Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Title: Blood Diamonds? OSS Contributors’ Response to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Speaker: Yanfeng Zheng (Hong Kong University Science & Technology)

Time: 10:00 (Thursday), June 8, 2023

Venue: Room712, Mingde Business Building

Language: Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

Firms sponsor public projects to engage stakeholders in the hope of doing well by doing good. While prior research focuses on the extrinsic motivations of participating stakeholders, we examine their moral expectations. If a sponsor violates these expectations even in unrelated activities, our cognitive dissonance framework theorizes that stakeholders respond negatively and reduce the engagement. The disengagement is greater if they are less embedded in the project community or there are substitute projects. However, if stakeholders keep their engagement, they will employ cognitive work to justify and counterintuitively reinforce their engagement intention. Exploiting Facebook’s mass data scandal and analyzing open-source contributors’ responses via a DiD approach on a two-stage matched sample, we find compelling evidence. Our study contributes to CSR research with practical implications.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Yanfeng Zheng is currently an associate professor with tenure at the Hong Kong University Science & Technology (HKUST). He earned his Ph.D. in management from University of Wisconsin Madison. His research interests revolve around the nexus of innovation and entrepreneurship. Specifically, he studies how high-tech startups develop capabilities through organizational learning and the consequences. His work has been published at leading management and entrepreneurship journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Industrial and Corporate Change, Research Policy, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and more. He was the recipient of the Irene M. McCarthy Award for the best paper on the topic of High Technology and Innovation at the Babson International Entrepreneurship Conference. Dr. Zheng has extensive teaching experience in strategic management and entrepreneurship. He serves the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal and won the Best Reviewer Award twice.