Copenhagen Business School

In this article we delve into the elites’ evolving forms of power to study the relationship between social change and capital accumulation. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the field of power and relying on the identification of the field’s effective agents in Switzerland, we investigate the changing relations among the most important forms of capital. We use prosopographical data spanning six historical periods from 1910 to 2015 and thanks to multiple correspondence analysis we uncover the changing structure of the field of power. We show the dominance of economic and organisational network powers throughout history. While both forms of power opposed before the Second World War, they could be accumulated together between the 1950s and the 1980s but opposed again in the recent period. The article contributes to ‘big picture’ sociology, offering historical accounts of broad social trends and provides evidence of a recent return to past inequality logics.

We present a novel analysis about factors driving divestment for deletion (DD) and divestment for redeployment (DR) of foreign subsidiaries. While relatively recent studies recognize DR, along with conventionally assumed DD, their empirical analysis leaves some ambiguity concerning how the presence of peer subsidiaries affects DD and DR simultaneously. Adopting a portfolio perspective to foreign subsidiaries, we predict that the presence of related peer subsidiaries increases the hazard rate of DR more than DD. This association between related peer subsidiaries and DR-DD choice is moderated by performance gaps between focal and peer subsidiaries and effective control by parent firms, especially when peer subsidiaries locate outside focal subsidiaries’ host countries. Competing-risk analysis of a unique dataset informing divestment types of foreign subsidiaries strongly supports the argument. Our findings concerning differential impacts of the presence of peer subsidiaries on DD and DR suggest that failing to distinguish between them leads to underestimation of the effect for DR.

This paper examines how creative entrepreneurs manage the interplay of art and business before and during a disruptive environmental event. While numerous studies have explored the financial impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the creative industries, our research provides a fresh perspective on how the pandemic influenced creative entrepreneurs' practices. We present our empirical findings from a study that involved 20 semistructured interviews with creative entrepreneurs in the Norwegian Arctic, conducted twice, that is, before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our findings show that the creative entrepreneurs initially balanced the aesthetic and market logics similarly. However, when COVID‐19 struck, the creators and creative sustainers rebalanced the logics of aesthetics and the market in distinct ways. These findings contribute to the literature on creative entrepreneurship in different ways: First, we refine the concept of creative entrepreneurs by noting that creators and creative sustainers, due to their distinct institutional contexts, interpret societal disruptions differently. Second, we expand on the skills needed in creative entrepreneurship, explaining how the actors quickly adjust and rebalance institutional logics during an environmental disruption. The study provides practitioners with a clearer framework for navigating disruptions, emphasising the importance of adaptability in business strategies and the need to uphold artistic integrity while also addressing market demands.

Conflicts involving tech companies and data privacy between the US and China have evolved into a technology decoupling between the two countries. Nationalistic sentiments have been on the rise in both countries as well. This study examines how the rising geo-technological race and conflict affect people’s perception of data privacy. In particular, we examine whether reminding Chinese internet users of the US-China technological decoupling influences their willingness to share personal data. We conduct a randomized online experiment where we remind people of the US–China technology competition in artificial intelligence or the US sanctions on Chinese tech companies and examine the impact on respondents’ willingness to share personal data with private companies, the central government and local government. We find that the US-China tech decoupling treatments increase people’s willingness to share their data with private companies. Exploring the heterogeneous treatment effects by gender and education level reveals that nationalism is likely the mediating factor that explains why some people, especially, males and the college educated, are more likely to increase their willingness to share personal data when exposed to these treatments. Moreover, the US-China tech decoupling treatments directly increase people’s perception that data is a key input for Chinese company competitiveness in AI development. In sum, we find that reminding people of the US-China tech decoupling can invoke nationalistic sentiment and increase people’s willingness to share data with private companies and the government in China. The randomized control trial was pre-registered on the AEA RCT Registry (AEARCTR-0007526). The public URL of https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/7526 and the digital object identifier (DOI) is 10.1257/rct.7526-1.0.

