Future-Time Framing: The Effect of Language on Corporate Future Orientation
研究企业工作语言是否强制区分将来时和现在时，如何影响其未来导向行为（如企业社会责任和研发投入），并发现多语言环境会减弱这种影响。
We examine how international variation in corporate future-oriented behavior, such as corporate social responsibility and research and development investment, could partially stem from characteristics of the languages spoken at firms. We develop a future-time framing perspective rooted in the literatures on organizational categorization and framing. Our theory and hypotheses focus on how companies with working languages that obligatorily separate the future tense and the present tense engage less in future-oriented behaviors, and this effect is attenuated by exposure to multilingual environments. The results based on a large global sample of firms from 39 countries support our theory, highlighting the importance of language in affecting organizational behavior around the world. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1217 .