We conduct an exploratory qualitative comparative case analysis of the S&P 1500 firms with the aim of elaborating theory on how corporate governance mechanisms work together effectively. To do so, we integrate extant theory and research to specify the bundle of mechanisms that operate to mitigate the agency problem among publicly traded corporations and review what previous research has said about how these mechanisms combine. We then use the fuzzy-set approach to qualitative comparitive analysis (QCA) to explore the combinations of governance mechanisms that exist among the S&P 1500 firms that achieve high (and not-high) profitability. Our findings suggest that high profits result when CEO incentive alignment and monitoring mechanisms work together as complements rather than as substitutes. Furthermore, they show that high profits are obtained when both internal and external monitoring mechanisms are present. At the same time, however, monitoring mechanisms evidently combine in complex ways such that there may be simultaneity of substitution and complementarity among and across the various monitoring and control mechanisms. Our findings clearly suggest that the effectiveness of board independence and CEO non-duality-governance mechanisms widely believed to singularly resolve the agency problem-depends on how each combine with the other mechanisms in the governance bundle.

We utilized a multilevel approach to both estimate the relative importance of industry, corporate, and business segment effects on firm performance, as well as to demonstrate how it enables the investigation of specific strategic factors within each class of effects. Our results confirmed previous findings suggesting that although business segment effects carry the most relative importance, industry and corporate effects are also important. Among the findings regarding specific factors, we found that industry concentration and munificence, as well as the resource environment provided by corporate parents, impact performance. These findings suggest that investigators should consider both industry and corporate environments when examining performance.importance of industry, corporate, and business unit effects on firm performance. Since the seminal studies of Schmalensee (1985) and Rumelt (1991) on this issue, several scholars have entered the debate (From a practical standpoint, the identification of the factors which most substantially contribute to firm performance would enable managers to focus their attention on influential factors rather than peripheral ones.Despite the vast attention this line of inquiry has received, however, this literature offers varying conclusions about the relative contribution of each effect to firm performance (see Bowman and Helfat, 2001, for a comprehensive review). The

We would like to thank Associate Editor Heather Haveman and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and developmental comments. We also thank the participants of the O&S Workshop at the University of Southern California and of an OTREG meeting held at the University of Cambridge for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper, especially

We draw from theories of institutions and collective identities to present a threefold framework of institutional change-involving institutional logics, resources, and social actors-that furthers our understanding of the mitigation of corruption. Those social actors intent on reforming corruption function as institutional entrepreneurs, and their success depends both on articulating an anticorruption institutional logic that incorporates corruption-disabling identities, cognitive schemas, and practices and on having or developing the resources necessary to propagate the new anticorruption institutional logic. We thank Sandra Robinson and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.