rodolphe durand

Auteur/autrice : durand

  • why and how much environmentalists make firms invest in green energy

    This article theorizes about and tests the conditions under which firms’ commitment to an industry is influenced by social movement organizations (SMOs) that favor the industry. We argue that the more prominent SMOs are within an industry, the more a firm increases its commitment to that industry by expanding its operations; yet, this main effect should be moderated substantially by a firm’s idiosyncratic characteristics. The current research predicts that a firm’s location, its sensitivity to information about the industry’s potential, and its history of associations with activists determine the magnitude of the effect of SMO prominence on its strategic commitment to the industry. We test and find support for these hypotheses using a longitudinal data set of European manufacturers of solar photovoltaic cells between 1990 and 2011. The findings offer new insights for literature on social movements and organizations, as well as strategic management research.

    get the article: Differental Firm Commitment

  • Article published in American Journal of Sociology: Deference as a strategic behavior

    Since the early days of French cinema, financiers have been mocked for their lack of culture and shortsightedness. Countless films, from Godard’s Le Mépris to more recent pieces, depict financiers as moral enemies attempting to invade the cultural world. When financiers entered the film industry in the mid-1980s to help remedy a shortage of capital, specialized investment funds, called SOFICAs, experienced the very tangible consequences of the stigma attached to their profession in the film world.

    The financial fund managers soon found out that film producers were reluctant to establish relationships with organizations raising money in the market to invest in film. While there was not much they could do to dissipate the deeply-entrenched negative perception of financiers – which still persists today – some of the funds selectively invested in arthouse films. Financing these high-risk low-profit products did not make much economic sense, and in effect hurt the funds’ overall profitability. But, this investment strategy, our study reveals, helped some of the funds convert financial capital into social capital, and eventually gain a foot hold in the film industry. The funds that had more bankers on their board, were not locked in strict financial goals, and were associated with Cannes award-winning films, were more likely to engage in such a strategy.

    In a world of increasing conflict and division, understanding how social actors of different standings, occupation, and status liaise and work together is critical. The work of sociologist Ervin Goffman and his followers have emphasized the role deference plays in accomplishing this goal. Investing in art house movies helped SOFICAs convey appreciation and respect to film producers, smoothing strained relationships. Engaging in deference was a costly strategy that not all funds chose to follow. But it was the price of admission to be paid to be accepted in the movie business.

     

    get the article Organizational Deference AJS

  • Explaining why spanning categories can lead to positive evaluations and better performance

    Studies suggest that category-spanning organizations receive lower evaluation and perform worse than organizations focused on a single category. We propose that (1) these effects are contingent on clients’ theory of value and that as clients expect more sophisticated services, they tend to value category spanners more positively and (2) the evaluation of producers mediates the relationship between category spanning and performance. We test our hypotheses using original data on corporate legal services in three markets (London, New York City, and Paris) over the decade 2000–2010. We find that (1) category spanners receive a better evaluation, and more so when their categorical combination is more inclusive and (2) evaluation mediates significantly the relationship between category spanning and performance. This study enriches our understanding of how audiences apprehend a whole market category system and why organizations span categories.

     

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  • Why CSR practices diffuse in big firms

    How do subsidiaries respond to normative demands from both their headquarters and local external constituents? We propose that subsidiaries pay varying levels of attention to either demands depending on their peers’ norm-conforming behavior, resulting in heterogeneous practice implementation. We study the implementation of 25 practices, associated with three corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in 101 worldwide subsidiaries of a multinational enterprise (MNE). Consistent with the idea that attention is limited and therefore selective, we find that external peers’ conformity to the CSR norm directs subsidiaries’ attention toward the CSR-related demands of external constituents at the expense of the demands from the headquarters. However, internal peers’ conformity increases attention to both external and headquarters’ demands related to CSR. As higher attention levels result in higher practice implementation, internal and external peers’ conformity drives the heterogeneity of practice implementation in the MNE. Our results suggest the need to rethink the influence of peers’ conformity on subsidiaries’ implementation of practices, as it not only triggers mimicry based on legitimacy but also and simultaneously a more strategic response based on internal and external competitive threats and attention allocation.

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  • Alignment and Conventionality, the two faces of conformity

    Beside making organizations look like their peers through the adoption of similar attributes (which we call alignment), this paper highlights the fact that conformity also enables organizations to stand out by exhibiting highly salient attributes key to their field or industry (which we call conventionality). Building on the conformity and status literatures, and using the case of major U.S. symphony orchestras and the changes in their concert programing between 1879 and 1969, we hypothesize and find that middle-status organizations are more aligned, and middle-status individual leaders make more conventional choices than their low- and high-status peers. In addition, the extent to which middle-status leaders adopt conventional programming is moderated by the status of the organization and by its level of alignment. This paper offers a novel theory and operationalization of organizational conformity, and contributes to the literature on status effects, and more broadly to the understanding of the key issues of distinctiveness and conformity

    get the forthcoming paper

     

  • do CSR raters converge?

    Raters of firms play an important role in assessing domains ranging from sustainability to corporate governance to best places to work. Managers, investors, and scholars increasingly rely on these ratings to make strategic decisions, invest trillions of dollars in capital and study corporate social responsibility (CSR), guided by the implicit assumption that the ratings are valid. We document the surprising lack of agreement across social ratings from six well-established raters. These differences remain even when we adjust for explicit differences in the definition of CSR held by different raters, implying the ratings have low validity. Our results suggest that users of social ratings should exercise caution in interpreting their connection to actual CSR and that raters should conduct regular evaluations of their ratings.

    get the forthcoming paper