RESEARCH OVERVIEW
My research examines how organizations respond to and shape their social, political, and economic environments (i.e., organizational theory). In particular, most of my work tends to explore how organizations come to be differentially evaluated by various actors, and how organizations may better balance the interests of multiple stakeholder groups.
My research has been published or is forthcoming in leading organizational journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organizational Research Methods, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Strategic Management Journal. Below, I list examples of this work.
PEER-REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
Iqbal, F., Pfarrer, M. D., & Gupta, A. Fit to Print? How Political Bias Affects Media Coverage of Corporate Sociopolitical Activism. Forthcoming at Organization Science.
Abstract: Organizational research has largely treated media coverage of firms as insulated from news outlets’ political biases, implicitly assuming that it provides a balanced representation of firm behaviors. However, increasing political polarization and firms’ growing involvement in social and political controversies challenge this assumption by creating greater scope for news outlets’ political orientations to shape business reporting. We explore this possibility by developing a two-stage framework that discerns news outlets’ attention (i.e., what firm behaviors they cover) from their tone (i.e., how they portray those behaviors). We argue that media organizations face two competing pressures: an incentive to cultivate ideological differentiation that appeals to readers and an incentive to maintain credibility that appeals to advertisers. We find that ideological congruence between a news outlet’s political orientation and a firm’s behavior increases the likelihood that the behavior receives coverage but does not influence the evaluative tone of that coverage—a pattern we term bias allocation. Supplemental analyses also reveal ideological asymmetries across left- and right-leaning outlets. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on the media, organizational political ideology, and strategic management.
Iqbal, F. & Pfarrer, M. D. Using Coreference Resolution to Mitigate Measurement Error in Text Analysis. Forthcoming at Organizational Research Methods.
Abstract: Content analysis has enabled organizational scholars to study constructs and relationships that were previously unattainable at scale. One particular area of focus has been on sentiment analysis, which scholars have implemented to examine myriad relationships pertinent to organizational research. This article addresses certain limitations in sentiment analysis. More specifically, we bring attention to the challenge of accurately attributing sentiment in text that mentions multiple firms. Whereas traditional methods often result in measurement error due to misattributing text to firms, we offer coreference resolution—a natural language processing technique that identifies and links expressions referring to the same entity—as a solution to this problem. Across two studies, we demonstrate the potential of this approach to reduce measurement error and enhance the veracity of text analyses. We conclude by offering avenues for theoretical and empirical advances in organizational research.
Iqbal, F., Pfarrer, M. D., & Bundy, J. 2024. How crisis management strategies address stakeholders’ sociocognitive concerns and organizations’ social evaluations. Academy of Management Review, 49(2): 299-321.
Abstract:Crises are harmful events that can influence organizational outcomes, leading to significant scholarly and practitioner interest in crisis management. A limitation of this line of inquiry, however, is that it typically glosses over stakeholders’ multiple concerns and the multiple factors that comprise organizations’ response strategies. To address this limitation, we delineate stakeholders’ crisis concerns into rational, emotional, and moral aspects. We then develop a typology along two dimensions of crisis response strategies—accountability and attention—to predict the likelihood that a specific strategy mitigates each of these concerns. We theorize that certain strategies mitigate just one type of concern, while others mitigate multiple concerns—albeit with a lower likelihood of success. Finally, we apply our typology to an organization’s social evaluations—that is, important, proximal outcomes affected by a crisis—in order to better understand the trade-offs associated with managing stakeholders’ multiple concerns.
Bundy, J., Iqbal, F., & Pfarrer, M. D. 2021. Reputations in flux: How a firm defends its multiple reputations in response to different violations. Strategic Management Journal, 42(6): 1109-1138.
Abstract: We examine how a firm defends its capability and character reputations in response to different violations. We develop our core theoretical mechanism—stakeholders' situational expectations—to theorize that the effectiveness of a firm's response strategy following a violation depends on the nature of the violation and the reputational judgment being made. We test our hypotheses using two longitudinal violation samples and novel media-based measures of reputation. Generally, we find that a more accommodative strategy is an effective defense following a capability violation, but it is less effective following a character violation. In supplemental analyses, we also discover that a more accommodative strategy is less effective at managing general reputation. Ultimately, our theory and findings suggest that reputation defense is more complex than previously considered.