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Publications
Publications (46)
Contemporary organizations increasingly embrace multiple identities, but such hybridity may fuel innovation. This research examines communicative drivers of organizational hybridity (i.e., network, community, and institutional) and how plural organizational identities relate to the creation of novel ideas. Research composed of survey, archival, and...
Social enterprises (SEs) have emerged throughout the world to address societal challenges through market-based activities and innovation. Research has focused on how SEs manage the tensions arising from the combination of social-welfare and market logics, neglecting the institutional complexity that arises in authoritarian regimes where the state p...
This study draws on institutional theory to provide insights into how new forms of organizations gain legitimacy under institutional voids. Based on interviews with leaders of 42 Chinese social enterprises (SEs), we find that dominant stakeholders—the state—are ambivalent about new ventures’ agendas and practices, which is displayed in their being...
Given the critical role of legitimacy in attracting key resources for organizational survival and growth, organizational and strategic communication research has long sought to understand the mechanisms essential in improving organizational legitimacy. Guided by stakeholder research and configurational thinking, we examine three interconnected comm...
Despite scholarly consensus that communication is significant to entrepreneurial organizing, communication research in entrepreneurship is nascent. To advance theory and empirical research, this article presents a systematic review of entrepreneurship studies published in communication journals. Through a comprehensive keyword and literature search...
Organizational listening is critical in times of change, especially for organizations that must meet diverse stakeholder interests. Organizations’ views on who they are—whether they are altruistic or self-oriented entities—may shape organizational listening practices in meaningful ways. To explore the undertheorized topic of organizational listenin...
Digital innovation is the future of work. The ongoing and interlinked transformation of digital technologies, work, communication, and organizing raises important theoretical questions. Integrating recombination-based innovation theory and institutional theory of communication, this article contributes a novel framework that specifies the theoretic...
Organizational listening to solicit, consider, and incorporate information and inputs from diverse stakeholders is critical for tackling organizational and societal challenges. Yet, despite the potential benefits of organizational listening, researchers studying stakeholder engagement and communication have focused on how organizations speak to sta...
Growing research suggests social ventures (SVs) variably combine social and profit orientations in core organizational features, and this variation in hybridity leads to divergent organizational dynamics and outcomes. However, no comprehensive and precise measurement scale has emerged to capture the varying degrees of hybridity across SVs. To advan...
Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) increasingly consider how to engage external stakeholders, such as clients and partners, in their efforts to adapt to the fast‐changing and highly competitive environment through innovation. Although the existing literature offers evidence that stakeholder engagement can help promote organizational innovation, much of...
Increasing evidence reveals that social media visibility produces paradoxes in which actors simultaneously confront contradictory, even mutually exclusive, conditions. Yet limited research has explored how actors perceive these paradoxes and manage resulting tensions in a politically repressive context. Ubiquitous government oversight, information...
Research suggests that organizations tend to collaborate with others that share similar ascribed status, but focuses less on the role of value homophily. To advance a fuller understanding of how organizations select partners, this study examines the roles of—and relationship between—status and value homophily in interorganizational collaboration (I...
Building on the symbiotic sustainability model, this study
investigated how offline collaboration networks are related to
organizations’ representational networks on social media. We
analyzed survey data from disaster risk reduction organizations
in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions, along
with these organizations’ representational ne...
Nonprofit scholars have long considered stakeholder targeting communication (STC), an important mechanism of organizational accountability to meet stakeholders’ diverse interests and needs. However, research has yet to systematically examine the antecedents and outcomes of organizations’ STC to advance a more comprehensive understanding of how orga...
Organizational and communication studies have established that communication plays a critical role in organizational innovation, because internal and external communication allows individuals, groups, and organizations to recombine existing knowledge into new ideas. In light of this, this research re-directs our attention to the specific communicat...
Humanitarian organizations involved in disaster risk reduction (DRR) play a major role in helping communities better cope with disaster risks. But a lack of research has hindered our understanding of how to equip organizations with the capacity to carry out effective DRR measures. To address this question, this study unpacks the determinants of hum...
Although nonprofit collaboration is commonplace, recent research suggests that faith-based organizations (FBOs) are less likely to collaborate than other nonprofits. This study builds on prior FBO, collaboration, and nonprofit capacity research to examine the influence of religiosity and operational capacity on FBOs’ within- and cross-sector partne...
Increasingly, nonprofit organizations engage in interorganizational collaboration to address large‐scale social problems. Scholarship typically focuses on the characteristics of both within‐sector and cross‐sector partnerships of two collaborating organizations or all partnering organizations involved in a collaboration, but we know little about th...
Social networks have long been viewed as a structural determinant of health. With the proliferation of digital technologies, numerous studies have examined the health implications of online social networks (OSNs). However, the mechanisms through which OSNs may influence individual health are poorly understood. Employing a social network approach, t...
This study examines the processes of complex innovation adoption in an interorganizational system. It distinguishes the innovation adoption mechanisms of organizational-decision-makers (ODMs), who make authority adoption decisions on behalf of an organization, from individual-decision-makers (IDMs), who make optional innovation decisions in their o...
