Stephen J. Mezias

INSEAD | INSEAD · Area of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise

During industry emergence, what we call the proto-industry phase, the lack of agreement about legitimate organizational forms between audiences and firms is a key problem. We develop an ecological model of emerging institutional pressures among audiences and firms during the emergence of new industries to understand these challenges. We develop a t...

Purpose – Over the last 15 years, articles about the base of the pyramid (BOP) have begun to appear in scholarly business journals. Although attention was driven initially by claims that corporations could earn a fortune selling to these consumers, it became clear that this is difficult. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/a...

Although Chinese investment in Africa has long been a subject of policy debate (Alden, 2007 ; Brautigam, 2009; Michel and Beuret, 2009; Rotberg, 2008; US Senate, 2012),1 it has received relatively little attention from business scholars. We aim to correct this oversight, not least because Chinese investment in Africa represents new and important op...

The first proposed presentation is a paper co-authored by Julie Battilana, focusing on how imprinting at founding influences paradoxical performance tensions between social and economic goals faced by mature social enterprises. Investigating the nature and development of these paradoxical tensions in a growing social enterprise, Marya Besharov offe...

Over the last 15 years, articles about the world’s poorest populations, known as the base of the pyramid, have begun to appear in scholarly business journals. Although the initial wave of attention was driven by claims that large corporations could earn a fortune selling to these consumers, it soon became clear that executing on this premise was mo...

Nowhere else is operational value creation approach more in need or more in demand than in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. Advocating and building operational capabilities requires active investment in business processes, human capital and a long term horizon. By developing capabilities of managers to deliver value from operations will...

In the current economic climate firms face economic pressures to cut costs and reduce risk as well as pressures from the capital markets to find growth opportunities. Trends in globalization imply that tapping into the latent growth potential of a poorly understood consumer class living in far-flung countries, so-called base of the pyramid markets,...

A burgeoning private equity (PE) industry provides investment capital to build the capacity of an economy for innovation and entrepreneurial growth. We argue that for PE to contribute to this capacity building requires effective systems for allocation of financial capital to the private sector and an ecosystem of supportive organizations. To illust...

Securing the support of internal stakeholders is a fundamental organizational pursuit, one that is especially difficult during periods of organizational change. One reason for this difficulty is that employees' conceptions of the organization's identity do not correspond with managers' desired images for the future organization. Consequently, emplo...

During industry emergence, collective actors may not yet exist as a mechanism for coordination. To explore whether informal network ties might fill this void, we develop an ecological model of new industries. Using simulation methodology, we obtain the following results: First, network ties increase the number of surviving firms and total industry...

Fairs, festivals and competitive events play a crucial role in the creative industries; yet their significance has been largely overlooked. This book explores the role of such events through a series of studies that include some of the most iconic fairs and festivals in the world. It brings together a team of distinguished scholars to examine art f...

Despite the importance of the processes by which legitimacy barriers to the emergence of new industries are overcome, direct study of them has been largely absent from the literature. We develop and test a model of how capacities for social action are created and deployed to overcome cultural barriers to new industries. Specifically, we argue that...

Past research examining country-level corruption found that corruption reduces foreign direct investment. However, this research lacks implications for multinational corporations considering operating in high corruption countries. Recent international research has examined subsidiary challenges beyond initial investment decisions, but has not addre...

We both arrived at Stanford in September 1982 to begin the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). The beginning was not auspicious; it rained heavily during orientation, an unusual event in itself, but a fitting precursor to one of the worst El Niňo's on record. By February of our first winter in California, there was one period in...

The emergence of new industries has remained conceptually and empirically problematic, particularly in terms of overcoming what Aldrich and Fiol (1994) characterize as the legitimacy barriers to emergence. Ecological theory suggests legitimacy is a mere spillover of increasing density; social movement theory suggests the need for organized collecti...

the South Florida International Business Group seminar participants and Sri Zaheer.

This study of the emergence of the film industry in the U.S. between 1893 and 1920 contributes to the growing literature linking legal environments and population dynamics. This was an era characterized by a shift to active anti-trust policy, which manifested itself in legal action to disband a trust that had dominated the industry, the Motion Pict...

In this study, we focus on the use of measures of national cultural distance as a proxy for liabilities of foreignness. In particular, we focus on the dominant measure of national cultural distance: a linear combination of the differences between the two countries where the workplaces are located using indices from previously published research. Ou...

Using field data from an American financial services organization, we examined the effects of three important variables in Cyert and March's (1963) initial conceptualization of the aspiration-level adaptation process: The previous aspiration level, performance feedback, and social comparison. Past findings obtained in controlled contexts (Glynn et...

America is known as the litigious society (Lieberman, 1981), and American organizations have become increasingly legalistic (Sitkin and Bies, 1993; Sutton, Dobbin, Meyer, and Scott, 1994). Of current organizational theory perspectives, neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991) has had the clearest focus on how the state and the legal env...

The ecological (Hannan and Freeman, 1977) and institutional (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) perspectives have emerged as two dominant but distinct paradigms in organizational theory since their inceptions over a decade ago. Initially, one reason why these theories may have seemed irreconcilable, at least superficially, was the difference in the research qu...

