Smith School of Business Graduate Theses

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    Understanding How Consumers and Discourses Respond to Ritual Practice Disruption: Two Studies
    (2024-09-17) Slobodzian, Adam; Business; Thomas, Tandy
    The COVID-19 pandemic changed almost every aspect of our daily lives. From mundane to milestone ritual practices, during the pandemic people could no longer engage in activities in the ways they had typically been performed. Despite a growing number of studies exploring how people responded to pandemic restrictions, we still have little insight into the factors contributing to these outcomes and their heterogeneity, or the lasting nature of these adaptations beyond disruption. In this dissertation, I address this gap in our knowledge by conducting two studies with the central focus of inquiry being disrupted milestone ritual practices. Using depth interviews and observations, my first essay explores why people choose to reconfigure disrupted rituals in the ways they do, and why some choose to abandon a ritual and not reconfigure it at all. Emergent from my analysis is a multi-staged process that is triggered by disruptions that cause a loss in how consumers envision their milestone and a loss in the social script that guides the ritual practice. In response, I find that consumers engage in three stages of ritual response: first, they engage in a period of reflexivity; then, they reconfigure the ritual in one of five different ways; and third, they experience affective and behavioral repercussions. My second study examines how the social discourse that surrounds rituals evolves through periods of disruption, and how this impacts the ritual script long-term. Using interviews and archival data to inform an automated content analysis over four time periods, I explore how the North American wedding ritual changed during and after the pandemic. My findings reveal a vital shift in influence over the script from the market to consumers. With this shift, I observe an increase in the empowerment of consumers and reflexivity about the ritual’s purpose. With these transformative shifts, I then document that the overall discourse has changed to reflect the priorities of consumers in several lasting ways.
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    Sustainability Regulation and Multinational Enterprise Behaviour
    (2024-08-30) Fiske, Luke; Business; Goerzen, Anthony
    Mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly important fixture in our institutional environment, as governments re-assert their role in establishing and policing transnational responsibility boundaries, defined as the border where firms must accept responsibility for their and their suppliers’ social and environmental actions. Sustainability policies such as the European Union’s recently passed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and Canada’s Modern Slavery Act put multinational enterprises (MNE) in their crosshairs, as both pieces of legislation demand MNEs accept responsibility for the social and environmental actions of suppliers with whom they only have indirect contact. In three papers in this dissertation, I explore this conundrum, showing why responsibility boundaries emerge as they do, as well as how MNEs can respond to these new regulatory imperatives, and thereby contribute to addressing grand challenges (e.g. climate change, modern slavery). Chapter two takes the regulatory environment as its core focus and I build on rhetoric and logics scholarship to explain the dynamics around responsibility boundary construction. I show how the contours of responsibility boundaries emerge from rhetorical contests in which a regulatory agency’s need for ongoing legitimacy is paramount. Chapter three turns to how MNEs respond once this new regulatory environment is established, and I build a conceptual framework based on new internalization theory that reveals how MNEs can better “cascade compliance” across their global value chains (GVCs). In the fourth chapter, which draws on convention theory, I discuss one common strategy MNEs have used in the past to improve social and environmental outcomes: sustainability certifications. To reveal how sustainability certifications can remain legitimate even while diffusing norms across different institutional environments and national contexts, I generate a model based on both interviews and document analysis that shows how legitimate certifications successfully mitigate many differently perceived sustainability risks. My work has important implications for both theory and practice. In the broadest terms, I add to our understanding of new internalization theory, rhetorical legitimation, and CSR. Practically, across these chapters, I help MNEs see what capabilities to build to respond to our new regulatory environment. I also show how policymakers and MNEs can maintain their legitimacy with diverse stakeholders when communicating their ideas about sustainability.
