Institutional Dynamics in Corporate Political Linkages: Evidence From China's Emerging Economy

1 online resource (151 pages) : PDF

2015

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This dissertation aims to reveal the institutional dynamics in corporate political linkages as the extant literature largely fails to recognize that corporate political linkages are institutionally embedded. Specifically, three studies have been conducted to better understand the motivation, impact, and spillover of corporate political linkages. I will address these research questions by drawing empirical evidence from China. In Study 1, to understand why managers passionately pursue political connections, I propose a dual-embeddedness approach to simultaneously examine the structural and cultural motivations underlying such political actions. In Study 2, different from the extant literature that mostly focuses on the corporation involved in political connections, I shift attention to the side of government and discuss how local government officials can leverage political connections to co-optate the corporation into politics. In Study 3, through the lens of institutional logics, I investigate how corporate political linkages interact with two other institutional logics--market and family logics--in affecting corporate philanthropy. Altogether, these three studies deepen our understanding of the institutional embeddedness of corporate political linkages. They make broad theoretical contributions to the fields of organizational theory, institutional theory, and strategy, and also have important practical implications to management.

doctoral dissertations

Management
Business
Organizational sociology

Ph.D.

China
Corporate Philanthropy
Corporate Political Connection
Institutional Theory
Strategy

Organizational Science

Zhao, Wei

Kellermanns, Franz
Cao, Yang
Beck, Tammy
Wang, Yu

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2015.

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