Scandinavian Journal of Management最新文献

Mission maintenance in professional service firms must balance the commercial and professional logics and prevent mission drift. Based on a case study of ‘auditing in action’ in a German professional service firm we argue that mission maintenance results from interactions between the practice and field level. We find that anchors on the field level target individuals’ discretionary choices by balancing competing demands from the commercial and professional logics on the practice level. Therefore, we identify anchoring as a central cross-level mechanism for maintaining the balance between routinizing for professional quality and ‘flexibilizing’ for efficiency on the practice level. With these findings we make two contributions to the literature: an analysis of how the field level can contribute to maintaining organisations’ missions in fields that have competing logics, and the identification of anchoring as a central mechanism to balance competing demands with the expectations of referent audiences on the field level.

The social entrepreneurship (SE) discourse habitually casts social entrepreneurs as heroic, creating economic and social value, whereas those whom they strive to assist are portrayed as disadvantaged and in need of interventions. This implies an implicit differentiation between knowing, agentic entrepreneurs and less-knowing, more passive beneficiaries. In this article, we seek to unfold the subtle ordering of relations in SE and problematize power-related aspects and ideological influences that potentially overshadow dimensions of mutuality and relationality inherent to SE. From an examination of two cases, we hypothesize that differentiations between knowing selves and learning others tend to disintegrate when entrepreneurs and beneficiaries enter into closer interaction. Adopting a postcolonial framework, we identify three forms of relations in SE: transactional, ambiguous/interactional and transcending.

Leadership development programs (LDPs) have proliferated and diversified but still usually share the ambition of involving the participants’ on-the-job experiences. Yet, the dominant view hereof is crude, not acknowledging the variety of ways used to accomplish it. The Scandinavian context is illustrative for reviewing what we term ‘customization devices’ because of its tradition for LDPs with collective reflection, practice orientation, and broad participation. This review curates and synthesizes 31 studies evaluating empirical experiences with customization devices in Scandinavian university-based LDPs from no earlier than 2010. Such devices fall within three key categories, namely theories, cases, and relationships, and have three key effects: distancing from practice, dedicating to the program, and devising future action. Based on our findings, we challenge the dominant view that open enrollment programs cannot adequately mobilize participants’ experiences by theorizing the distinction between open and closed customization. The review further serves as a resource for LDP designers and instructors to carefully choose and mix customization devices that are complementary in their effects.

In connection with the "Great Reset" literature in management and organizational theory, this article discusses human resource sustainability, employment stability, and layoffs in worker cooperatives, a unique organizational form in which employees are members holding residual control rights. Theoretical and empirical contributions show that worker control stabilizes employment better than investor ownership, opening the door to stronger employment protection. The paper leverages key theoretical insights from evolutionary economics and systems theory to discuss the benefits and critical elements associated with limiting member layoffs in worker cooperatives. While strong employment protection can lead to short-term inefficiencies and underperformance due to labour hoarding, imperfections in governance and control mechanisms, it can foster better accumulation and retention of firm-specific human capital and dynamic capabilities, thereby supporting long-term performance.

Policymakers, commentators, and academics have called for a Great Reset, a deep-seated overhaul of the organization of the global economy. Some suggest that management theory needs a reset of its own. We argue that Great Reset proponents fail to appreciate the power of markets to bring about desirable social outcomes and are overly sanguine about what governments can do to alleviate alleged market failures. These views also drive the increasing enthusiasm for stakeholder governance, an increased government role in innovation, and the call for new metrics for assessing outcomes, all part of the Great Reset narrative. And yet, concentrating more decision power in the hands of governments, implementing diffuse metrics, and diluting effective ownership can hamper the functioning of markets, encourage crony capitalism, and reduce the resources that are available for dealing with grand challenges. Existing management theory provides powerful tools for understanding the benefits and costs of alternative institutional arrangements; abandoning these tools will push management theory to the sideline in policy debates.

This study investigates whether employees’ psychological ownership results in stewardship behavior and whether this relationship is affected by an employee’s perception of the organization’s agency culture. A survey of the financial managers of 129 firms in Germany generally confirms these expectations. In addition, and surprisingly, our findings suggest a negligible effect of an agency culture on the relationship between psychological ownership and stewardship behavior when managers perceive high psychological ownership. Thereby, our study enriches the literature on the consequences of psychological ownership by providing insights into the boundary conditions of such outcomes at the manager level.

In this paper, we revisit a moment in the 1990 s when the proposal of ecocentrism as an alternative to anthropocentrism was promising of unprecedented changes in how the field of Organization Studies (OS) should understand the natural environment. Nevertheless, in what seems to be a twist of history, the notion of sustainability became dominant in the OS, and ecocentrism almost got lost in time. Through a reminiscent review, we reflect on past events with the critical attitude of questioning how the field of OS missed a precious opportunity to tread a different future. Facing up the consequences of the destructive potential of human actions upon nature, we explore the concept of the Anthropocene to reflect on the role of organizations in the current state of environmental depletion. We expect that recovering a forgotten history may precipitate the resumption of ecocentrism in OS, as well as compel scholars within this field to further engage with more ecological concerns.

Organizational scholars have long studied and theorized the apparent divergence of discourse and practice in organizational settings, and how it affects leadership, management, and professional work. In this article, we review this work and connect it to an hitherto unexplored philosophical line of thought from the writings of the late Czech playwright, dissident and president Václav Havel. In 1978, Havel published an essay that discussed the consequences of the disconnect between official discourse, promoted by the communist regime, and the everyday life of Czechoslovak citizens. His ideas about the ‘yawning abyss’ between the two, and the resulting ‘pseudo-reality’, are explored in this article, as food for thought about organizational life in late modern capitalism.

This research investigates how employer branding can be strengthened by taking a business ecosystem approach that encourages and leverages indirect social exchanges, such as the behaviour of paying it forward. This work is founded on extant literature and exploratory interviews with individuals from firms seeking to strengthen their employer brand by interdependently operating in a business ecosystem. A model is developed that proposes how indirect social exchanges can occur in an ecosystem, and what types of outcomes it can lead to for the individuals, firms and the ecosystem as a whole. As far as can be ascertained, this is the first study that combines these perspectives. The work suggests that there is value for firms in taking an ecosystem-focused approach to employer branding. The findings highlight that indirect or generalized social exchanges can provide value for individual firms when they form a group of interdependent collaborators rather than simply being competitors. Further, this work adds to the literature related to employee and partner extra-role behaviour by proposing the perspective of an Ecosystem Citizenship Behaviour. Ecosystem Citizenship Behaviour is an extra-role behaviour that occurs in the business ecosystem and as such can be beneficial for joint employer branding initiatives of participating firms.

In their recently published article, Berti and Simpson introduced a comprehensive framework for the systematic analysis of the dark side of organizational paradoxes. While I follow the authors in connecting the analysis of this dark side to types of organizational power, I am concerned with the narrow view on double binds as an expression of coercions only. This narrow view not only runs counter to the basic idea of double bind theory, but also neglects or even denies transition dynamics between different types of organizational double binds. To address these issues, I develop an alternative framework for the analysis of the dark side of organizational power that considers double binds in a broader and more fruitful way. This framework not only facilitates the analysis of transition dynamics between types of double binds, but also reveals practical strategies for mitigating paradoxes and disentangling them from implicit structures that are in the blind spot of Berti and Simpson's framework.