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    The first mile of global value chain governance: Empowering women and reducing gender-based violence through third-party interventions
    (2024-08-29) Li, Shengwen; Business; Goerzen, Anthony
    Despite increasing attention to research on equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., SDG 5), women’s experiences in low-income countries affected by global value chain (GVC) activities remain insufficiently explored in mainstream international business research. Evidence indicates that women frequently encounter poor working conditions and insecure employment arrangements within many GVCs. In response, various GVC actors—including multinational corporations (MNCs) or lead firms, governments, and NGOs—are seeking to improve gender equality and women’s empowerment through third-party interventions. However, prior research shows that these interventions often fail to benefit women and can sometimes exacerbate their conditions, particularly in the first mile of GVCs, where institutional contexts are especially fragile. These fragile contexts are marked by pervasive gender discrimination, widespread conflicts and violence, and weak legal and regulatory frameworks that fail to protect women’s rights and hinder their empowerment. This raises a crucial question for scholars and practitioners: under what conditions do third-party interventions effectively enhance women’s empowerment and reduce gender-based violence in the first mile of GVCs? To address this research question, my supervisor and I have partnered with IMPACT, a Canadian non-governmental organization, to analyze primary data from three projects in three African countries. This collaboration provides us with a unique opportunity to access remote and marginalized communities within GVCs. My thesis seeks to advance our theoretical understanding of third-party interventions and the root causes of barriers to women’s empowerment in fragile contexts. We aim to develop and empirically validate hypotheses that will advance scholarship on GVC governance by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing the inclusion and effectiveness of third-party interventions. Our findings will benefit NGOs by offering insights that enhance the rigor of their experimental design and social impact assessment within GVCs. Additionally, these findings will equip MNC managers with the knowledge to implement socially conscious and responsible business practices throughout GVCs. Lastly, these evidence-based recommendations will interest policymakers and donor agencies that fund and support various international development projects worldwide, aiming to achieve gender equality (e.g., SDG 5) and promote multi-stakeholder collaboration and partnership (e.g., SDG 17).
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    Essays on Stakeholder Activism and Firm Practices
    (2024-08-01) Shaheen, Hadi; Business; Litrico, Jean-Baptiste
    In my dissertation, I study the emergence and evolution of novel forms of social activism, including those coming from organizational members, such as employees and shareholders. The first study of my dissertation takes the context of bottom-up activism and explores how activists' employees influence corporate behaviour. I construct a proprietary dataset of employee activism campaigns and use Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative analysis to identify and explain the interaction among movement tactics and organizational factors. The findings highlight the different configurations of successful and failed employee activism campaigns and add to the research on insider activism by highlighting the interaction between tactics and opportunity structures to explain movement outcomes. The second study explores the dynamics within the same stakeholder activists’ group, such as shareholders, and how it might influence the effectiveness of their social proposals when firms face competing requests for change. Results suggest that social-oriented proposals reduce social performance because they can increase the presence of wealth-oriented proposals, which together can have a negative impact on the positive individual effect of social-oriented proposals on social performance. The third study investigates the indirect effect of shareholder activism by borrowing the bandwagon effect. The results suggest that non-targeted firms imitate rivals' social and competitive actions when observing successful shareholder activism. The evidence also indicates that visibility for non-targeted firms can influence the strength of the relationship.
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    Incentives, Information, and Investments in Chapter 11 Bankruptcies
    (2024-06-19) Yang, Yan; Business; Wang, Wei
    As business cycles generate ebb and flow in economic activities, the recurring corporate failures have highlighted how critical bankruptcy regimes are in reviving and stabilizing the economy. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection offers a court-supervised venue for defaulting companies to shed debt burdens, reallocate resources to potentially more productive uses, and obtain new capital. Bankruptcy affects not only distressed firms but also healthy firms. The rules of bankruptcy influence the capital structure and investment activities of firms distant from financial distress ex-ante. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the evolution of bankruptcy regimes and their implications for financial market participants. Exploring rich institutional details in Chapter 11 bankruptcies, this dissertation consists of three essays that investigate incentives, information, and investments within this context. The first essay is related to ”incentives”. It examines why managers of bankrupt companies retain top-tier investment banks as financial advisors during Chapter 11 bankruptcies. While these advisors facilitate faster resolutions, they also support incumbent management’s control. The second essay is about ”information”. It analyzes the stock trading activities of hedge funds serving on the Unsecured Creditors’ Committee (UCC) of a bankrupt firm. It shows that these hedge funds have higher portfolio turnover and make large trades in the few quarters after accessing material nonpublic information from the UCCs. The third essay, focusing on ”investments”, examines the performance of equity issued by public companies that emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, namely, post-reorg equity. Although there was significant initial outperformance, it has diminished in recent years due to market expectation corrections and increased participation of institutional investors. Collectively, these essays offer a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics in Chapter 11 bankruptcies, shedding light on their broader implications for financial markets and economic recovery strategies.