When goals collide: Essays on corporate governance, stakeholders, and the concept of the firm.

摘要

I explore how various types of organizational constituents, or stakeholders, shape cooperative and competitive interfirm behavior at the industry, national and multinational levels. My three essays draw on separate theoretical paradigms and empirical settings to study different organizational phenomena, each of which is of special importance to, organization theory, strategy and corporate governance research. In my first essay, I use Major League Baseball data to analyze how business organizations distinguish between partners and rivals within their own industry. Team dyads are found to trade more frequently when the rivalry between them is at moderate levels, as measured by geographic distance and league structure. Consistent with social reference theory but contrary to the principle of social homophily, teams are more likely to trade when there managers are different from one another in terms of salient socio-demographic characteristics. Manager mobility between teams increases the likelihood of trades. In my second essay (joint with Mauro F. Guillén), I build on prior research in organizational sociology to propose a "stakeholder-power" theory of corporate governance. We suggest that each country's unique corporate governance system is determined in part by the stakeholders that possess the legally protected power to defend their interests against stakeholders with opposing interests. We test this model by analyzing hostile takeover activity across countries and find that takeovers increase with the extent that shareholder rights are protected, and decrease with the degree to which the rights of workers and commercial banks receive privilege. My third essay, which was inspired by past economics and strategic management research on mergers and acquisitions, examines aggregate patterns of corporate acquisition activity across countries. I find that corporate acquirers are more likely to target firms from nations that are similar to their own home country in terms of labor standards, cultural distance and political interests. The number of cross-border acquisitions between countries is also inversely related to the level of political uncertainty in the home country. Overall, the dissertation affirms the utility of performing management research at differing levels of analysis and using diverse theoretical paradigms that are chosen based on the practical questions to be studied.