Eric Yanfei Zhao

University of Oxford | OX

Microfinance is a promising tool for addressing the grand challenge of global poverty. Yet, while many studies have examined how microfinance loans affect poor borrowers, we know little about how microfinance organizations (MFOs) themselves finance their lending activities. This is an important oversight because most MFOs do not self-fund their len...

Research summary : A ttaining optimal distinctiveness—positive stakeholder perceptions about a firm's strategic position that reconciles competing demands for differentiation and conformity—has been an important focal point for scholarship at the interface of strategic management and institutional theory. We provide a comprehensive review of this l...

Many social problems reflect sets of beliefs and practices-or "institutional logics"- that operate at the societal level and rationalize the marginalization of certain categories of people. Studies have examined the consequences this has for individuals, but have largely overlooked how organizations that address such issues are affected. To underst...

In this paper, we develop an exemplar-based model of the emergence and evolution of proto-categories—new groupings of products that are only weakly entrenched, but have the potential to become widely institutionalized—and examine how different positioning strategies of new entrants vis-à-vis the exemplar of a proto-category affect entrant performan...

Optimal distinctiveness—being both “similar to” and “different from” peers—is an important imperative of organizational life and represents a common research question of organizational scholars across various disciplinary domains such as strategy, organization theory, entrepreneurship, and international business. This book reviews the historical gr...

Despite growing attention to the role of home countries in studies of emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), there is limited focus on how international expansion affects EMNEs’ home conditions. Drawing on signaling theory, we propose that EMNEs’ international expansions serve as a signaling mechanism that shapes perceptions of stakehol...

Research summary: A core question in strategy research is how firms should position themselves to gain favorable audience evaluations. Emphasizing the heterogeneity in audience predispositions, we propose that firms can gain an audience composition premium by strategically positioning themselves to gain more (less) attention from audiences with pos...

Social classes shape entrepreneurial pursuits in that entrepreneurs from lower social class groups face more resource deficiencies compared to those from higher social class groups. In this study, we theorize that being resourceful with a particular resource—time—helps ventures run by lower-class entrepreneurs achieve better performance. However, w...

Optimal distinctiveness is a theory that emphasizes actors’ drive to be both “the same and different at the same time” (Brewer, 1991, p. 475). Originating as an approach to explain individuals’ self-construals, the theory has expanded over time to embrace the organizational level and beyond, becoming a major area of research where organization theo...

Research Summary Cultural entrepreneurship theory suggests that entrepreneurial narratives need to be optimally distinctive—neither portraying an offering as too similar to nor too distinctive from the conventions of its product category—for attracting superior demand. Building on and extending this literature, we propose that the benefits and down...

ABSTRACT Research summary: This research develops a multilevel framework to study optimal distinctiveness (OD) at two levels. We distinguish between within-organization distinctiveness and between-organization distinctiveness of product design and examine how they independently and interactively influence performance. Analyzing a unique data set...

Studies that apply gender role congruity theory (GRCT) have focused on resource providers’ biased evaluations and women entrepreneurs’ internalization of gender stereotypes as primary mechanisms explaining the gender gap in venture performance. We provide an institutional foundation for GRCT and argue that informal political-cultural institutions—n...

Entrepreneurial resourcefulness is a concept that resonates with practitioners and scholars alike from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical backgrounds. Despite the prevalence and promise of this concept, the literature on entrepreneurial resourcefulness is fragmented and lacks cohesion in how it is labeled, conceptualized, measured, and depl...

Optimal distinctiveness is a theory that emphasizes actors' drive to be both "the same and different at the same time" (Brewer, 1991: 475). Originating as an approach to explain individuals' self-construals, the theory has expanded over time to embrace the organizational level and beyond, becoming prominent in theoretical explanations of organizati...

In this paper, we return to the roots of strategic entrepreneurship research by examining the dynamic tension between opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking activities and by testing key resources that affect both activities. More specifically, we identify the empirical manifestations of the two activities—market entry timing decisions and entra...

Time: Friday, Aug. 9, 2019, 8:00am-9:30am Location: Boston Hynes Convention Center 208 Theme: comparing and bridging macro and micro approaches in optimal distinctiveness research Confirmed panelists: Noah Askin, David Deephouse, Rudy Durand (Keynote-Macro), Stine Grodal, Geoff Leonardelli (Keynote-Micro), Michael Lounsbury, Margaret Ormiston, Cy...

In this paper, we problematize the growing literature on hybrid organizing to demonstrate that research on hybrids and entrepreneurship can benefit from considering the degree of hybridity in organizing the exploitation of potential opportunities for the creation of both economic and social value. Recent work has moved beyond discrete categorizatio...

The growing number of studies which reference the concept of mission drift imply that such drift is an undesirable strategic outcome related to inconsistent organizational action, yet beyond such references little is known about how mission drift occurs, how it impacts organizations, and how organizations should respond. Existing management theory...

Studies have argued that hybrid organizations often face tradeoffs between the competing goals that they pursue. Yet we know little about the actual nature of such tradeoffs, nor how they might be shaped by different contextual factors. Focusing on social enterprise, we address these gaps by: (1) developing a framework that can be used to predict t...

Organizations constantly face the competing pressures to be both " similar to " and " different from " their peers (Deephouse, 1999; Durand & Calori, 2006). Conformity helps organizations gain legitimacy and avoid performance penalties associated with deviance from existing norms, expectations, and practices (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Differentiati...

Research on crisis management and resilience has sought to explain how individuals and organizations anticipate and respond to adversity, yet—surprisingly—there has been little integration across these two literatures. In this paper, we review the literatures on crisis management and resilience and discuss opportunities to both integrate and advanc...

PurposeIn this chapter, I develop a theoretical framework to address the financial–social performance debate in strategy research, drawing on literatures on institutional logics and organizational forms. Methodology/designI test the theoretical framework using an exploratory empirical approach based on ideal types with global microfinance data. A j...

How can organizations spanning institutionalized categories mitigate against the possibility of reduced attention by audiences? While there has been a good deal of research on the illegitimacy discount of category spanning, scant attention has been paid to how organizations might strategically address this potential problem. In this paper, we explo...