Abstract. Punishment is an important mechanism through which institutions maintain normative order. Although research demonstrates that the severity of organizational punishment varies with characteristics of organizations and their evaluators, it has largely treated the normative standards underlying punishment as fixed. We argue instead that punishment is an expressive institutional process whose severity changes as broader normative environments evolve. We theorize that social movements reshape punishment by altering both the evaluative standards and affective responses through which organizational misconduct is judged. We further argue that these effects will be strongest where local communities are more receptive to the movement's claims. We test these arguments using a hand-collected dataset of U.S. employment-discrimination jury verdicts surrounding the mainstream emergence of the #MeToo movement. Using a difference-in-differences design comparing workplace sexual-harassment cases to other employment discrimination claims, we find that punitive damages increased substantially following #MeToo, but only in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions. These findings extend expressive theories of punishment by demonstrating that formal legal sanctions reflect evolving and locally differentiated normative judgments. More broadly, they show that macro-level institutional change influences punitive outcomes by being translated through the locally situated audiences entrusted with administering punishment.

Abstract. Conventional accounts expect stakeholder and investor responses to track the valence of corporate conduct, with responsible actions generating positive responses and irresponsible actions negative responses. We challenge this by integrating expectation-confirmation theory with cognitive psychology to argue that sentiment shocks—abnormal deviations in stakeholder affect relative to firm-specific expectations—are the operative investor signal. While expectancy-confirming events are financially muted, violations prompt reappraisal. We introduce Cumulative Abnormal Media Sentiment (CAMS), a firm-specific sentiment shock measure analogous to Cumulative Abnormal Returns, validated by replicating and extending Flammer’s (2013) environmental event study through 2024. We find that sentiment shocks predict stock price reactions, though the weight investors assign is conditional on environmental reputation. Specifically, sentiment shocks carry inconsistent weight where reputation creates interpretive ambiguity, and differentiated responses where it does not.

Funded by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract. When is an executive’s misconduct attributed to the organization rather than the individual responsible? Prior work suggests evaluators more readily blame individuals than organizations, an asymmetry mirrored in organizations’ reliance on succession alone to sever themselves from the locus of blame. I argue that this asymmetry reverses when an organization’s identity is tightly coupled to an implicated executive’s own, a condition I term key-man reputational risk (KMRR). Under high KMRR, evaluators use the executive’s identity as a lens through which to interpret the organization itself, causing fault attribution to spill over from the executive to the organization. Drawing on over 100 executives terminated for workplace sexual misconduct (2010-2025), I find that organizations with greater exposure to KMRR experience stronger reputational spillover following misconduct-triggered succession, and that organizations may attenuate this spillover through substantive person and policy remediation. These findings identify the cognitive mechanisms that turn organizations into credible targets of blame, addressing recent calls for closer attention to this process (McDonnell & Nurmohamed, 2021), and clarify when remediation can decouple organizational identity from a departing leader.

Funded by the Zicklin Center for Governance & Business Ethics at the Impact, Value , and Sustainable Business Initiative, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania