Institutional Equivalence: How Industry and Community Peers Influence Corporate Philanthropy
研究了企业如何同时受行业和本地社区两种制度影响，提出“制度等价”概念，即处于相同行业和社区的企业构成清晰参照组，并通过1980-2006年财富1000强企业慈善捐赠数据验证了同行行为、组织特征等因素的影响。
This paper explores how organizations respond to simultaneous institutional influences from two distinct sources: the industry in which they operate and the local geographic community in which they are headquartered. We theorize that the existence of institutional equivalents—other organizations at the same intersection of different fields, such as the same industry and the same community—provides a clear and well defined reference category for firms and thus shapes which subset of peers the focal organization imitates most closely. We develop hypotheses about how the presence or absence of institutional equivalents affects organizations’ responses to behavioral cues from different peer groups, how these effects vary when peers in different fields exhibit inconsistent behaviors, and how organizational characteristics, such as size and performance, strengthen or weaken the influence of institutional equivalents. We test our propositions through a longitudinal analysis of philanthropic contributions by Fortune 1000 firms from 1980 to 2006. Our framework illuminates how simultaneous presence in multiple fields affects organizations and introduces to institutional theory the concept of institutional equivalence, which we argue is a critical factor in determining how organizations respond to multiple institutional cues.