Research Summary In this special issue introduction, we analyze how a firm's international ownership affects its global strategy. We reinterpret the literature by grouping dominant owners into four categories: (1) individuals (entrepreneurs and families), (2) labor (managers and employees), (3) state (national and subnational governments), and (4) institutions (pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and impact investors). We argue that although all seek financial returns from their investments, they differ markedly in their non‐financial objectives, resulting in differences in strategies for expanding abroad. We also propose that the home country context modifies the impact of ownership on global strategy, directly by influencing the prevalence of owner types, and indirectly by affecting owners' incentives and constraints in their pursuit of non‐financial objectives. Managerial Summary Although all firms' owners search for financial returns from their investments, differences across dominant owners in their non‐financial objectives result in significant diversity in the global strategies of invested firms. We clarify these differences by grouping owners into four categories: (1) individuals (entrepreneurs and families), (2) labor (managers and employees), (3) state (national and subnational governments), and (4) institutions (pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and impact investors). We explain how their specific non‐financial objectives influence the global strategies of invested firms. We also discuss how the characteristics of the home country affect both the prevalence of types of owners and owners' strategies. The special issue articles illustrate some of these ideas.

Working from home (WFH) significantly impacts firms’ operations by introducing altered control challenges regarding the facilitating and influencing of decisions. WFH can drastically limit the control options that managers—according to organizational control theory—can rely on, particularly behavior control and informal control, shifting emphasis to outcome control. Yet, the effectiveness of outcome control can also be constrained in a WFH setting, potentially resulting in a control loss. We conducted a field study among all customer due diligence teams of Nordea bank, exploiting teams’ abrupt shift to WFH after the COVID‐19 disruption to examine how team leaders’ (TLs') reliance on outcome control based on performance information supported remote team operations and performance. Multilevel analysis of survey data collected in May/June 2020 from both TLs and team members (TMs) matched with other firm data shows that TLs’ reliance on outcome control supported favorable changes in TMs’ task performance after shifting to WFH. This effect is mediated by changes in team communication effectiveness, which, supported by performance information, enabled TLs to better manage team operations conducted from home. Collectively, our findings highlight the role of outcome control in supporting WFH by enabling remote team operations and performance.

This article reorients Critical Management Studies (CMS) literature on alternative organization by proposing a processual perspective that relies on Foucault’s concept of ‘critique’ and Mathiesen’s notion of ‘the unfinished’. Rejecting the predefined and normative conception of alternativity that guides much CMS literature, we suggest viewing alternatives as constituted through ever-changing processes of making and breaking dominant orders. This perspective moves the study of alternatives forward by allowing researchers to discover alternativity in unexpected places and appreciate the constitutive intertwinement of ‘the alternative’ and ‘the mainstream’. Most importantly, however, it helps us study the organizational evolution of alternatives and their ongoing struggle to remain deviant. We demonstrate the analytical utility of our approach through a comparative study of two political parties: Independents for Frome (IfF) in the UK and Alternativet in Denmark. Building on this analysis, we explore how and why one organization appears to be thriving while the other seems moribund. We further outline three ‘liberating tactics’ that alternatives may use to remain unfinished and thus alternative: reiteration, compartmentalization, and alliancing. In conclusion, we discuss what it might mean to study alternatives in a processual manner and point to future avenues of research.

Objectives Climate change is an undeniable reality that has never before been experienced at such a higher scale of social, physical, and mental levels. Its impact has been studied at environmental, health, economic and sustainable survival levels, but the toll that it takes on the mind, especially among the youth, needs further studies to highlight the impact. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the impact of climate change on anxiety among adolescents and young adults in the Global South. Methods This questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey was conducted among students from all levels of education in the Global South. A total of 760 respondents including 202 from schools, 158 from colleges, and 400 from degree-awarding institutes and universities, (200 were undergraduates and 200 were graduates) voluntarily participated in the study. Based on their age and gender distribution, the average age was 18.56 years, 363 (47.7%) were males, and 397 (52.3%) were females. The Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale (HEAS) was used to investigate the level of ecological anxiety among the youth in the Global South. The three categories of anxiety symptoms in terms of affective symptoms, behavioural symptoms, and personal impact were investigated. Results The results revealed that the affective symptom shows a moderate positive and statistically significant relationship with age, higher the age higher the affective symptom of anxiety. The impact of income on affective symptoms, the respondents with a higher income have the highest mean (M=1.61), the higher the income the higher the affective symptoms of anxiety. To assess the difference in the anxiety symptoms based on the education level of respondents, the highest mean value was found among those with graduate (M=1.78), followed by college (M=.88), university (M=.83) and school (M=.82), which means that the highest affective symptoms are faced by graduate students. Conclusions The results show a moderate positive and statistically significant relationship between age and income on anxiety symptoms, the higher the age and income higher the affective symptom of anxiety. The youth of the global south feel little anxiety due to climate change; this is detrimental and needs urgent remedial measures. To combat climate change requires a multi-pronged approach, with solutions ranging from personal responsibilities and actions to large-scale systemic changes to tackle this critical challenge.

