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While previous open strategy studies have acknowledged open strategy's function as an impression management instrument, their focus has mostly been on short episodes. The impression management literature, meanwhile, pays openness scant attention. By studying how new ventures engage in open strategy-making, we track how open strategy-making and respective impression management benefits evolve over time. Specifically, we draw on a comparative case study of two firms' blog communication on strategy-related issues and corresponding audience responses over a four-year period. We identify three distinct modes of how organizations engage in open strategymaking with external audiences and show how each mode is related to a specific set of impression management effects. Having established the impression management functions of these modes, we then demonstrate how open strategy-making contributes to new ventures' quests for legitimacy as they evolve. In the launch phase, dialoguing with blog audiences helps a venture attract endorsements for its organization and products. As the venture grows, concentrating on broadcasting relevant strategic information may attract media audiences' additional support for pursuing openness as a desirable organizational practice. IntroductionOpen strategy-making challenges the traditional perspective on strategy-making as being pursued by an exclusive group in an organization's upper echelons, that often envelops strategic processes in a veil of secrecy (Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007;Doz and Kosonen, 2008;Whittington et al., 2011). Essentially, openness in strategy-making implies increasing transparency and the scope of actors being involved at various stages of the strategy-making process (Whittington et al., 2011). Examples of open strategy include transparently communicating strategy through public presentations (Whittington and Yakis-Douglas, 2012;Whittington et al., 2016), voluntary merger and acquisitions announcements , utilizing social software (Cox et al., 2008;Haefliger et al., 2011;Whittington et al., 2011), as well as involving wider internal and external audiences into strategic decision-making (Aten and Thomas, 2016;Dobusch and Müller-Seitz, 2012;Haefliger et al., 2011;Luedicke et al., 2016;Matzler et al., 2014). Benefits attributed to open strategy-making include improved understanding of strategic decisions, increased commitment to those decisions, and access to more diverse sources of information, which can result in better overall decision quality (Lakhani et al., 2013;Matzler et al., 2014;Whittington et al., 2011).Recent work, however, points to an additional function of open strategy-making as an impression management instrument seeking to manipulate the perceptions of external audiences. Drawing upon strategic disclosure literature, Whittington et al. (2016) show how new CEOs openly communicating strategic plans in strategy presentations positively influences shareholder perceptions, then in turn, stock market prices (for a similar approach, see Yakis-Douglas et al., 2...

In this article, we explain the mechanisms that allow social enterprises to balance their missions, and the risk of mission drift as organizations grow. We empirically explore Incubator-BUS (I-BUS), a student organization within a private Brazilian university, which sought to incubate cooperatives for vulnerable groups. Although initially successful in balancing its missions, I-BUS then failed. We show how scaling-up can complicate the balancing of different missions within the same organization. We propose that, to balance their missions, social enterprises—especially recently formed and democratically managed enterprises—need not only “spaces of negotiation,” as suggested in the literature, but also “herding spaces” that connect an organization to its institutional context. We indicate why herding spaces are critical, but then show how scaling-up can result in organizational “compartmentalization” that undermines them.

Digital work platforms are often said to view crowdworkers as replaceable cogs in the machine, favouring exit rather than voice as a means of resolving concerns. Based on a qualitative study of six German medium-sized platforms offering a range of standardized and creative tasks, we show that platforms provide voice mechanisms, albeit in varying degrees and levels. We find that all platforms in our sample enabled crowdworkers to communicate task-related issues to ensure crowdworker availability and quality output. Five platforms proactively consulted crowdworkers on task-related issues, and two on platform-wide organisation. Differences in the ways in which voice was implemented were driven by considerations about costs, control and a crowd’s social structure, as well as by platforms’ varying interest in fair work standards. We conclude that the platforms in our sample equip crowdworkers with ‘microphones’ by letting them have a say on workflow improvements in a highly controlled and easily mutable setting, but do not provide ‘megaphones’ for co-determining or even controlling platform decisions. By connecting the literature on employee voice with platform research, our study provides a nuanced picture of how voice is technologically and organisationally enabled and constrained in non-standard, digital work contexts.