Media Coverage of Firms: Background, Integration, and Directions for Future Research

Abstract

Over the past years, media coverage of firms has received significant scholarly attention. However, the resulting literature is spread across multiple disciplines and, therefore, varies with regard to its theoretical underpinnings and contextual settings. This makes it challenging for scholars to understand the contributions of this literature, to identify areas of inquiry, and to develop an encompassing research agenda. In this review, we address these issues by surveying the diverse literature on media coverage of firms to develop an integrative framework of the antecedents and consequences of media coverage that highlights paths for future research. Specifically, we identify the three theoretical perspectives—economic, institutional, and social-psychological—that the literature generally assumes on the news media. In addition, we highlight differences between strategy, finance, governance, and crisis contexts and review results from articles examining media coverage of firms in aggregate. In each context, we identify the primary functions of the news media as well as antecedents and consequences of media coverage. We proceed to develop an integrative framework for media coverage of firms by building on these findings and by examining the empirical methods used to measure media coverage, particularly regarding the measurement of specific coverage attributes. We highlight the gaps in current knowledge that our framework exposes and derive opportunities for future research that can further scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of firm media coverage.

The Organizational Improvisation Landscape: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

“…Our method is modeled after recently published Journal of Management reviews (e.g., Foss & Saebi, 2017; Graf-Vlachy, Oliver, Banfield, König, & Bundy, 2020; Saebi, Foss, & Linder, 2019). We restricted our review to articles that contained the term “organi* improvi*” in the title, abstract, or keywords.…”

“…This gleaning process narrowed the list to 173 articles. Finally, we employed a snowball search protocol similar to that of Graf-Vlachy et al (2020) and identified 13 additional articles to be included in our review. Thus, the final sample consists of 186 manuscripts.…”

Strategic leadership and technological innovation: A comprehensive review and research agenda

“…With respect to innovation output, scholars should utilize recent developments in text‐mining and data‐mining techniques to develop more nuanced measures of innovation output. For example, scholars could try to capture the public's perceptions of firms' innovativeness through semantic analyses of press coverage (Graf‐Vlachy, Oliver, Banfield, König, & Bundy, 2020), sentiment analyses of social media data (Gautam & Yadav, 2014), or analyses of company rankings (e.g., Forbes, 2018). Alternative ways of determining the quantity and quality of newly developed products, services, and processes could include systematic analyses of trademark filings (Castaldi, 2020), the content and structure of company websites (Mirończuk & Protasiewicz, 2020) or mission statements (Hanisch, Haeussler, Graf‐Vlachy, König, & Cho, 2018), firms' 10‐K filings (Hoberg & Phillips, 2016), or analyst reports (Bellstam, Bhagat, & Cookson, 2020).…”

Family Offices and Institutional Change in Europe: A Comparative Analysis

“…We used newspaper articles because they provide comparable information through time and across countries (Duriau, Reger, & Pfarrer, 2007) and are a credible and legitimate source of information in research adopting an institutional perspective (Graf-Vlachy, Oliver, Banfield, König, & Bundy, 2019). Their use ensures the availability of comparable data that is independent of the access to informants (Duriau et al, 2007), which is difficult given the secrecy of family offices (Decker & Lange, 2013;Decker & Günther, 2016;Eigenheer, 2014;Glucksberg & Burrows, 2016).…”

“…They reflect the dynamics of stakeholders' perceptions of family offices in their institutional contexts and the evolution of these contexts. Their bias reflects their core readers' interests, journalists' attitudes, and sources of information (Graf-Vlachy et al, 2019;Hoffman, 1999;von Bloh et al, 2019).…”