Motivated by the stereological application of volume estimation, this paper is concerned with numerical integration on the real line, employing function values at a finite set of randomly chosen points. The sampling points are modeled by a stationary point process, with the estimators being Newton–Cotes quadratures. Our comprehensive probabilistic analysis crucially extends existing results regarding the approximation error and variance, accommodating more general integrands and non-ergodic sampling processes. Notably, these findings are used to formulate novel asymptotic confidence intervals, a considerable challenge given the usual absence of limit distributions. To underscore the practicality of our approach, we apply it to a stereological simulation study. Specifically, we establish confidence intervals for the volume of a three-dimensional ellipsoid, based on section areas obtained from randomly positioned parallel planes.

Much research has examined the drivers of firms’ R&D investments. However, many questions remain with respect to the role of R&D as a learning target and as a means of achieving legitimacy, particularly in the context of imitative R&D strategy. We develop a theory that integrates different explanations of why firms engage in imitation, highlighting efficiency-enhancing learning and legitimacy and focusing on firms’ R&D investment decisions. We argue that deviations in firm performance from social aspiration levels determine the salience of learning and legitimacy goals. Specifically, as performance moves from lying below to being above social aspiration levels, organizations gradually shift from a primary focus on learning vicariously from others’ R&D investments toward a focus on mimicking them to maintain legitimacy. An analysis of a sample of 2,081 Spanish manufacturing firms, as well as an online experiment with 863 participants from the manufacturing industry largely support our hypotheses. JEL CLASSIFICATION: D22, M10, O32

This study investigates workers' preferences for expanding training and education at the cost of reducing unemployment benefits in the context of budgetary trade‐offs. It focuses on non‐standard employment types at the individual level and the ratios of expenditures on training and unemployment benefits within labour market policies (LMPs) at the county level. Analysing a dataset that combines European Social Survey Round 8 data (2016) with country‐level data from the OECD for 19 European countries, the findings reveal that workers' preferences vary depending on employment type and LMP expenditure allocation. The analysis indicates that part‐time permanent workers are more supportive of increasing training at the expense of unemployment benefits, while part‐time temporary workers show less support. Full‐time temporary employees and solo self‐employed workers exhibit no significant differences from standard employees. From a comparative perspective, support for reallocating funds to training is lower in countries that dedicate a larger share of their LMP budget to training but higher in countries that spend more on unemployment benefits within their total LMP expenditure.

Addressing grand challenges confronts organizations with global–local and other paradoxes that can result in ‘paradox knots’ where responding to one paradox impacts another. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study of an NGO operating in Uganda, we study how such knots impact ‘paradox salience’, i.e. their visibility and perceived urgency. We elucidate the knotted nature of two paradoxes: a global–local paradox and an identity elasticity paradox. Our analysis shows how the salience of these paradoxes developed inversely as the organization’s response to the global–local paradox amplified the salience of the identity elasticity paradox while its response to the identity elasticity paradox mitigated the salience of the global–local paradox. With these findings we contribute to the paradox literature by developing the concept of knotting mechanisms that tie paradoxes together and at the same time impact their salience within organizations. We explain how such mechanisms can produce different types of paradox knots and discuss what differentiates these types. We further contribute to the literatures that discuss NGOs’ local adaptation processes and identity elasticity by showing how the fluidity of organizational identity acts as a precondition for the local contextualization of development solutions.