The so-called independent film production companies dominated the 1996 Academy Awards. Of the five nominees for best picture, a Hollywood studio produced only one. Van Gelder (1996: 9) described the phenomena of the rise of the much smaller and more specialized independents, asserting that the films produced and distributed by these firms demonstra...

Throughout this book our focus has been on developing the contribution of organization theory to the study of entrepreneurship. We have done this in terms of four primary ideas; we will review each of these and suggest some implications for future research from each as a way of concluding our book. The first idea is that demand side perspectives on...

One of the earliest and most consistent claims of organization theory has been that organizations face a liability of newness (Stinchcombe, 1965). This claim has obvious relevance to the study of entrepreneurship and is reflected in the emerging consensus among organizational scholars of entrepreneurship that new firms and new industries face a leg...

In this paper we explore corporate change and renewal in large, established organizations by examining how different types of innovation strategies affect organizational outcomes. We start from one of the hallmarks of the management literature: a concern with the trade-off between the flexibility and efficiency of large bureaucratic organizations (...

The study of entrepreneurship has traditionally focused on the founders of new organizations, especially those that emerge as leaders in the creation of new industries. Much of this work follows what Gartner (1989) called the ‘traits’ approach. Studies of this type posit a causal link between the founding and success of new organizations and the pe...

This paper provides insight for practitioners by exploring the collective process of entrepreneurship in the context of the formation of new industries. In contrast to the popular notions of entrepreneurship, with their emphasis on individual traits, we argue that successful entrepreneurship is often not solely the result of solitary individuals ac...

This paper provides insight for practitioners by exploring the collective process of entrepreneurship in the context of the formation of new industries. In contrast to the popular notions of entrepreneurship, with their emphasis on individual traits, we argue that successful entrepreneurship is often not solely the result of solitary individuals ac...

Past research has established that large bureaucratic firms are less innovative than other firms. This reduced innovativeness is likely to be exacerbated when large firms engage in market control. In cultural industries, the effects can be especially pernicious, resulting in the failure to provide audiences with artistic quality or product diversit...

This paper explores the possible implications of population-level learning in the evolution of organizational populations by examining the potential influence of modes of interorganizational imitation on the persistence of organization-level change in organizational populations. We use an institutionalized ecology of learning model to develop propo...

This article addresses theoretical and research frontiers for learning research, a second theme of Professor Argyris essay---the lead article in the “Crossroads” section. We outline three key theoretical questions for further work. We call for more systematic empirical learning research, suggesting that the paucity of such research may have resulte...

We examine the decision process of a public policy task force that plays a role in establishing financial reporting standards to determine what affects the kinds of decisions made. The task force is charged with resolving emerging problems in the design of rules that govern the reporting of information provided to the public by firms that sell secu...

This essay examines the recent financial disaster involving savings and loan institutions in the United States. The model of normal accidents, which attributes organizational disasters to the intersection of tight coupling and complexity, is used to illuminate aspects of the crisis. The neo-institutional perspective, stressing the role of three org...

This analysis starts with models of the diffusion of due process protections in organizations that emphasize the role of the state, especially those from the institutional perspective. The case of equal pay for work of comparable value is used to develop propositions concerning important additions to current models of the expansion of due process p...

We examine the effects of competition and institutional linkages on the growth of day care centers (DCCs) in Metropolitan Toronto, Canada, between 1971 and 1989. Estimates obtained from a model of organizational growth show that density-dependent, mass-dependent, and size-localized forms of competition decreased DCC growth and that the possession o...

We examine corporate renewal by taking a structural approach and focusing on the routines and rules that are part of large, established, bureaucratic organizations. We characterize approaches to the management of innovation in terms of three different themes–institutional, revolutional, and evolutional strategies. The first two approaches involve i...

This study examines the impact of localized competition on rates of failure in the Manhattan hotel industry from 1898 to 1990. The study investigates whether the organizations in a population with more similar resource requirements compete more intensely. This approach builds on existing density-based models of interorganizational competition by in...

A critical challenge facing organizations is the dilemma of maintaining the capabilities of both efficiency and flexibility. Recent evolutionary perspectives have suggested that patterns of organizational stability and change can be characterized as punctuated equilibria (Tushman and Romanelli 1985). This paper argues that a learning model of organ...

Individual aspiration level adaptation is examined in a strategic decision making experiment. Results support a model of incremental adjustment and responsiveness to performance feedback; learning and ambiguity interacted to affect the pattern of incremental adjustment. Longer experience under high ambiguity decreases effects of previous aspiration...

This paper compares applied economic models and an institutional model in an empirical study of financial reporting practice at the Fortune 200 between 1962 and 1984. The findings indicate that the institutional model adds significant explanatory power over and above the models that currently dominate the applied economics literature. Thus, the pri...

Theories of aspiration level effects predict that decisions under uncertainty will depend on whether performance is above or below some target level of performance. A sample of 5000 quarterly earnings announcements by publicity held companies listed on the COMPUSTAT and CRSP data bases is examined to test this hypothesis. Four models from the curre...

the South Florida International Business Group seminar participants.

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1987. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-191). Photocopy.