Events

Prof. Elizabeth Pontikes
Professor of Management
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Davis

In this study, we investigate when scandal gives rise to industry-wide social change. Empirically, we examine firms’ actions taken in response to media reporting on a series of sexual harassment scandals within the U.S. venture capital (VC) industry, 2012-2017. We first content-analyzed media coverage and found that media framings evolved over time from depicting sexual harassment cases as idiosyncratic acts to focusing on the broader context that enabled them. We then sought to understand how different framings impacted two types of industry actions: an increase in (1) women representing VC firms as lead investors and (2) VC funding of start-ups whose founding teams include women. Our findings suggest a two-phase response: limited actions were taken by individuals directly associated with accused harassers when media framed issues as isolated events. This evolved into a stronger collective industry effort after media narratives shifted to depict sexual harassment as a systemic issue. We conducted exploratory interviews with VCs that contextualize these results. We consider implications of our findings to extend understandings of the conditions under which scandals may lead to organizational and industry-wide change.