Digital Commons Network^™

Gendered Language And Entrepreneurial Joiners, Mihwa Seong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the impact of gendered language in start-up job advertisements on the perceived attractiveness of start-ups among individuals (‘joiners’) interested in working for new firms. While entrepreneurship research has established the prominent role of entrepreneurial joiners in start-ups and the importance of building a gender-diverse team, we know relatively less about how start-ups can attract more women joiners. This dissertation seeks to investigate whether women’s ratings of the attractiveness of joining start-ups increases significantly when start-ups use more feminine language in place of male-centric gendered language. Compared to men, I theorize that women are more sensitive to the …

Three Essays On Corporate Sustainability Language, Nahyun Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation explores how public firms employ language in their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports to lengthen the horizons of their strategic decisions. The three essays included in my dissertation introduce and investigate the pursuit of temporal equilibrium in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. Specifically, I compare the emphasis placed on the short versus long- future in the annual sustainability reports of public firms and derive three explanations for the increased emphasis of long-termism.

In Essay 1 (Chapter 2), I describe how firms seek and find temporal equilibrium after the Financial Crisis. Using topic modeling, I linguistically and …

Ideas Worth Spreading? Adverse Effects Of Information Load In Online Communications, Amir Sepehri

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What makes public addresses such as online talks successful vs. not? Across seven field and lab studies, I find that information overload hurts consumer adoption. The cause? Processing disfluency. Information overload makes a message more difficult to process, which in turn reduces liking and interest. The effect disappears among audience members with greater need for cognition, a personality trait marking a penchant for deep and broad information-processing. My empirical investigation concludes by documenting the counter-intuitiveness of the findings (i.e., how consumers mispredict which talks they actually (dis)like). From these results, I derive insights for (i) the psychology of adoption, and …

Three Essays In Empirical Finance, Srikanth Ramani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis includes three essays in mutual funds, empirical finance, and asset pricing.

The first essay explores the relation between mutual fund ownership and how it affects firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements. The essay classifies mutual funds into CSR-friendly and CSR-unfriendly funds using a holdings-based, value-weighted mutual fund corporate social rating (MFCSR). The empirical results show that firms with higher CSR-friendly ownership are associated with increased future levels of CSR and the firms with higher CSR-unfriendly ownership are associated with decreased future levels of CSR. This result is robust after controlling for many observable firm characteristics and firm-specific unobservable …

Examining Rating Source Differences In Narrative Performance Feedback, Kevin Doyle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of the present study was to examine the narrative feedback quality and content of comments from supervisors, peers, and subordinates in a multisource performance feedback context. Research on performance management interventions tends to focus on issues such as rater training, scale development, scale formats, and reducing test and rater bias. However, other components in performance management interventions have received little attention, including narrative feedback. Narrative feedback takes the form of written comments describing the ratee’s performance on different dimensions. The narrative feedback quality variables included favorability, specificity, goal content, and feedback length. Predictor variables of narrative feedback quality …

Invisible Labour: Support-Service Workers In India’S Information Technology Industry, Indranil Chakraborty

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dissertation investigates the life, working conditions and urban experience of support-service workers in the Information Technology (IT) sector of India: the janitors, security guards, fast food delivery service professionals and car pool drivers who work in and around technology parks that develop software applications for a world-market. The common experiences of these employees are migration from rural contexts to a radically modern employment setting, where they work long hours with minimal benefits in informal conditions that often violate basic labour laws. The thesis draws on quantitative and qualitative research, and in particular on analysis and interpretation of hundred and …

Contemporary Perspectives On The Internationalization Of Firms, Maximilian Stallkamp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes new insights to research on the internationalization of firms. Whereas prior research has focused mostly on the country as the main locational unit of analysis, I examine internationalization from both subnational and (supranational) regional perspectives. Moreover, I investigate the impact of digitalization on internationalization, by studying how ‘digital’ firms expand internationally.

