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.

Although state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are recognized as important economic actors, the literature to date has assumed close state control over SOEs and, therefore, their passive stance towards institutions. Drawing on the institutional work and historical institutionalism literatures, we challenge this view. We develop a multilevel framework of SOE top management teams’ (TMTs’) embedded agency, spanning the national macro-institutional level, the meso-level of regimes of state-SOE relations, and sector-specific institutions. We then derive propositions regarding the factors across these multiple levels that shape SOE TMTs’ motivation, resources, and scope for institutional work. This framework allows us to explain the leeway for and likelihood of SOE TMTs’ engagement in institutional work across institutional contexts.

National Contact Points (NCPs), which support the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, are often invoked as a reliable state-based mechanism for holding transnational corporations accountable for business-related human rights abuses. The objective of this article is to scrutinize the ability of NCPs to offer effective remedy through the lens of an often-quoted success story (the case of the post-colonial brewery Bralima-Heineken at the Dutch NCP) and through a few existing studies that examine factors that curtail or enhance the possibility of NCP mechanisms to deliver effective remedy. Based on these findings, we suggest specific ‘actions for effectiveness’ in the form of recommendations for improving NCPs as a tool to deliver effective remedy. Zooming out, we extend some general observations on how our findings illustrate that NCPs are expressions of a larger systemic problem surrounding the role of law within market globalization and the impact of economic liberalization on the making of norms, changing legal authority and basic fairness under conditions of stark power imbalance. Supporting this approach are historical factors which make the OECD Guidelines and NCPs ripe for such conceptualization.

This article examines the origin of the “Prancing Horse” symbol and its role in helping the racing team Ferrari survive under the fascist regime in Italy. Enzo Ferrari, the company’s founder, adopted the coat of arms of Francesco Baracca, the most renowned Italian military aviator during World War I, as the logo of his new racing team. By repurposing it from military aviation to motorsport, he benefitted from powerful cultural associations and strong political and cultural endorsement of Baracca’s persona. Drawing from scholarship on cultural branding and consumer culture, this study shows how new companies can establish powerful business icons by borrowing symbols connected to populist worlds and national ideologies, and transferring them to various industries. Strategic repurposing thus emerges as a distinct process within cultural branding to obtain institutional support and establish powerful brand identities in challenging contexts.

We use a text-based measure of popular sentiment toward finance to study how finance sentiment responds to rare historical disasters and to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Finance sentiment declines after epidemics and earthquakes but rises following severe droughts, floods, and landslides. These heterogeneous effects suggest finance sentiment responds differently to the realization of insured versus uninsured risks. Finance sentiment declines at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but recovers in countries that experienced high stock markets returns and that responded with large fiscal spending. Finance sentiment seems to depend on the insurance provided by private markets and by public finance.

Within the last two decades, the international expansion of Latin American companies has undergone remarkable growth. This phenomenon has attracted scholarly attention, however, most of the available research is focused on companies that have already engaged in foreign direct investment (FDI), meanwhile, Latin American firms in pre-FDI stages remain mostly understudied. This article uses an explanatory case study design to analyze the corporate reputation and decision-making process related to international expansion of a set of ten Latin American companies. Both archival and primary data were used in the individual and cross-case analyses stages for 22 months. Our study identifies and establishes analytical generalizations when examining and contrasting the findings with the previously revised theoretical frameworks. More specifically, we identified that these companies exhibit similarities with the behavior of Jaguars, the Latin American wild feline; especially because of (i) their preference to remain in their regional market to exploit current capabilities and advantages, and eventually enter developed markets to upgrade capabilities and surpass strong competitors at home; (ii) their strategies to disguise their country of origin and lack of experience when operating internationally; and (iii) their solitary behavior and reluctance to engage in partnerships and/or strategic alliances unless they have a specific interest in building legitimacy and enhancing reputation.

Drawing from social exchange theory, this study proposes the effects of perceived leader narcissism on employees' voice behaviors (promotive voice and prohibitive voice) via organizational justice depending on the conditions of employees' trust in leader. Through investigating 257 employees and conducting a scenario study in China, this research shows that perceived leader narcissism is negatively related to prohibitive voice. The relationships between perceived leader narcissism and voice behaviors are moderated by trust in leader, and perceived leader narcissism is positively related to employees' voice behaviors when trust in leader is low. Results also show that organizational justice mediates the relationships between perceived leader narcissism and voice behaviors. The indirect effect of perceived leader narcissism on voice behaviors via organizational justice is moderated by trust in leader. This study has important implications for explaining the relationships between perceived leader narcissism and employees' voice behaviors and contributes to the social exchange theory by illustrating trust in the partner in exchange relationship as a boundary condition of norm reciprocity violation.

Recognition of co-operatives as a legitimate business model and form of economic participation was significantly challenged by the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s with its emphasis on individuals and markets. This fueled an externally and internally driven push to demutualize co-operatives and convert them into Investor Owned Businesses (IOB). While the international trend to demutualize emerged from the end of the Second World War, evidence indicates it accelerated from the late 1980s until the onset of the Global Financial Crisis. Drawing on an ongoing project of historical data collection and visual analysis of Australian co-operatives, this paper explores the Australian experience with demutualization, particularly with regard to agriculture. In line with the international experience, there has been a surge in Australian demutualization since the 1980s. However, while demutualization continues to be a feature of the Australian landscape post-GFC as co-operatives tackle with the changed political and economic environment, the paper also challenges the view that demutualization is inevitable for agricultural co-operatives. Co-operative managers can make strategic choices to avoid demutualization and retain member control. Further, co-operative culture and the persistence of co-operative clusters in particular regions can blunt the push to demutualize.

We present a second-personal account of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to the first-personal approach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation’s ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the relevance of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment.

We investigate the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (often assumed to reflect corporate voluntarism) and government (often assumed to reflect coercion). We distinguish two broad perspectives on the CSR and government relationship: the dichotomous (i.e., government and CSR are / should be independent of one another) and the related (i.e., government and CSR are / should be interconnected). Using typologies of CSR public policy and of CSR and the law, we present an integrated framework for corporate discretion for engagement with public policy for CSR. We make four related contributions. First, we explain the dichotomous and the related perspectives with reference to their various assumptions and analyses. Second, we demonstrate that public policy for CSR and corporate discretion coexist and interact. Specifically, we show, third, that public policy for CSR can inform and stimulate corporate discretion and, fourth, that corporations have discretion for CSR, particularly as to how corporations engage with such policy.