Delayed Adoption of Rules: A Relational Theory of Firm Exposure and State Cooptation
研究企业因规则暴露程度低和国家关系可吸纳而延迟采纳国家规则，以中国股权分置改革为例，发现暴露和吸纳影响采纳速度及与改革意图的脱耦，且制度化后效应减弱。
The state creates and changes rules that coerce firms, but firms can delay or decouple responses to rule changes to manage the cost of demands. Theory of compliance to the state has not yet considered the degree to which the firm can delay adoption because of low exposure to rules and state links that allow cooptation, but both of these relations between state power and firm ability to counteract it can affect the adoption decision. This makes the response to state rule changes a more strategic outcome than the theory of coercive isomorphism implies. We develop a relational theory of delayed firm compliance to a state rule change that considers firm exposure due to discrepancy from the rule and firm cooptation of the state due to state links, and we test the theory by examining the adoption of the split-share structure reform, a state-mandated corporate governance reform among listed firms in China. We find that exposure and cooptation influenced the speed of adoption and the decoupling from reform intentions. We also found that their effects on firm response to coercion weaken when the new rule becomes institutionalized. Our theory of delayed compliance is also likely to apply to coercive pressure from other powerful organizations than the state.