Institutional Norms For Place Branding And Their Effects On Corporate Involvement

Considering the global slowing economies during the present time,the regions,cities,or countries are being faced with more and more challenges.At this time,place branding has become a new strategic tool for changing that situation in places,improving the welfare of local residents,companies,even the whole place.However,place branding within its development process will also bring a lot of problems,such as leading to opportunistic behaviors like ‘hitchhiking',or the negative enterprises acting or not participating in the place.How to solve these problems has become the focus for this study.So this paper will explore the impact of institutional norms on enterprises involvement in the place from the perspective of institution.That means this paper will discuss the dimensions of institutional norms for place branding and their influence on enterprises involvement by the combination of grounded interviews and empirical analysis.The results show that the dimensions of institutional norms for place branding composed of the moral norms(responsibility consciousness,benefits integration,information sharing),professional norms(technique norms,operation norms,supervision norms),common values(social expectations,value orientation)and social norms(behavior norms,role position,tradition and convention)have 4dimensions,11 factors.These four dimensions have significant influence on the institutional legitimacy of enterprises,and the influence sequences of 4 dimensions are as follows: common values,professional norms,social norms and moral norms.In addition,the institutional legitimacy of enterprises has impacts on corporate involvement beliefs and corporate involvement behavior.The topic of institutional norms for place branding and their influence on corporate involvement not only enriches the existing theories of place branding,but also reveals the driving mechanism of enterprises involving in place branding.