Abstract: We examine the emergence of new organizational forms from the perspective of indirect participants, not the two commonly-identified main players—entrepreneurial firms and interested audiences. We argue that negative responses from indirect existing stakeholders to new organizational forms make the differences between current and new forms more salient to audiences. The perceived dissimilarity then positively affects form emergence processes. Entrepreneurial firms can also exploit the contrast effect created by existing stakeholders by explicitly highlighting dissimilarity. Our empirical setting is the South Korean newspaper industry and legal contestations between existing stakeholders and online newspapers. We found that arbitrations positively affected online-newspapers’ founding rate. Online-newspapers also improved their own legitimation by explicitly emphasizing the distinctiveness of online journalism compared to print media in their mission statements.

Abstract: This proposal explores how firms in pioneering industries respond to loss of legitimacy upon technological failure. We define pioneering industries as sectors that are built around emergent and yet-to-be-created technologies that have the potential to dramatically alter life as we know it, opening up possibilities that are unimaginable in our present technological state and have captured human imagination on a grand scale before the industry was born, so that there is a pre-existing emotional connection between the public and the envisioned possibilities the technology might afford. We use traditional and social media data on Virgin Galactic’s 2014 test flight crash to ascertain how the firm managed storytelling through different means of communication to restore three kinds of legitimacy: cognitive, pragmatic, and inspirational.

Abstract: This paper joins a recent stream of studies in viewing categorization as an endogenous process and examining the role of strategy in the emergence of new categories. We used archival data from the US dietary supplement industry to tell the account of how dietary supplement makers successfully created a new and unique category for themselves in the 90’s, which allowed their industry to grow 1000% in the subsequent decade. Our findings provide a realistic picture of the categorization process with a particular attention to the various stakeholders and their strategies to enable/disable institutional change in their environment. Our story answers previous calls to move beyond tracing the evolution of category labels and constitutes a step towards understanding the social construction and dissemination of categories.

Abstract: Throughout the stakeholder literature the stakeholder power has been frequently studied. Nevertheless, some aspects still remains unclear, such as the possible relationship between stakeholder power and the attendance level of its interests. The paper contributes proposing a mechanism to explain this relationship and providing an empirical test. A method using content analysis and non-parametric tests was employed. Data collection was over IPO prospectus of the Brazilian Stock Exchange. The sample was of 147 IPO cases during 2003 to 2013. Three industries were selected for studying: Retail, Banking and Real Estate, as well as three different stakeholders: employees, consumers and suppliers. Although not conclusive, the findings showed a positive relationship between power and the attendance level of interests for consumers and employees, but not for suppliers.