Workshop’s Topic: Organizational theorists have extensively documented the effects of status on deviance and social sanctions. Their approaches, however, hold a static view of the audiences’ expectations of and attention towards high-status actors. We theorize that when high-status actors enter anew domain they face higher expectations and more attention combined with lack of established priors, leading to stronger social sanctions for early deviance, but weaker sanctions for later deviance: as a result, status would be negatively associated with deviance for early involvement, but the relationship would weaken or even reverse later on. Using a longitudinal dataset of loan guarantees among publicly listed Chinese firms, we find that higher-status firms receive more severe sanctions if they fail to meet the expectation to reciprocate their partners in the earlier involvement than in the later involvement of loan guarantees. We also show that the tendency of higher-status firms (relative to lower status firms) to reciprocate their partners declines over time. This study adds a dynamic perspective of the relationship between status and potential social sanctions as well as the corresponding pattern of deviance following actors’ initial entry into a new field.

Time and Location: 14:00 PM (GMT+8), Room A823 (School of Management)

Language: English