Lobbying as a potent political marketing tool for firm performance: A closer look

This study endeavors to enhance political marketing literature about the impact of lobbying on firm performance. Our sample is composed of 140 U.S. firms and spans the years 2007–2014 to encompass the 2007–2009 recession and the subsequent recovery period. Our findings indicate that lobbying expenses positively contribute to firm performance. Also, government contracts in both ways, dollar amount and number of government contracts, act as mediators between lobbying expenses and firm performance. In addition, organizational slack moderates the relationship between lobbying expenses and government contracts. The managerial implications suggest that lobbying expenses can be leveraged as a potent tool for firm performance. Firms with larger lobbying efforts acquired both, higher dollar amounts and a greater number of government contracts.     

Social Innovation in an Interconnected World: Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue and identifies the need for continued work in the area of social innovation, which seeks to create social value and progress and engages multiple stakeholders. Our special issue highlights various levels and stakeholders involved in the process and outcomes of social innovation. While mainstream innovation, which has been traditionally driven by profit maximization motivations, tends to create winners and losers, social innovation that focuses on redistribution of knowledge, discovery, and cocreation changes the key assumptions and logics of the conventional innovation theory. This introduction first briefly outlines current social innovation literature, presents the contributions created in this special issue, and concludes with the identification of three priorities (or needs) for social innovation researchers.     

Enhancing Stock Market Return with New Product Preannouncements: The Role of Information Quality and Innovativeness

To advance development and application of signaling theory in the new product preannouncement literature while seeking to resolve ambiguity regarding the influence of innovativeness on stock market return, the role of information quality is examined. Specifically, this study investigates the effect of innovativeness across low and high levels of information quality. The results, ascertained using event study methodology on a sample of 243 new product preannouncements collected over a nine‐year period, indicate that higher information quality increases the strength of the positive relationship between innovativeness and stock market return. The findings offer managers insight into what role information quality plays in new product preannouncements that can help their firms generate higher stock market return.     

The Impact of Innovative Culture on Individual Employees: The Moderating Role of Market Information Sharing

Current innovation literature provides a very limited understanding of the potential impacts of innovative culture on employees. Building on resource‐based view theory, the authors investigate theoretically and empirically how a perceived innovative culture can be a building block for a firm's competitive resource and advantage by creating superior employee‐level outcomes and how a market information‐sharing process may moderate these effects. The authors identify three distinct types of individual‐level outcomes stemming from an innovative culture. The three outcome variables—job satisfaction, organizational dynamism perception, and firm performance perception—reflect employees’ psychological and cognitive reactions to the process of creating organizational innovation and innovative culture. The authors collect survey data from 3960 individual employees in China. Their findings first show that a perceived innovative culture significantly and positively affects employees’ job satisfaction and perceptions of organizational dynamism and firm performance. Moreover, organizational dynamism perception plays an important mediating role among three employee‐level outcomes by converting job satisfaction into firm performance perception. The authors also find support for the direct, positive effect of a perceived market information‐sharing process on job satisfaction but not on perceptions of organizational dynamism and firm performance. Most importantly, their findings on the significant moderating role of a market information‐sharing system contribute to innovation theory by emphasizing the importance of the innovation/marketing interface: bundling market information sharing and innovative culture together enhances employees’ positive attitudes and perceptions. This result also suggests that examining only the direct effects of innovative culture and market information sharing may lead to incorrect conclusions as to how to manage the cultural infusion process: the market information‐sharing process shows only a weak effect on job satisfaction and no effect on perceptions of organizational dynamism or firm performance. Organizational designs should ensure simultaneous consideration of both variables in the cultural transformation process to enhance employees’ derived benefits in the process of creating an innovative culture. We offer a new insight: a perceived market information‐sharing process may strengthen the effect of an innovative culture on employees’ job satisfaction and organizational dynamism perception, while it may weaken the effect of an innovative culture on firm performance perception. This more nuanced view of market information sharing in the cultural infusion process presents new wisdom and calls for further studies in entrepreneurial innovation.     

