Horacio Rousseau, Ph.D.

Behavioral Strategy and Sustainable Development

Research

My research examines how organizations and their leaders manage complexity and respond to institutional, environmental, and social pressures. It develops along two connected streams: behavioral strategy — how power, learning, and attention shape strategic choices under uncertainty — and sustainable development — how firms, nonprofits, and communities advance societal goals such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals through responsible and ethical management. A complete, current list of my work is on Google Scholar (ORCID: 0000-0002-2356-2888).

Today these streams converge in the care economy — the focus of my current research program.

Current Research: Stewardship in the Care Economy

My current projects examine stewardship in the care economy: how governance and management shape whether organizations serve the people entrusted to them — patients and residents who often cannot judge the quality of their care, or easily choose where to receive it. In settings like these, ownership and management are not neutral; they can decide the care people actually receive.

The empirical core is a pair of large U.S. panels I have assembled — roughly 140,000 nursing-home facility-years and 177,000 hospital-years, spanning 2011–2024 — supporting a series of ongoing studies on when and where ownership matters for quality of care, how care organizations respond when they fall behind on competing goals, how a community’s mix of providers relates to the health of its elders, and who benefits when public funding expands.

A first public-facing output — the Florida Hospital Management Monitor, a dashboard of Florida hospital quality built on open federal data — is currently in development.

Selected Publications

The current agenda stands on a decade of published research in behavioral strategy and sustainable development.

Behavioral Strategy

Smulowitz, S. J., Rousseau, H. E., & Audia, P. G. (2025). Institutional logics as a resource and risk: Logic deviance and categorical penalties in US community banks. Journal of Management Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13260

Maslach, D., Rousseau, H., & Lamont, B. (2026). Pioneer learning from failure: How competitor entry and consumer reports improve learning from failure repositories. Journal of Management, 52(3), 1290–1323. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241303059

García-Dastugue, S. J., & Rousseau, H. E. (2024). Supply chain awareness: Theoretical development and empirical test in the nonprofit context. The International Journal of Logistics Management, 35(4), 1224–1252. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-04-2023-0146

Audia, P. G., Rousseau, H. E., & Stimmler, M. K. (2023). Public opinion and impression management in the communication of performance during the Second Iraq War. Organization Science, 34(2), 777–800. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1598

Audia, P. G., Rousseau, H. E., & Brion, S. (2022). CEO power and nonconforming reference group selection. Organization Science, 33(2), 831–853. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.1397

Smulowitz, S. J., Rousseau, H. E., & Bromiley, P. (2020). The behavioral theory of the (community-oriented) firm: The differing response of community-oriented firms to performance relative to aspirations. Strategic Management Journal, 41(6), 1023–1053. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3123

Sustainable Development, CSR, and Ethics

Berrone, P., Rousseau, H. E., Ricart, J. E., Brito, E., & Giuliodori, A. (2023). How can research contribute to the implementation of sustainable development goals? An interpretive review of SDG literature in management. International Journal of Management Reviews, 25(2), 318–339. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12331

Rousseau, H. E., Berrone, P., & Gelabert, L. (2019). Localizing sustainable development goals: Nonprofit density and city sustainability. Academy of Management Discoveries, 5(4), 487–513. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2018.0151

Rousseau, H. E. (2017). Corporate sustainability: Toward a theoretical integration of Catholic social teaching and the natural-resource-based view of the firm. Journal of Business Ethics, 145(4), 725–737. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3119-5

Berrone, P., Gelabert, L., Massa-Saluzzo, F., & Rousseau, H. E. (2016). Understanding community dynamics in the study of grand challenges: How nonprofits, institutional actors, and the community fabric interact to influence income inequality. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), 1940–1964. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0746

Honors & Awards

  • Award for Responsible Research in Management (2021), for “Localizing Sustainable Development Goals”
  • Academy of Management Discoveries Best Paper Award (2020)
  • Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings (2017, 2020, 2023)
  • Southern Management Association Best Strategy Track Paper Award (2018)
  • Southern Management Association Best Doctoral Paper Award (2017)
  • Academy of Management ONE Division Best Paper Award (2014)