Drawing on Wales, Monsen, and McKelvie's (2011, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35(5), 895–923) model of entrepreneurial orientation pervasiveness and the strong culture hypothesis (Denison, 1984, Organization Dynamics, 13, 4–22), this study investigates how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) strength, defined as the level of agreement in the shared perceptions of EO, serves as a boundary condition of the EO–firm performance relationship. Four field studies provide evidence for a valid and reliable 10-item multidimensional measure of entrepreneurial orientation, the EO-10, which in turn, may be used to assess EO strength. We establish content and construct validity of the EO-10 (study 1; n = 447 employees), criterion-related validity with revenue growth and sales growth (study 2; n = 412 employees in 43 profit centers), and convergent validity with Covin and Slevin's (1989, Strategic Management Journal, 10, 75–87) 9-item measure (study 3; n = 291 employees). Finally, in study 4 (n = 853 employees nested in 22 organizations), we demonstrate the interactive effects of EO and EO strength on profit growth and revenue growth. In sum, this study provides conceptual and empirical evidence for the importance of EO strength as a moderator of the EO–firm performance relationship.

We study the relation between electoral politics and government small-business lending, employment, and business formation. We construct novel measures of electoral importance capturing swing and base voters using data from Facebook ad spending, independent political expenditures, the Cook Political Report, and campaign contributions. We find that businesses in electorally important states, districts, and sectors receive more loans following the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, controlling for funding demand and both health and economic conditions. Estimates from survey and observational data show that electoral politics and the allocation of government funds affect employment, small-business activity, and business applications.

As a new management reform adapting the development of the times, electronic human resource management (E-HRM) covers all possible integration mechanisms and contents between HRM and Information Technologies. E-HRM promotes employees' subject status with the network characteristics of openness and cooperation. Taking the theory of work adjustment as the instruction, this research studies the adaptive process induced by reconstructing the sense of matching when employees experience the reform, along with the influence of E-HRM on employee's initiative behavior from the perspective of job crafting. In total, 706 employees and their supervisors were investigated with matched questionnaire survey. The results show that: (1) E-HRM can stimulate employees' personal initiative behavior; (2) task crating, relational crafting and cognitive crafting as three dimensions of employees' job crafting, mediate the effect of E-HRM on personal initiative behavior and (3) the self-development motivation of employees' internet use plays a positive moderating role, steering self-oriented job crafting in the positive direction which conforms to the organizations' expectation.

The fundamental nature of humility and prosocial motivation entails transcending self-interest to enact behaviors that benefit others. We theorize that leader humility may enact a self-transcendent contagion effect that will manifest in enhanced follower prosocial motivation. Due to the fundamental nature of humility, this construct holds great promise in understanding how contextual signals (i.e., leader behaviors) shape prosocial motivation in followers. In this study, we find that leader humility impacts follower prosocial motivation through followers' perception of work meaningfulness. Specifically, we found that leader humility is positively related to prosocial motivation. We also found that this relationship is mediated by followers' perception of work meaningfulness, and that this mediation is moderated by followers' perception of relational vitality. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Research on firm-level corporate political activity often treats firm-government interactions as independent of the market competition between firms. Yet, firms that compete in the market will consider rivals when making strategic nonmarket decisions. Ignoring market rivalry when studying nonmarket strategy introduces fundamental endogeneity problems and potentially overlooks a central mechanism explaining firms’ political choices. Our study demonstrates this by investigating the strategic nonmarket interactions of large US tobacco manufacturers, a case study that is independently interesting. From 1992 to 2008, the US tobacco industry experienced dramatic upheaval in its business environment as regulatory authority shifted from the state to federal level, under the Food and Drug Administration. Using firm-candidate–cycle data, a complete information campaign contributions game, played in the nonmarket environment, is estimated for two of the United States’ largest tobacco manufacturers. Results demonstrate that, rather than acting in isolation, US tobacco firms strategically coordinated their firm-level political campaign contributions.

This article examines a patenting conflict between the Halliburton Oil Well and Cementing Company and an independent inventor named Cranford Walker. It argues that Halliburton’s effort to lower the barriers to entry into the oil well depth measurement industry facilitated the re-emergence of materiality as a pre-condition for the patent eligibility of inventive processes. In 1941, Walker sued Halliburton for infringement of three of his patents, and Halliburton responded with an aggressive defense aimed at invalidating them. Over the next five years, the courts handling this conflict adopted very narrow legal theories developed during the Second Industrial Revolution to assess the patent eligibility of inventions that involved mental steps—processes such as mathematical computations, which people can perform in their minds. The resulting legal precedent cleared the path for Halliburton’s short-term industrial goals and continued to shape patent law for the rest of the century.

There is a great deal of variability in estimates of the lifetime medical care cost externality of obesity, partly due to a lack of transparency in the methodology behind these cost models. Several important factors must be considered in producing the best possible estimate, including age-related weight gain, differential life expectancy, identifiability, and cost model selection. In particular, age-related weight gain represents an important new component to recent cost estimates. Without accounting for age-related weight gain, a study relies on the untenable assumption that people remain the same weight throughout their lives, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding of the evolution and development of the obesity crisis. This study seeks to inform future researchers on the best methods and data available both to estimate age-related weight gain and to accurately and consistently estimate obesity’s lifetime external medical care costs. This should help both to create a more standardized approach to cost estimation as well as encourage more transparency between all parties interested in the question of obesity’s lifetime cost and, ultimately, evaluating the benefits and costs of interventions targeting obesity at various points in the life course.

This study investigates how venture capital firms (VCs) choose syndication partners. Exponential random graph models of Chinese VC syndication networks from 2006 to 2013 show that the homophily mechanism does not always determine VCs’ partner selection. In selecting partners, VCs have to strike a balance between reducing uncertainty and mobilizing heterogeneous resources. Therefore, decisions about partners depend on institutional uncertainty and VCs’ investment preferences. While VCs that focus on traditional business in an immature market are more likely to form homogeneous syndications, their peers that prefer to invest in innovative companies and that can rely on a stable market tend to syndicate with heterogeneous partners.

The turbulent 1830s saw a sequence of great political and social reforms in the United Kingdom. One such reform was the introduction of a locally funded Poor Law in Ireland. The development of a nascent welfare system in 1838 coincided with a boom in the formation of microfinance institutions in Ireland. The focus of this study is the expansion of a hybrid organizational form, Loan Fund Societies (LFSs), in the ten years prior to the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. LFSs were legally established with a conflictual structure: acting as commercially viable charitable institutions required to provide credit to the deserving poor (to enable them to be self-sufficient) while dedicating their “profits” to supporting the indigent poor. This study uses an analytical framework drawing inspiration from institutional logics to explore and better understand Irish microfinance in the early nineteenth century, a period of profound socioeconomic and socioreligious changes. It seeks to explain the factors that motivated the establishment and de-establishment of microfinance institutions amid this tumult. Legislative changes in LFS business parameters in 1843 made the tensions between being charitable and commercially sustainable salient; and, for some, it made continued existence untenable.

Using City of Oakland data during COVID-19, we document that small-business components of survival capabilities (i.e., revenue resiliency, labor flexibility, and committed costs) vary by firm size. Nonemployer businesses rely on low-cost structures to survive. Microbusinesses (1–5 employees) depend on 14% greater revenue resiliency. Enterprises (6–50 employees) use labor flexibility to survive but face 10%–20% higher residual closure risk from committed costs. The evidence argues for size targeting of financial support programs, including committed costs and revenue-based lending programs. Supporting the capabilities mapping, we find that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) increased medium-run survival probability by 20.5% specifically for microbusinesses.