The influence of organic organizational cultures, market responsiveness, and product strategy on firm performance in an emerging market

Organizational culture is a strategic resource that influences a range of activities within firms, and empirical evidence from management and marketing demonstrates that it impacts performance. In this study, we investigate how organic types of organizational culture (i.e., adhocracy and clan) serve as a strategic resource to influence marketing effectiveness and performance in an emerging economy, using an extended form of the resource-based view as our theoretical framework. We posit that organic cultures, which are relatively dominant in emerging-nation firms, serve as antecedents of competitive advantage and superior performance. We selected China as the context to test the veracity of our model and use multiple informants and archival performance data to minimize common method variance. Our results support the proposed model and demonstrate that organic cultures impact market responsiveness, while confirming the critical roles of market responsiveness and product strategy change in producing superior performance. We further demonstrate a direct effect between clan culture and product strategy change, in addition to its indirect effect. Importantly, our results uncover that, although individually either adhocracy or clan culture can significantly improve the firm’s responsiveness, their combined effect does not enhance market responsiveness; that is, their interaction yields a negative coefficient. Additionally, the influence of organic cultures on market responsiveness varies across different industry types. These important differences, along with theoretical contributions and managerial implications of our findings, are discussed, and several avenues for future research are proposed.     

Internal Stakeholders' Claims on Branding a State University

Educational institutions, as part of the service sector, face unique challenges in developing and implementing an internal brand management (IBM) program. Internal stakeholders generally resist branding strategy. A case study of a public U.S. university describes the branding approach, which incorporated the multiple interests into an integrated strategy. The article contributes to our understanding of “doing branding” in the higher education sector and the unique role of IBM before, rather than after, a branding strategy has been developed.     

Sectoral Effects of Monetary Policy: The Evidence from Publicly Traded Firms

This article examines the impact of monetary policy on net sales of publicly traded firms in various sectors of the U.S. economy. We find that monetary policy has a heterogeneous effect on firms in different industries, with the strongest effect on firms in Retail and Wholesaling. Balance sheet characteristics, especially size, influence the impact of policy. Larger firms in several industries are able to mitigate the effect of policy. We find mixed results for firms' working capital, short‐term debt ratio, and leverage ratio with respect to the operation of the credit channel of monetary transmission mechanism.     

EXTERNAL MACROECONOMIC IMBALANCES AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT INFLOWS TO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

We employ relative size of International Monetary Fund (IMF) credit as a proxy for interdependent macro variables that are associated with external macroeconomic imbalances or balance of payment (BOP) crisis to investigate how they impact foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Relative size of IMF credit as a share of gross domestic product sends two mixed signals to multinational enterprises (MNEs). First, it is a signal that a country is facing an actual or potential BOP crisis. Second, countries that seek IMF credit typically agree to implement a set of “IMF conditionality” before financial credit is disbursed. This may signal to MNEs that policy reforms that must accompany IMF financial credit may result in ex ante positive economic outlook and stability. We find that relative size of IMF credit is negatively (positively) correlated with FDI inflows to developing countries below (above) a threshold value of economic freedom. The main implication of these findings is that MNEs may view developing countries with below average index of economic freedom as lacking institutional capabilities to implement recommended IMF policy reforms when faced with an actual or potential BOP crisis. Our results are robust across alternative model specifications and consistent with the theory of catalytic finance. (JEL F21, F23, F33)     

The sexual division of care in mainland China and Hong Kong

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the sexual division of domestic labour in Hong Kong and mainland China is influenced by traditional Chinese values and contemporary political and economic factors. It discovers that women in these two societies assume far more caring responsibilities than men. This is similar to women in traditional Chinese society. An important reason is that the political and economic conditions in Hong Kong and mainland China favour the reproduction of traditional Chinese values. Hence it can be argued that the unequal division of domestic labour between men and women will continue as long as the political and economic conditions are unfavourable to women. Le but de cet article est d’explorer jusqu’à quel point les valeurs chinoises traditionnelles et les facteurs politiques et économiques contemporains influencent la division sexuelle du travail domestique à Hong Kong et en Chine. Cet article a découvert que, dans ces deux sociétés, les femmes ont beaucoup plus de reponsabilités sociales que les hommes. Ceci est similaire à la société chinoise traditionnelle. Une raison importante est que les conditions politiques et économiques à Hong Kong et en Chine favorisent la reproduction des valeurs chinoises traditionnelles. On peut donc dire que la division inégale du travail domestique entre les hommes et les femmes continuera tant que les conditions politiques et économiques seront désavantageuses pour les femmes.