European Management Review最新文献

The debate on corporate governance of business companies and the discussions on the concept of corporate purpose intensified. Looking at the role of law in ensuring that businesses profit from creating benefits and not from creating detriments, it is worth distinguishing between interventions designed to incentivise the former (e.g., mandatory rules on sustainability disclosure or new dual-purpose companies) and disincentivise the latter (tort or recent supply chain due diligence laws). Nevertheless, the existence of a grey area for activities that do not materialise in tort, or the violation of other mandatory rules cannot be denied and is probably where the reconceptualisation of fiduciary duties can mediate. New legal trends in these areas are mapped with a special focus on the European context and some comparative law considerations with respect to the United Kingdom and the United States. Finally, a suggestion for the future of European harmonisation on dual-purpose companies will be offered.

Scholars have greatly improved our understanding of legitimacy and legitimation processes in recent years. Focusing mainly on organizations and institutional fields, mainstream organizational legitimacy theories assume that organizations are permanent. In so doing, projects—viewed as temporary organizations—like those involving natural resources and infrastructure development projects have been overlooked. In this article, our initial argument posits that a significant temporal distinction underpins the contrast in legitimacy between stable and established organizations and projects. We then develop and discuss two spectra that differentiate the legitimacy of a project from the legitimacy of the organization endorsing the project. Building on these spectra, we then theorize four interplay processes between the legitimacy of projects and the legitimacy of organizations: project reinforcement/degradation and organizational reinforcement/degradation. Our findings pave the way for new and unexplored research avenues on the legitimacy of projects.

The learning strategies offered by science for discovering the world by generating and testing hypotheses have been used abundantly to build decision-making heuristics. In contrast, decision-making heuristics for (re)designing the world are rarer. This paper develops a heuristic combining the exploratory power of chimeras with a design logic. Chimeras have long been used to foster imagination and build initially unknown futures. And recent advances in design theory show that in decision-making situations, chimeras can be generated as nonfalsifiable existential statements about desirable alternatives and events. Moreover, design theory offers learning operations that handle nonfalsifiable statements to generate new real objects. This paper uses these operations to build a rational heuristic that may or may not transform initial chimeras into reality. Its main effect is to ensure that stimulated learning leads to decision alternatives (whether pre-existing or novel) that surpass the initial optimal one. This paves the way for a class of design-based heuristics extending the main functions of Bayesian learning to a non-Bayesian world.

Pressures to publish prolifically have led to an abundance of research on trivial matters rather than on issues of significance. This trend is particularly pronounced in developing countries, where limited access to paid content has fueled the growth of open-access publications. Additionally, the prevailing “publish or perish” culture has encouraged the pursuit of inconsequential and conformist research. The scholarly integrity of academic institutions is eroded when they struggle with evaluating research impact through metrics, potentially overlooking substantive contribution. The emergence of AI technology adds a fresh dimension to the issue, creating new possibilities for mass output rather than work that is innovative or informed by social values and priorities. This commentary serves as a call to action for scholars, institutions, and policymakers collectively to reshape the trajectory of academic publishing, restoring its sense of purpose through making lasting contributions to the betterment of society.

Argyris & Schön's notion of two types of learning, single-loop (SLL) and double-loop learning (DLL), is arguably one of the most popularized categorizations of organizational learning (OL). However, while the concept of DLL is widely cited, it has left a superficial impact on the literature and practice. We argue that the limited impact of DLL is due to two features of DLL: the complexity of its definition and the difficulty in its implementation. This study identifies and organizes critical insights in the literature related to the conceptualization, measurement, and generation of DLL. To address these topics, we review and synthesize the findings of 128 studies on DLL published between 1974 and 2021. We aim to reduce the confusion surrounding DLL and the proliferation of empirical studies on DLL that ignore its original notion. We propose a framework that makes explicit the misconceptions, wrong assumptions, and barriers in conceptualizing, measuring, and generating DLL, and it also provides insights into how to overcome these limitations and serves as a platform for future research on DLL.