International audienceA challenge facing cultural-frame institutionalism is to explain how existing institutional logics and role identities are replaced by new logics and role identities. This article depicts identity movements that strive to expand individual autonomy as motors of institutional change. It proposes that the sociopolitical legitimacy of activists, extent of theorization of new roles, prior defections by peers to the new logic, and gains to prior defectors act as identity-discrepant cues that induce actors to abandon traditional logics and role identities for new logics and role identities. A study of how the nouvelle cuisine movement in France led elite chefs to abandon classical cuisine during the period starting from 1970 and ending in 1997 provides wide-ranging support for these arguments. Implications for research on institutional change, social movements, and social identity are outline

International audienceSociological researchers have studied the consequences of strong categorical boundaries, but have devoted little attention to the causes and consequences of boundary erosion. This study analyzes the erosion of categorical boundaries in the case of opposing category pairs. The authors propose that categorical boundaries weaken when the borrowing of elements from a rival category by high-status actors triggers emulation such that the mean number of elements borrowed by others increases and the variance in the number of elements borrowed declines. It is suggested that penalties to borrowing in the form of downgraded evaluations by critics exist, but decline as the number of peers who borrow increases. The research setting is French gastronomy during the period from 1970 to 1997, when classical and nouvelle cuisines were rival categories competing for the allegiance of chefs. The results broadly support the authors' hypotheses, indicating that chefs redrew the boundaries of culinary categories, which critics eventually recognized. Implications for research on blending and segregating processes are outlined

Research summary: Raters of firms play an important role in assessing domains ranging from sustainability to corporate governance to best places to work. Managers, investors, and scholars increasingly rely on these ratings to make strategic decisions, invest trillions of dollars in capital, and study corporate social responsibility (CSR), guided by the implicit assumption that the ratings are valid. We document the surprising lack of agreement across social ratings from six well-established raters. These differences remain even when we adjust for explicit differences in the definition of CSR held by different raters, implying the ratings have low validity. Our results suggest that users of social ratings should exercise caution in interpreting their connection to actual CSR and that raters should conduct regular evaluations of their ratings. Managerial summary: Ratings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) guide trillions of dollars of investment, but managers, investors, and researchers know little about whether these ratings INTRODUCTIONHow much do we really know about corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Though many managers, investors, and scholars have embraced this concept, the ratings most often used to assess CSR have rarely been evaluated. If these ratings are invalid, then trillions of dollars of capital is Keywords: corporate social responsibility; ratings; corporate governance; socially responsible investing; performance measurement *Correspondence to: Aaron K. Chatterji, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Road, Durham, NC 27708, U.S.A. E-mail: ronnie@duke.edu Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. potentially being misallocated and numerous academic findings may also not be valid.In this study, we assess the convergent validity (that is, agreement) of six well-established social ratings. We find that these raters exhibit low convergence in their assessments of CSR. 1 This lack of agreement is not just due to announced differences in raters' theorization of CSR; for example, if they measure performance relative to an industry 1 When discussing the behavior of raters, we use the term convergence. When referring to the rating they provide, we use the term convergent validity. We do not wish to imply that convergence implies a particular time trend. We apply this term to describe overlap across ratings systems at a particular point in time. A. Chatterji et al.group or in absolute terms. Instead, the low agreement implies all or almost all of the ratings have low validity. This result has important implications for managers, investors, and researchers who use these ratings.Many managers spend significant time and resources on CSR activities. For example, analysts claim that nearly every Fortune 500 company releases some kind of sustainability report.2 Eight thousand firms have signed the UN Global Compact as a sign of their commitment to CSR.3 As CEOs and other top managers respond to growing pressure from multiple stakeholders over social issues (Bansal and Roth, 2000;Crilly...

International audienceWe advocate for more tolerance in the manner we collectively address categories and categorization in our research. Drawing on the prototype view, organizational scholars have provided a 'disciplining' framework to explain how category membership shapes, impacts, and limits organizational success. By stretching the existing straightjacket of scholarship on categories, we point to other useful conceptualizations of categories - i.e. the causal-model and the goal-based approaches of categorization - and propose that depending on situational circumstances, and beyond a disciplining exercise, categories involve a cognitive test of congruence and a goal satisfying calculus. Unsettling the current consensus about categorical imperatives and market discipline, we suggest also that audiences may tolerate more often than previously thought organizations that blend, span, and stretch categories. We derive implications for research about multi-category membership and mediation in markets, and suggest ways in which work on the theme of categories in the strategy, entrepreneurship, and managerial cognition literatures can be enriched

Champaign EERO VAARA Aalto School of Business and EMLYON Business School We conceptualize the roots of cognitive, linguistic, and communicative theories of institutions and outline the promise and potential of a stronger communication focus for institutional theory. In particular, we outline a theoretical approach that puts communication at the heart of theories of institutions, institutional maintenance, and change, and we label this approach communicative institutionalism. We then provide a brief introduction to the set of articles contained in the Special Topic Forum on Communication, Cognition, and Institutions and describe the innovative theorizing of these articles in the direction of communicative theories of institutions. Finally, we sketch a research agenda and further steps and possibilities for theory and research integrating communication and institutions.

International audienceDeviance from social norms has been extensively examined in recent strategy research, leaving the strategic implications of conformity largely unexplored. In this article, we argue that firms can elect to conform to a norm along two dimensions: compliance with the goal and level of commitment to the procedures. We then produce a typology of four norm-conforming behaviors, which allows us to isolate differentiated effects of conformity on firm reputation. We examine the corporate environmental disclosures of 90 U.S. firms and find that firms derive different reputational rewards depending on whether they conform to the goal or procedure dimension of the environmental transparency norm. In addition, the relationship between conformity and reputation is moderated by the firm's prior reputation and the stringency of the normative environment

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