I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences they perceived in those markets. To address these tensions, insurers attempted two strategies: (1) incorporating tropical rates as additional premiums designed to cover the “extra mortality” of tropical markets; and (2) advocating for social practices of “sanitary progress” related to public health and sanitation. These practices, framed in orientalist terms, were not adopted in any smooth manner but in fumbling and meandering ways as insurers tried to understand what kinds of lives tropical settlers might be and how those lives might be priced. They eventually liberalized life insurance rates for White settlers in tropical settings, but insurers then confronted questions on how newly socialized “native” lives might be rendered calculable. This story of tropical exposure in globalizing actuarial discourse reinforces the ways in which race and racialized/exceptionalized differences were at the core of life insurance and the calculative devices it assembled between 1852 and 1947.

I examine whether competition from domestic industry rivals affects firms’ proclivity to undertake foreign direct investment (FDI) and their country location choices. I find that competition affects foreign production decisions and the geography of international investments. While firms enduring stiffer competition are significantly less likely to undertake FDI, this effect is heterogeneous across firms. Competition deters FDI more strongly when costs are heavier, whereas it has weaker effects when efficiency is higher, growth opportunities are valuable, and cash reserves are higher. FDI location models suggest that when going abroad, firms facing stronger competition are more likely to pursue economies of productivity and taxation.

We investigate the implications of recovering real-world conditional expectation of return functions using options on the S&P 500 index and Treasury bond futures. First, we construct estimates of the probability of disasters, defined as higher than 6%, 5%, or 4% equity market declines over option expiration cycles. This measure of disaster probability forecasts realized disasters. Second, we employ options on the futures of the 10- and 30-year Treasury bonds to construct estimates for the expected return of bond futures. These measures display forecasting ability for subsequent futures returns beyond the level, slope, and curvature variables extracted from the yield curve.

Informal risk sharing within social networks and formal financial contracts both enable households to manage risk. We find that financial contracting reduces participation in social networks. Specifically, increased crop insurance usage decreased local religious adherence and congregation membership in agricultural communities. Our identification utilizes the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994 that doubled crop insurance usage nationally within a year, although changes in usage varied across counties. Difference-in-difference and Spatial First Difference tests confirm that households substituted insurance for religiosity. This substitution was associated with reductions in crop diversification and crop yields, indicating an increase in moral hazard.

This article concerns the rise of young entrepreneurship education programs in 1980s Sweden, which entered schools surprisingly early and quickly, backed by organized Swedish business. The increased popularity of entrepreneurship education toward the end of the twentieth century in many European welfare states is usually associated with a shift toward neoliberal, market-oriented, policies. It is argued here that an important reason for young entrepreneurship’s success was its ability to connect with the Swedish tradition of cooperation and democratic decision making, in combination with values such as individualism and competition. A case in point is the surprising compatibility between progressive pedagogical ideas and “neoliberal” entrepreneurialism. The article is based on a study of Ung Företagsamhet (Young Entrepreneurship, henceforth UF), the Swedish version of the American organization Junior Achievement, and the ambition of the consumer cooperative movement’s think tank, Koopi, to offer a different kind of entrepreneurship education. In the analysis, the concept of “the entrepreneurial self” is applied to these two different programs, and the results show how they clashed, but also overlapped, in ways that help explain the success of UF. The article is a contribution to our understanding of how entrepreneurship discourse emerged and manifested itself in everyday environments in the late twentieth century, and as such also contributes to the history of Nordic neoliberalism.

Drawing on the work of Donaldson and Walsh, this article explains why for-profit companies in industries denominated by intrinsic values such as health, education and justice, have heavier responsibilities when it comes to honouring the human rights reflected in their industry identity. Optimized collective value, the overarching aim of any system of business, is defined in terms of the satisfaction of intrinsic values, a definition that gives special meaning to firms operating in industries themselves defined in terms of intrinsic values. Nor are such companies’ responsibilities to human rights, such as the right to healthcare, conveniently reducible to the ‘enlightened’ pursuit of profit. For example, a pharmaceutical company such as Pfizer or Moderna may be required to make its COVID-19 vaccine more accessible to COVID-19 victims in developing countries at the expense of optimizing profits over the long run. Such companies have a special and mandatory correlative duty to honour the right to healthcare that derives from their corporate constitutional purpose.

