on the process of employer branding. One of the highlights of which is preferred communication channel for effectiveness of the strategies.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to present an automated ontology mapping and merging algorithm, namely OntoDNA, which employs data mining techniques (FCA, SOM, K‐means) to resolve ontological heterogeneities among distributed data sources in organizational memory and subsequently generate a merged ontology to facilitate resource retrieval from distributed resources for organizational decision making.

The OntoDNA employs unsupervised data mining techniques (FCA, SOM, K‐means) to resolve ontological heterogeneities to integrate distributed data sources in organizational memory. Unsupervised methods are needed as an alternative in the absence of prior knowledge for managing this knowledge. Given two ontologies that are to be merged as the input, the ontologies' conceptual pattern is discovered using FCA. Then, string normalizations are applied to transform their attributes in the formal context prior to lexical similarity mapping. Mapping rules are applied to reconcile the attributes. Subsequently, SOM and K‐means are applied for semantic similarity mapping based on the conceptual pattern discovered in the formal context to reduce the problem size of the SOM clusters as validated by the Davies‐Bouldin index. The mapping rules are then applied to discover semantic similarity between ontological concepts in the clusters and the ontological concepts of the target ontology are updated to the source ontology based on the merging rules. Merged ontology in a concept lattice is formed.

In experimental comparisons between PROMPT and OntoDNA ontology mapping and merging tool based on precision, recall and f‐measure, average mapping results for OntoDNA is 95.97 percent compared to PROMPT's 67.24 percent. In terms of recall, OntoDNA outperforms PROMPT on all the paired ontology except for one paired ontology. For the merging of one paired ontology, PROMPT fails to identify the mapping elements. OntoDNA significantly outperforms PROMPT due to the utilization of FCA in the OntoDNA to capture attributes and the inherent structural relationships among concepts. Better performance in OntoDNA is due to the following reasons. First, semantic problems such as synonymy and polysemy are resolved prior to contextual clustering. Second, unsupervised data mining techniques (SOM and K‐means) have reduced problem size. Third, string matching performs better than PROMPT's linguistic‐similarity matching in addressing semantic heterogeneity, in context it also contributes to the OntoDNA results. String matching resolves concept names based on similarity between concept names in each cluster for ontology mapping. Linguistic‐similarity matching resolves concept names based on concept‐representation structure and relations between concepts for ontology mapping.

The OntoDNA automates ontology mapping and merging without the need of any prior knowledge to generate a merged ontology. String matching is shown to perform better than linguistic‐similarity matching in resolving concept names. The OntoDNA will be valuable for organizations interested in merging ontologies from distributed or different organizational memories. For example, an organization might want to merge their organization‐specific ontologies with community standard ontologies.