Corporate reputation has roots in national beliefs about the role of the business corporation in society; these beliefs are constructed in accordance with the preferences of powerful stakeholders. Building on a stakeholder-power approach to corporate governance, we investigate whether differences in the legal rights and protections of shareholders, creditors, and workers across countries affect the general public’s reputation assessments of business corporations. Using a sample of 593 of the largest publicly traded companies in the world from 32 countries during 2007 to 2011, we find that in societies where shareholders enjoy a high degree of legal rights, the impact of stock market returns on corporate reputation becomes more positive. Likewise, the negative relationship between earnings volatility and reputation becomes greater when creditor rights are stronger. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence of an interaction effect between labor rights and corporate social performance on corporate reputation.

We examine the role of three types of stakeholders in the uneven adoption of an organizational practice in different countries, arguing that organizational practices achieve widespread use only when they are consistent with the interests of the most powerful social actors as enshrined in legal rights. Building on a “stakeholder-power” approach to corporate governance, we examine whether the interests of shareholders, workers, and banks are consistent with the practice of hostile takeovers. Regressions using data on as many as 37 countries between 1988 and 1998 lend support to predictions that hostile takeovers increase in frequency with the extent to which shareholder rights are protected and decrease with the degree to which workers' and banks' rights are protected. We discuss the implications for the analysis of comparative institutions and for organizational theory.

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Purpose The purpose of this study is to explain how factors relating to resource availability affect managerial risk-taking with regard to the geographic and institutional proximity of cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) targets. The paper further considers the impact of organizational learning by testing the moderating effect of the acquiring firms’ prior international M&A experience. Design/methodology/approach This study uses linear regression with robust standard errors to account for dependence among clustered observations at the firm level. The authors used country and industry fixed-effects specifications to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Findings The results suggest that when internal and external resources are more abundant, firms pursue cross-border M&As that are more geographically and institutionally distant. The findings further indicate that a firm’s prior international M&A experience positively moderates the aforementioned relationships.. Research limitations/implications Extending the behavioral theory of the firm beyond organizational slack resources, the results highlight the importance of taking a multi-level, open-systems perspective of the strategic impact of resource availability. The authors’ theory and findings also provide a more nuanced view of the critical role organizational learning plays in the relationship between resource availability and organizational outcomes. Originality/value This is the first study to the authors’ knowledge that develops and tests a theoretical model exploring the impact of both internal (organizational slack) and external (environmental munificence at both the industry and home-country levels) resource availability, as well as prior organizational experience on an important multinational business practice.

Purpose Liberal arts colleges (LACs) have played a crucial role in the foundation and development of the US higher education system. Today, these schools face numerous organizational and environmental challenges that threaten their performance and even survival. This paper aims to examine whether Senge’s (1990) vision of the learning organization can serve a useful function in responding to these challenges. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual analysis was conducted based on research relating to learning organizations, LACs and the liberal arts tradition. Findings The paper identifies significant congruence between learning organization and liberal arts/liberal learning principles. LACs may benefit from applying and modifying Senge’s (1990) framework to their own unique situations. Originality/value While The Fifth Discipline has certainly contributed to the lexicon of higher education, the role that Senge’s (1990) framework plays in LACs has received scant research attention. This paper investigates the applicability of Senge’s approach to an underexplored context.

This chapter examines the relationship between stakeholder theory and research on the learning organization. It begins by describing the history of the stakeholder concept and some of the most important ideas and trends relating to stakeholder theory. Next, the authors discuss some apparent similarities in the principles underlying stakeholder theory and Senge’s (1990) articulation of the learning organization. They also examine the types of stakeholders that received the greatest attention by Senge (1990). The chapter continues with a review of the various ways that subsequent learning organization scholarship has approached stakeholders and stakeholder theory. The authors find that Senge’s The Fifth Discipline had a strong “anchoring” effect on subsequent learning organization research that has tended to direct attention to just a few major stakeholder theory topics and types of stakeholders. The concluding section offers recommendations on how principles relating to stakeholder theory and the learning organization can be further combined in the future.

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