In this study, we theorize humanness in organizations as a property of practice. We apply practice theory to examine how humanness becomes enacted in a business organization as people prioritize organizational and individual ends in their work activities. Our empirical case study examines the everyday interactions of development team members in an R&D organization of a large Nordic cooperative. Challenging the dominant individualist and structuralist approaches in humanness and human dignity studies, we identify and locate four different aspects of humanness in organizational practices. As a result, we show how the emergence of humanness is an ongoing process that transpires through two mechanisms: site shifting and reconciliation; that is, people shift between different sites of the social, consisting of different sets of practices with underlying disparate assumptions of humanness, which requires reconciliation. These findings provide a basis for an alternative theorizing of humanness in organizations.

In this special issue, we have collected 13 articles that offer new vantage points for research on dynamic capabilities. We offer a selection of thought-provoking papers that advance current thinking on dynamic capabilities and provide directions for new inquiries using the dynamic capability framework. The microfoundations of dynamic capabilities have increasingly received interest. This special issue offers a range of conceptual methodological approaches to deepen our understanding of the issues surrounding the microfoundations of dynamic capabilities.

The changing geopolitical landscapes and increased migration flow across the world call for a fresh perspective on the sociocultural and economic integration of migrants in their new ‘homes’ and ‘communities’. In this qualitative process study, we provide insight into the identity work dynamics that underlie interfirm cooperation in the new business context. We see a sample of Bulgarian migrant entrepreneurs as knowledge boundary spanners who employ identity work tactics for the development of shared norms and values that facilitate knowledge exchange between their home culture and the UK host culture context. This study suggests that knowledge boundary spanning is enabled by a temporal identity work process, characterized by a series of inward and outward identity work tactics. The interplay between inward and outward identity work tactics occurs over phases of identifying identity differences, adopting identity cues, and finally, realizing hybrid identity. This article contributes to the identity work and migrant entrepreneurship literature by exploring the underlying mechanisms for realizing knowledge boundary spanning by migrant entrepreneurs.

Do lenders securitize or price loans in response to credit risk? Exploiting exogenous variation in regional credit risk due to foreclosure law differences along U.S. state borders, we find that lenders securitize mortgages that are eligible for sale to the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) rather than price regional credit risk. For non-GSE-eligible mortgages with no GSE buyback provision, lenders increase interest rates as they are unable to shift credit risk to loan purchasers. The results inform the debate surrounding the GSEs’ buyback provisions, the constant interest rate policy, and show that underpricing regional credit risk increases the GSEs’ debt holdings.

Existing theories of individual trade preferences do not satisfactorily explain how security concerns should affect American support for the US–China trade war that began in 2018. Although existing theories of public attitudes toward international trade—economic self-interest, sociotropism, partisanship, reciprocity, and xenophobia—all help to explain initial support for the trade war, these hypotheses do not adequately explain citizen attitudes in the context of an increasingly adversarial and securitized bilateral US–China relationship. In particular, they do not address how rising security tensions affect trade preferences. Using nationally representative original survey data (n = 1,016) and a nonrepresentative survey with an embedded experiment (n = 1,015), this article argues that securitization of the bilateral economic relationship has spurred threat perceptions and given rise to a Cold War narrative that has in turn caused a substantial share of Americans to become less concerned with the economic outcomes of trade and more concerned with trade's effect on security. These Americans demonstrate an instinctive “commercial peace” response, seeing trade liberalization as a potential deterrent to conflict. The results challenge conventional wisdom on political support for the trade war and add depth to existing theories of individual trade preferences regarding the interaction between economic, security, and psychological motivations.

This study explores the mission statement–performance relationship of 247 Philippine-listed firms by employing the practical component and theoretical stakeholder approaches to studying mission statements. Using content and regression analyses, results indicate that: (1) the existence of a mission statement and the inclusion of customer in the statement are positively and significantly associated with performance; and (2) the inclusion of society and public image is negatively and significantly associated with performance. Aside from contributing to the growing body of theory-based, quantitative research on mission statements, this study offers another view within an emerging market context. Furthermore, it reinforces the value of having a mission statement and the importance of acknowledging salient and dominant stakeholders in the statement.

We examine diseconomies of scale for two different investment approaches: quantitative and fundamental. Using separate account (SA) data where the investment approach is self-identified, we find that fundamental SAs exhibit greater diseconomies of scale than quantitative SAs. Looking at liquidity costs, we find that quantitative SAs hold more diversified portfolios of higher liquidity stocks than fundamental SAs, thereby reducing their expected liquidity costs. We also find that consistent with lower information processing/hierarchy costs, the speed of information diffusion is higher for quant SAs. Accounting for these differences helps to explain the differences in diseconomies of scale.