Termination provisions establish vital governance mechanisms in alliances, offering essential safeguards and incentives by providing the flexibility to exit (underperforming) partnerships. However, they can also foster distrust and instability by potentially undermining commitment and continuity. We argue that the motivation behind termination provisions lies in the need to address safeguarding and flexibility concerns arising from increases in alliance scope, upfront payments, and technological uncertainty. Conversely, alliances with strong relational commitment and social embeddedness stemming from prior and indirect ties tend to omit termination provisions. Drawing on an analysis of 1,576 biopharmaceutical alliance contracts, we scrutinize various conditional and unconditional termination rights, along with their partner-specific allocations. Among other findings, we observe a positive association between broad alliance scope and termination rights for patent challenge, for lack of reasonable effort, and for specific countries assigned to the research and development (R&D) firm contributing technological expertise and, furthermore, termination rights for convenience for the client firm sponsoring the alliance. Larger unilateral upfront payments increase the likelihood that the client firm receives termination rights for lack of reasonable effort and for convenience. Higher technological uncertainty is associated with termination rights for convenience for the client or R&D firm. In contrast, prior ties negatively correlate with termination rights for convenience for the client firm, while indirect ties show a negative association with termination rights for convenience and specific countries for the R&D firm. Conceptually, our study highlights the relevance of termination provisions as elastic governance mechanisms that enable partners to accommodate postcontractual disturbances.

Drawing on complexity theory, we investigate the structuring processes and underlying mechanisms underpinning the emergence of a new technology. Empirically, we track the emergence of blockchain technology by examining international patents issued between 2009 and 2020. Our results indicate that technology emergence follows an evolutionary trajectory that progresses from disordered to structured interactions among the technological elements, culminating in the formation of a technological core that acts as a pole of attraction for further interactions and delineates boundaries within the technological domain. Technology structuring is fueled by what we term “technology fitness” and “self-reinforcing” mechanisms that progressively transform primitive structures into more complex, self-organized configurations. Our study offers a novel framework of technology emergence, highlighting how dispersed bits of technological knowledge gradually aggregate into complex structures that define the specific trajectory of a particular domain.

Extant research on stars has demonstrated stars’ immense direct and indirect contributions to value creation, yet it lags behind strategy scholarship, which has emphasized the dynamic nature of value creation associated with firms’ core resources. In particular, we lack knowledge regarding how stars’ knowledge creation varies across a star’s career. Drawing on insights from the stars and careers literatures, we develop theoretical arguments that suggest that over their careers, stars shift focus from emphasizing personal attainment and status to prioritizing legacy building—shifts that we predict will correspond to decreases in stars’ relative individual productivity and conveyance of explicit knowledge spillovers to collaborators (which reinforce stars’ status) and increases in stars’ relative conveyance of tacit knowledge spillovers (that aid in colleagues’ development) as stars advance in career tenure. We test our hypotheses through the analysis of patenting activities spanning the years 2000-2022, 291 firms, and 214,398 inventors, cumulating to more than 1,210,989 inventor-year observations. Through the integration of temporal and psychological perspectives in our consideration of stars’ multiple contributions to knowledge creation over their careers, we bring our understanding of stars into alignment with insights related to the dynamic value creation associated with firms’ resources and advance knowledge on stars’ roles in the micro-foundations of human capital-based competitive advantage.

Scholars have examined the role of customer preferences, and demand-side characteristics more generally, in varied core strategy areas like market entry and timing, diversification, positioning, resource reallocation, and firm adaptation, among many others. We review this diverse demand-side literature and develop an empirical classification that identifies five archetypical customer value-creation logics seen in the literature to date. To apply each of these logics, a firm must look downstream with the intent of matching, leveraging, adapting, learning, or shaping customer preferences or market characteristics to create value for customers. For each value-creation logic, we detail the logic itself, how the demand side is characterized, how specific strategic decisions allow for value creation following the logic, literature gaps in the logic, and opportunities for future research. Opportunities include extending the work on existing logics, examining the combined effects of multiple logics, identifying understudied demand-side characteristics, and studying strategy applications for which demand-side attributes have received comparatively little attention to date. These include business models, corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate governance, and demand-side shocks. Finally, we address implications for managerial practice.