Recent research has revealed the significant role of perceived cultural differences, or cultural novelty, in shaping the intercultural experiences of diverse individuals. Yet, our understanding of how cultural novelty influences the relationship between language and cultural adjustment remains limited. This study addresses this gap by examining the moderating effect of cultural novelty on the relationship between foreign-language proficiency and cultural adjustment. Survey data from 1,092 international students in five countries were analyzed using mediation and moderated mediation analyses. The moderating effect of cultural novelty was confirmed, specifically in the host-language context, where higher cultural novelty significantly weakened the relationship between host-language proficiency and socializing with domestic students. Moreover, this research illuminates the influence of the lingocultural context on cultural adjustment. This study has important implications for higher education institutions. It demonstrates how cultural novelty can impact the ability of foreign-language proficiency to enhance student adjustment and the overall educational experience.

This study reports the effectiveness of a theory-driven Internet based intervention aiming at reducing participants’ ( N = 415) clothing purchases. An information-only intervention and a combination of information, goal setting, goal feedback, commitment, and self-regulatory strategies was applied in four different experimental conditions, including a passive control group. At a 1-month post-test, only participants in the combined intervention groups significantly reduced their clothing purchases compared to the control and information only group, on average by 58.59% for a condition with individual goal setting and by 46.82% for a condition with collective goal setting as compared to a 1-month pre-intervention period. At a 3-month follow up, consumers across all groups reduced their clothing purchases. We explore changes in mechanisms of action and their role for changes in clothing purchases. Specific goal setting, but not a general goal to reduce clothing consumption, and goal conflict were linked to changes in purchase behavior.

This study explores how gendered norms are performed in organizations in Saudi Arabia and the boundary work managers engage in when (re)producing a norm. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews with firm owners, managers, and government representatives in Riyadh, the analysis highlights the fluidity between politics and religion in Saudi Arabia and how this has shaped local regimes of recognition and organizational forms of gendered space. Based on the findings, four interconnected forms of performativity are theorized—precarious, sovereign, hyperbolic, and paradoxical performativity. Thereby, this study advances a novel perspective on how the intimate entanglement between cultural and religious norms and laws engenders different forms of performativity through which managers try to pursue an ideal gendered arrangement in the workplace. Future areas for research and practical implications are proposed to deepen the understanding of the interplay between performative agency and organizational dynamics and policies.

The nonidentifiability of the competing risks model precludes the empirical researcher from obtaining informative estimation results unless she is willing to impose restrictions on the model. Inspired by the heavy use of exclusion restrictions in other areas of statistics, we impose an exclusion restriction to derive a new identifiability result for the competing risks model. This exclusion restriction could be more easy to justify than the restrictions of existing approaches which are on the dependence structure or marginal distributions. It is shown that the degree of risk dependence of an Archimedean copula is identifiable without parametric restrictions on the marginal distributions of the competing risks. We introduce a semiparametric estimation approach for the nonparametric marginals and the parametric copula. Our simulation results demonstrate that the degree of risk dependence can be estimated without parametric restrictions on the marginal distributions. It therefore overcomes the main disadvantage of the copula graphic estimator.

The housing markets in districts across the United Kingdom (UK) co-move over time. We use the dynamic factor model to decompose the co-movement in house prices of the smallest possible geographical unit into national, regional, and idiosyncratic factors. Using the Bayesian time-varying parameter VAR (TVP-VAR) model, we study the dynamic impact of uncertainty shocks on synchronization in housing markets. We find that the estimated national factor accurately tracks the overall housing market cycles in the UK and explains nearly all the variations in East, South–East, and South–West districts. Furthermore, the results from TVP-VAR indicate that the estimated response of the national factor to uncertainty shocks is negative. However, the magnitude of the effect is more pronounced and persists longer in the case of housing price uncertainty shocks compared to overall economic uncertainty. Overall, our results suggest that uncertainty about house prices is a primary driver of the national factor.