Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long Run Survival

By Cheng Gao, Tiona Zuzul, Geoffrey G. Jones, Tarun Khanna. 2017

365 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emerging markets are characterized by underdeveloped institutions and frequent environmental shifts. Yet they also contain many firms that have survived over generations. How are firms in weak institutional environments able to persist over time? Motivated by 69 interviews with leaders of emerging market firms with histories spanning generations, we combine induction and deduction to propose reputation as a meta-resource that allows firms to activate their conventional resources. We conceptualize reputation as consisting of prominence, perceived quality, and resilience, and develop a process model that illustrates the mechanisms that allow reputation to facilitate survival in ways that persist over time. Building on research in strategy and business history, we thus shed light on an underappreciated strategic construct (reputation) in an under-theorized setting (emerging markets) over an unusual period (the historical long run).

Subfields: Accounting, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/132ea9d54f51535debb5133fd0a7736328e38296

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Citations in the corpus

Transparency and replicability in qualitative research: The case of interviews with elite informants (2019, methodology): “An example is Gao et al. (2017), whose data are available for downloading from the Business History Initiative website.”
COVID-19: stock market reactions to the shock and the stimulus (2020, neutral): “…economic and financial meltdown is usually greater in emerging markets due to less advanced fiscal and monetary policies infrastructure, lower liquidity, greater information asymmetry and less developed healthcare systems (Gao et al. 2017; Khanna and Palepu 1997, 2011; McKibbin and Fernando 2020).”
Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and Effective Business-model Design (2019, background): “A key difference is that they likely have more resources and thus more alternatives to parallel play (Ahuja and Novelli, 2016; DeSantola and Gulati, 2017; Gao et al., 2017), such as acquiring another firm and waiting until the market coalesces.”