Social movements have long held noteworthy effects on organizations and industries by deliberately seeking to alter firms’ actions to align with the movements’ values. In the present research, we examine the possibility of nondeliberative effects of social movements on entrepreneurial activities. We posit that social movements elevate values that enhance market conditions and encourage entrepreneurship in unexpected ways. We examine this values-complementarity process in the context of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. Although the movement intended to delegitimize large corporations, we find evidence that it also had the complementary effect of increasing small-scale, people-centered, and community-oriented values. As such, this enhanced congruent forms of entrepreneurship. We find consistent effects of Occupy on startup growth across a range of industries. Moreover, using brewing as an illustrative setting, we identify distinctive emergent themes confirming the shift and alignment of microbreweries toward stronger community values after Occupy protests. We discuss implications for the social movement and organization literatures.

Extant strategic leadership literature has established the substantial and nuanced implications of narcissism in chief executive officers (CEOs) for firm outcomes, and psychological research on narcissism in groups highlights the importance of narcissism for interpersonal dynamics. However, there is little research on strategic leaders’ narcissism and the CEO–top management team (TMT) interface, especially related to its configuration by way of TMT composition. In this article, we therefore study two issues. First, we examine how CEO narcissism directly affects two aspects of TMT composition—the narcissism of newly appointed TMT members and TMT turnover. Second, we consider the moderating effect of TMT narcissism on the relationship between CEO narcissism and TMT turnover. To be able to test our theory, we develop and extensively validate a novel measure based on LinkedIn profiles that allows us to capture the narcissism of non-CEO executives. We find substantial support for our predictions in a large sample of executives of S&P 1500 corporations across a 5-year time frame. We discuss the contributions and implications of our findings for the literatures on executive narcissism, TMT composition, and the CEO–TMT interface.

The formation of boundaries between established and emergent categories is a complex social process. Therein, our understanding of how symbolic boundaries translate into regulatory boundaries is underdeveloped. Extant research either treats laws and regulations for categories as given or assumes a seamless translation of a symbolic into a regulatory boundary. This sidelines that market participants actively contest and shape boundaries between categories. To address this lacuna, we open the black box of how symbolic boundaries are translated into regulatory boundaries. We adopt a discursive perspective and conduct a longitudinal study of the contestation around the categories of home sharing and short-term rental in Europe. Our analysis shows how symbolic and regulatory boundaries are formed in a causal sequential process, driven by shifts in the field positioning of market actors and in the discursive accounts they mobilize. We develop a theoretical model of the discursive foundation of category boundary formation. At the heart of our theorization are discursive accounts and how shifting coalitions of market participants mobilize them to shape the evolving symbolic and regulatory boundaries between an emergent and an established category. We contribute to category research by unearthing the interdependent formation of symbolic and regulatory boundaries and the role of discursive accounts in these processes.

CEO power has been extensively studied across various disciplines and country contexts. Despite the exponential growth of research, there has been limited effort to integrate the vast body of literature. Using bibliometric and other analytical techniques we apply to the 580 articles in our review, we identify and discuss the topics and major research streams considered in CEO power research and their evolution over the years. We also highlight several shortcomings in the existing literature, including four pressing challenges concerning unclear conceptualizations, varied measurement and methods, the under-contextualized nature of CEO power across international contexts, and a lack of attention to how the changing corporate governance landscape has affected CEO power. We provide a roadmap for future scholarship by offering suggestions for addressing these pressing challenges. Finally, we provide several new and promising research directions in our discussion.

Decades of research have examined how employees experience organizational-level change events (e.g., “the merger”). However, employees can also experience “everyday change events” that occur at the individual-level as the change becomes routinized for their jobs. That is, individuals can react to organizational change events that are occurring at different hierarchical levels. Drawing on event system theory, we argue that employees’ commitment to the organizational-level change event can shape how employees anticipate and experience subsequent everyday change events. These negative and positive everyday change events can impact (a) how employees engage with their work, impacting their performance and (b) whether employees perceive that they are fairly treated, impacting their subsequent evaluations of organizational-level change. Our hypotheses were generally supported in a field sample in which employees were surveyed immediately after a merger was announced, participated in a daily diary study as the merger was implemented, and completed a second survey 2 weeks after the diary study. By applying event system theory to organizational change, we provide important theoretical and practical insights, including how an organizational-level event can exert top-down direct effects by impacting how employees anticipate and experience change on an everyday basis as well as how everyday negative and positive change events can subsequently impact employees’ commitment to the organizational-level change, creating bottom-up direct effects. We also illuminate the importance of considering the frequency and strength of both negative and positive events to understand what it is about everyday negative and positive events that has implications for employees and organizations.