In this article we reveal how network-enabled imitation processes impact young small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) internationalization, and how a firm's network position as well as its experiential knowledge moderate imitative behavior in internationalization modes. Building on institutional, network, and organizational-learning theory, we suggest that firms imitate the internationalization modes of their peers in their network. Moreover, we argue that a firm's imitation propensity depends on two important boundary conditions: network position and past experience. Applying a longitudinal event history analysis to analyze the complete population of 977 German biotechnology firms between 1996 and 2012 largely supports our hypotheses. Our findings reveal that firms imitate the internationalization modes of their peers in a precise manner. This implies that the imitation of others can initially serve as a presumably convenient low-risk shortcut to a planned or experience-driven internationalization process. Furthermore, our results confirm that this imitation process is channeled through formal network relations and that central network positions that are associated with superior information access, enhanced legitimacy, and status may promote deviating behavior. Acknowledging the interplay of different learning sources, our findings additionally show that initial internationalization mode choices of SMEs can have a lasting effect on subsequent internationalization behavior. Overall, our study contributes to a more nuanced view of imitative behavior of internationalizing SMEs and its boundary conditions, and highlights future research opportunities that exist for considering imitation and its implications in international business research.

We discuss whether organization theory is susceptible to fashion. Theories of scientific progress often assert that scientists' research is guided exclusively by the need to solve problems that are left unexplained by existing theories. In contrast, we argue that scientists, to some extent, create and follow fashions. We formulate a number of hypotheses on fashion in scientific communication and test them with a sample of 44 concepts that were published and discussed in 1784 articles in organization studies journals from the year 1960 until 2005. We suggest that conditions such as reputation of authors and of the outlets in which concepts are published, or the provision of a methodology for empirical analyses, increase the attractiveness of academic publications and eventually set off a fashion. Overall, our results show that fashion is present in communication within organization studies while demonstrating that the field is characterized by trends toward positivistic empirical studies and economic reasoning. We conclude by discussing whether fashion has positive or negative effects on theory development, whether it is avoidable at all in the field of science, and how evaluation systems impact on fashion and innovation in organizations theory.

This paper analyses how top managers account for their consumption of popular management concepts. By 'consumption' we refer to managers acting as active users of popular management concepts within their organizations. After reviewing the relevant literature, we argue that the logic of appropriateness is a better theoretical perspective to view, understand and analyse managers' accounts of concept consumption than is the logic of consequence. We apply this perspective to extensive interviews we conducted with top managers in Germany. Based on the managers' own accounts of how they understand and apply popular management concepts, we identified four discourse categories: (1) learning from others' experiences, (2) controlling organizational change, (3) gaining external legitimacy and (4) collective sensemaking. We argue that these discourse categories all draw on the social norm of rationality central to managerial identity, while differing in socially defined rules about how rationality is realized in typical management situations. Our findings strongly encourage researchers, when investigating popular management concepts in the future, to take into account the situational nature of rationality that circumstantiates the consumption of concepts.

This study seeks to explain how the innovation potential entailed in the structural characteristics of a diverse alliance portfolio can be leveraged by two different alliance management capabilities of a focal firm: portfolio coordination and proactive partner selection. An analysis of German biotechnology firms, based on database and survey data, indicates that each alliance management capability positively interacts with portfolio diversity to foster innovation. In addition, regarding their joint influence as capability bundle on the portfolio diversity-innovation link, portfolio coordination and proactive partner selection seem to substitute rather than complement each other. These results suggest that firms realize innovation benefits from a diverse set of external alliance partners only when they focus on and apply internal coordination or partner selection routines to manage these alliances, thus acting as either portfolio coordinators or portfolio configurators.

This study investigates the relationship between institutional pressure and a firm's strategic behavior in the context of Corporate Social Action. We posit that as an organization's susceptibility to institutional pressure increases, its proclivity to conform to and alleviate environmental concerns and pressures to establish or maintain its legitimacy increases. To explain variation in a firm's strategic response to institutional pressures and its engagement in Corporate Social Action, we focus on two factors: public ownership and media attention. Analysis of the largest publicly traded German firms indicates that greater public ownership reduces a firm's propensity to engage in Corporate Social Action, while firms with less public ownership are more proactive in social engagement. However, when confronting greater media attention, firms with greater public ownership are more reactive in pursuing conforming strategies and increasing Corporate Social Action engagement.

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics in the field of organization studies. We focus on the market for scholarly publishing and trace how many and which kinds of concepts have been developed and diffused in publications over the last 48 years. We argue that scholars in the publishing market must deal with two kinds of uncertainty: uncertainty on the delicate balance of maintaining research that is both novel and attentive to existing schools of thought, and uncertainty related to the heterogeneity of institutional logics that guide research in the field. We propose that concepts are a means of uncertainty reduction for two reasons. First, working with concepts allows considering both novelty and continuity. Second, working with concepts in a way that follows the dominant field logic helps to reduce uncertainty about what is valued as publishable in the field. We find that the number of concept articles in organization studies has increased, particularly concept articles that align with the dominant logic of positivism.

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We theorize that vicarious learning theory provides a framework for understanding how small- and medium-sized start-ups can learn from the activity of a variety of regional actors, not just from the activity of colocated peer firms (i.e., other start-ups). Furthermore, we suggest that the magnitude of the impact of vicarious learning is influenced by a firm’s own specific experience with a variety of actors. We use longitudinal data of the population of German biotechnology start-ups and pharmaceutical multinational corporations (MNCs) between 1996 and 2015 across 19 German biotechnology regions. We show that colocated start-ups’ international expansion is positively impacted by the regional network centrality of colocated MNCs and that this relationship is moderated by a start-up’s direct alliance experience with these entities. Our results highlight how important it is for researchers to differentiate the distinct and separate influences a wide variety of actors have on vicarious learning to more clearly identify outcomes of this influence. We also provide evidence that the influence of MNCs is heterogeneous and depends on whether MNCs are domestic or foreign and on their R&D intensity, yet find that country of origin has no significant influence. Our study makes a number of contributions, one of which is research on alliances, supporting conflicting arguments on the subsequent impacts of experience. We further find that certain types of alliance experience may not be transferrable to induce start-ups’ future international expansion, and in some cases may even hinder it.