A plethora of research has examined the effects of privacy concerns on individuals' self-disclosure on social network sites (SNSs). However, most studies are based on the rational choice paradigm, without taking into account the influence of individuals' emotional states. This study examines the roles of stress in influencing the relationship betwe...
Guided by the dialogic communication framework, stakeholder theory, and research on implicit framing, this study examines how stakeholder engagement reflects organizations' dialogic social media use in the form of stakeholder targeting and message framing. Analysis of survey data from 156 humanitarian organizations and semantic network analysis of...
Guided by the dialogic communication framework, stakeholder theory, and research on implicit framing, this study examines how stakeholder engagement reflects organizations' dialogic social media use in the form of stakeholder targeting and message framing. Analysis of survey data from 156 humanitarian organizations and semantic network analysis of...
Online social networks (OSNs), comprised of varying types of relations among actors that interact through social technologies, are widespread in today's media environment. However, questions remain whether we are moving towards convergence within the sub-disciplines of communication and with other disciplines in OSN research. This article pursues t...
Capacity-building initiatives are popular among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. In response to a lack of valid and reliable capacity measures for NGOs working on various social issues, Shumate and colleagues developed an 8-dimension, 45-item NGO capacities instrument, based on data from U.S. NGOs. However, the proliferation of inter...
A growing body of research has treated interorganizational networks as dynamic systems of communication. However, most longitudinal network studies have confounded the processes of new tie formation and old tie maintenance, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the processes of network change. Based on the multitheoretical multilevel framewor...
Social entrepreneurship (SE) and organization scholars typically conceptualize social ventures as hybrid organizations that embody both social and market logics. However, they are limited by a lack of a reliable and valid instrument to evaluate how social and market logics are differentially manifested in social ventures. This gap is significant as...
Although the amount of research on interorganizational networks has increased significantly in recent years, few studies have examined the antecedents to interorganizational network portfolios—organizations’ configuration of their relationship networks with other organizations. To address this gap, this study examines how firms’ interorganizational...
Interorganizational collaboration relies on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, previous ICT research often takes place within a single organization, lacking insight into how ICTs sustain interorganizational structures. This study examined both the product categories and functional uses of ICTs for interorganizati...
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play a pivotal role in combating HIV/AIDS. Yet research on the social construction of HIV/AIDS has investigated the discourse of the government, media, and the public but not NGOs. Drawing on the technology affordance framework, this study examines NGOs' discourse on social media and websites in China to underst...
Cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) case-based theory and research have long argued that nonprofits that engage in more integrative and enduring cross-sector partnerships should increase their organizational capacity. By increasing their capacity, nonprofits increase their ability to contribute to systemic change. The current research investigat...
Understanding customer preferences in consideration decisions is critical to choice modeling in engineering design. While existing literature has shown that the exogenous effects (e.g., product and customer attributes) are deciding factors in customers’ consideration decisions, it is not clear how the endogenous effects (e.g., the intercompetition...
In recent years, the amount of research on digital inter-organizational networks among Chinese non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has increased greatly. However, few studies have examined the offline networks of Chinese NGOs. To fill this gap, the present study investigates the size and spread of offline Chinese NGO networks. In particular, we e...
Customers’ choice decisions often involve two stages during which customers first use noncompensatory rules to form a consideration set and then make the final choice through careful compensatory tradeoffs. In this work, we propose a two-stage network-based modeling approach to study customers’ consideration and choice behaviors in a separate but i...
Although research has examined nonprofit organizations' use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and websites, we know little about how nonprofit organizations use ICTs in the context of interorganizational collaboration. This article reports the results of an exploratory study on how nonprofit organizatio...
Research typically focuses on one medium. But in today’s digital media environment, people use and are influenced by their experience with multiple systems. Building on media ecology research, we introduce the notion of integrated media effects. We draw on resource dependence and homophily theories to analyze the mechanisms that connect media syste...
Nongovernmental organization (NGO) hyperlink networks are institutionalized connective public goods. They influence which actors and what aspects of social issues are made visible to the public in search engine results. To understand how contextual forces and institutional pressures influence who hyperlinks to whom online, this research examines a...
Advances in information and communication technologies connect media organizations, media content, and audiences in new ways. This essay advocates the use of a relational approach to study journalism and media in the information age. This article begins with a review of the communication network typology, highlighting its applicability to journalis...
This study tackles the gap in public relations research on what drives users of microblogs in China to follow nonprofit organization (NPO) accounts and share (retweet) their posts, from a multidimensional perspective of the NPO, the microblog audience, and the post features. Using a content analysis of Sina Weibo data of 95 NPO accounts, results su...
This study examines a hyperlink network among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China. Using social media activity, indicated by the presence of a profile, length of time since social media adoption, number of accounts followed, and number of posts, we investigate NGOs' hyper linking behaviors from a holistic media ecology perspective. Drawi...
This study examines Chinese journalists' Weibo practices by analyzing 2659 Weibo posts by journalists. Previous studies indicate that Western journalists generally “normalize” their posting activities on social media to fit their professional standards and practices, but this normalization practice is conducted in a more complicated way in China. O...