Essay 1 examines how the initial subnational location choices of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in a host country (China) affect their subsequent investments in the same country. I argue that subnational locations with dense agglomerations of MNEs from the same home country can provide firms with co-ethnic …

Capacity For Sport For Development, Ryan Clutterbuck

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the management of local sport for development (SFD) in Canada. It uncovers the organizational capacity for local SFD, the processes involved in building capacity to achieve social change through sport, and the perceptions and experiences of National Sport Organization (NSO) leaders regarding SFD. Study 1 explores and uncovers the organizational capacity for local SFD, following Hall et al.’s (2003) framework for non-profit organizational capacity. Using semi-structured interviews, 17 local SFD organizations were asked to describe specific organizational aspects that enabled them to achieve their goals. They identified: familiarity with development issues; grant funding; facilities; and social capital, …

Before Exit: Three Essays On Business Exit In Politically And Economically Adverse Environments, Ramzi Fathallah

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation re-conceptualizes the exit phenomenon in management research by focusing on what precedes exit in times of political and economic turbulence, when firms and entrepreneurs are forced to contemplate unwanted exit as they face multiple threats in their home country. The three essays of this thesis collectively highlight the inadequacy of theories that conceptualize exit as a sudden and complete cessation of activity by showing that exit is an adaptive process that unfolds over time, and across parts of given entities.

The first essay contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial exit by exploring how entrepreneurs proactively respond to political …

Consumption As Emotion Regulation, Jeff D. Rotman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Products and services often provide value that goes beyond functional utility. Drawing from a compensatory consumption model, which suggests that consumption is a means to regulate self-discrepancies, the current research suggests that consumers are motivated to self-regulate their emotions and this self-regulation can be accomplished via consumption. Specifically, emotional and physiological deviations from a steady state motivate individuals to find balance in order to alleviate those deviations. Three papers provide evidence for this hypothesis. Utilizing an embodied cognition framework for chapter 2 and chapter 3, I demonstrate that individuals are motivated to reduce a perceived lack of interpersonal warmth by …

"My Friends, They Are People To Rely On": The Social Foundation Of Business In Ghana, Patrick D. Shulist

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The management and entrepreneurship literatures increasingly engage in poverty alleviation research in the developing world. However, there is a marked tendency to overlook how the Western World, from where most theory comes, differs from the developing world. Such a fallacy has potential deleterious effects on the research itself, but more importantly on the practical applications of that research.

With this in mind, my dissertation uses an inductive qualitative methodology to explore the nature of self-employment in the developing world as it is; that is, not coloured by theoretical priors. In doing this, I lay the groundwork for understanding the …

Social Barriers To Entry: Liquefied Natural Gas Import Terminals In The Us From 2000 To 2013, Chethan D. Srikant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Management scholars recognize the uncertainties and challenges during the market entry process that can impede operational startup. However, very little empirical research exists to fully understand these challenges and explain firm responses. Even less attention has been paid to the threats from non-market actors and the countering strategies employed by firms. Hence, this thesis explores firm reactions to community contestation, as a form of social barrier to entry that can prevent the firm from exploiting market opportunities. Specifically, I consider the strategic implications of firms’ rhetorical responses to community contestation during the market entry process.

For this thesis, U.S. liquefied …

Stability And Change In The Strategic Decisions Of Multinational Enterprise, Majid Eghbali-Zarch

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates some of the antecedents and consequences of stability and change in multinational enterprises (MNEs). It focuses on the strategic level decisions of MNEs in their international activities. Essay 1 studies the role of the development and deployment of decision rules, as an organizational capability, since they may lead to consistency and stability in MNEs’ international strategies. By focusing on recurring and high-stakes strategic resource allocation decisions, the study disentangles the time and space dimensions of the deployment of capabilities. The findings indicate a positive effect on performance for MNEs’ spatial consistency across subsidiaries for expatriation (as a …

Employment Of Returnees And The Performance Of Multinational Subsidairies In China, Huanglin Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Returnees, those who went overseas for higher education and then returned to their home countries, represent a unique group of employees for multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, they have been ignored in the MNE staffing literature which has developed a staffing typology based on nationality, specifically parent country nationals (PCNs), host country nationals (HCNs), and third country nationals (TCNs). We propose that cultural understanding is a more appropriate criterion than nationality in categorizing staff in MNEs and compare returnees with the existing categorizations of MNE staff. Returnees may be closer to the ‘balanced individuals’ that MNEs need compared with either expatriates …