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Seonghoon Kim
1. Information Disclosure Weakens Collective Reputations: Shareholder Reaction to the Toxic Release Inventory (w/ Matthew Potoski; Dissertation Research)
Abstract: A collective reputation is stakeholders’ mental image about how the observable characteristics of a group indicate members’ performance along difficult-to-observe attributes. Collective reputations become less salient when stakeholders receive new information about individual members’ difficult-to-observe qualities. In 1989, the US EPA published the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) which provided for the first time detailed information on the pollution emissions of large facilities, including companies in the chemical industry, which had a collective reputation for poor environmental performance. We apply multiplicative heteroskedastic linear regression models to data on 82 chemical firms to show that the TRI data release reduced the salience of chemical industry’s collective reputation, resulting in shareholders evaluating the firms’ financial prospects more individually.
2. Into a Vicious Cycle: A Negative Spillover Effect of an Entrepreneurial Failure on an Assessment of Minority Entrepreneurs' Managemerial Competence (w/ Jessica Santana; Dissertation Research)
Abstract: In this research, we argue that when people see a business failure of a certain female or minority entrepreneur, they negatively assess managerial competence of all other female or racial-minority entrepreneurs of the same field. At the core of our argument is the role of group stereotypes. In the entrepreneurial domain, differential assessments have existed about female vs. male (or Black vs. white) entrepreneurs, such that people assess female or racial-minority entrepreneurs as less competent than male or racial-majority entrepreneurs in managing their business. Under this circumstance, a female or racial-minority entrepreneur’s business failure can trigger people’s recognition of other female or racial-minority entrepreneurs’ group stereotype, leading to the reinforcement of an already-negative stereotype. Once negatively updating a group stereotype, people further negatively evaluate female or racial-minority entrepreneurs’ multiple, competence-relevant unobservable qualities, such as leadership, R&D knowledge and/or adaptability. Since these attributes are closely related to entrepreneurs’ financial rewards, minority entrepreneurs’ market performance can be significantly reduced on the capital market. In this paper, we derive relevant hypotheses and test them through an experimental vignette study approach.
3. Using Semantic Network Analysis to Measure the Codification of Professional Ethics (w/ Jessica Santana; Non-dissertation Research)
Abstract: Novel professional practices are often treated by peer practitioners as unethical. This study uses informal discourse data, natural language processing, and semantic network analysis to address the question of how innovative practices become accepted as ethical in a profession. We build on prior theorization of discursive boundary work in the professions and rhetorical strategies of legitimacy to theorize ethical codification as a dynamic period of boundary contestation culminating in a professional code of ethics. We describe the code of ethics as an interaction ritual that sets ethical boundaries of the profession and transforms a community of practice into a proto-institution. We use empirical, informal discourse data from the case of the IEEE-ACM Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practice Committee and the publication of the 1997 Software Engineering Code of Ethics to show how ethical codification follows a process of initial competition followed by semantic convergence.
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