Conference Programme

How can locally dependent organizations detect global issues from local cues? Global issues such as climate change carry profound local implications. For locally dependent organizations – whose competitiveness relies on local natural resources – detecting global issues is essential. We address this topic inductively using rich ethnographic data from Norlha Textiles, an enterprise on the Tibetan Plateau that bridges local nomadic knowledge with global luxury markets through yak-wool textiles production. We find that Norlha cultivated deep local connections, which enabled two complementary attentional processes: connecting, through which decision makers identify patterns among cues, and contrasting, through which they discern salient cues. These processes unfolded continuously and simultaneously, allowing decision makers to recognize global issues without overlooking critical information or exceeding attentional limits. Our findings advance research in two ways. First, we theorize a bottom-up attention mechanism that enables local organizations to detect global issues, whereas prior literature largely investigated a top-down approach. Second, we offer a ‘strong’ process account of organizational attention.

Research on entrepreneurial cognition assumes that greater interpretive capacity (IC) reduces uncertainty and promotes business ownership. This expectation, we argue, holds only when uncertainty is informational and yields to additional interpretation. When prescriptions across policy domains are misaligned, a condition we term residual institutional ambiguity (RIA) and measure as state-level entropy in enforcement, integration, and benefits regimes, additional interpretation reveals that prescriptions across domains contradict, and coherent expectations cannot be constructed. This matters especially for business ownership, which requires sustained multi-domain engagement and forecloses selective decoupling. High-IC actors rationally defer commitment, a pattern we term competence-induced caution. Dense co-ethnic communities independently compress IC returns by generating collective interpretations of institutional conditions that partially substitute for individual judgment. Using 2001–2020 ACS microdata on immigrant business ownership across U.S. states, we find that the positive association between IC and ownership attenuates as cross-domain contradiction increases, and co-ethnic density independently compresses IC returns. We contribute to entrepreneurial cognition and institutional theory by distinguishing informational uncertainty from specifying a boundary condition on the view that institutional contradictions are generative, and recasting dense co-ethnic communities as collective interpretive systems that compress returns to individual interpretive capacity.

We examine the operational consequences of mandatory carbon disclosure (MCD) using the United Kingdom’s 2013 carbon disclosure regulation as a quasi-natural experiment. We exploit differential exposure between manufacturing firms listed on the London Stock Exchange and comparable European-listed firms; and estimate difference-in-differences, event-study, and synthetic difference-in-differences models to identify causal effects on productivity-related outcomes. Our results show statistically and economically significant declines across a structured, multi-dimensional productivity system including total factor productivity, operational productivity, labour productivity, and inventory efficiency, following disclosure. Event studies show that effects emerge shortly after implementation, persist for several years, and propagate across interdependent production efficiency, labour deployment, and inventory execution. Consistent with an attention-based view, mandatory disclosure acts as a regulatory attention shock, shifting managerial focus and operational resources toward compliance and governance and away from productivity-enhancing investments. Effects are heterogeneous: productivity declines are more pronounced among firms with longer investment horizons and higher market valuations, consistent with strategic resource reallocation rather than reporting costs. Our findings show that MCD-based environmental regulation, often assumed operationally neutral, can create unintended productivity trade-offs. The study provides causal evidence that informational regulation reshapes firm operations and highlights the need for transparency-based policies to account for Unintended operational spillovers.