British Journal of Management最新文献

This essay interrogates how extreme events including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate disasters, and political conflict, amplify structural inequalities in academia. Drawing on critical autoethnographic material from an Early Career Researcher with intersecting marginalisations, we show how crises expose and intensify two mutually reinforcing dynamics: misrecognition (institutional neglect of care responsibilities, political vulnerability, and embodied identity) and responsibilisation (the shifting of crisis management onto individuals). We demonstrate how these processes operate through institutional silence and performativity mechanisms that simultaneously erase vulnerability and demand uninterrupted performance, making individual adaptability appear both natural and necessary. By situating these lived experiences within Honneth's theory of recognition and Foucault's concept of responsibilisation, we theorise how their interaction deepens disadvantage for vulnerable groups during and after crises. In response, we propose Recognition-based Accountability (RbA) as a framework for institutional reform. RbA shifts the emphasis from individual resilience to structural responsibility, outlining actionable, care-oriented pathways for embedding equity and recognition into crisis governance in management education. This essay thus contributes to debates on academic inequality and the future of work by revealing the embodied costs of institutional neglect and offering a model for reorienting crisis response toward justice, care, and accountability.

Our paper explains how organizations can build and sustain internal member identification during rapidly scaling transitions. Using a longitudinal case study of a UK scaling firm, we show how organizational members follow a recursive process of retaining and forgoing the past and foreseeing the future to create a transitional organizational identity through transitionary identity work. Key to such identity work is identification-based trust, which embraces being valued, having confidence in colleagues and being aligned with company values. Such identification-based trust generates positive emotions and holds a scaling firm together while it changes. Our study contributes to the literature on identity transition, showing how integration can be achieved in underexplored settings of chaotic and unstable change.

Studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling—the gap between CSR strategy and its implementation—have predominantly focused on macro- and organizational-level causes, with less attention paid to its impact on internal actors. To explore how organizational members respond to CSR decoupling, this study focused on middle managers (MMs) whose primary responsibility is to integrate CSR strategies into daily operations. We experimentally tested how different types of CSR decoupling influence MMs’ emotions, behaviour and cognition. Our findings showed that while MMs evaluate all types of CSR decoupling as equally negative, they are more likely to address it when it stems from their peers. However, when CSR decoupling stems from top managers, MMs are likely to resign from their organizations due to the ensuing emotional toll. CSR decoupling from external stakeholders (i.e. customers) encourages MMs to procrastinate on action. To add depth to our examination, we conducted 23 interviews, finding that expectations of influence and exposure distress explain MMs’ varying response patterns. Our conceptual model of middle-managerial responses contributes to the literature by unpacking how and why MMs respond differently to this phenomenon and complements the relational approach to CSR implementation by integrating intraindividual drivers of behaviour into the analysis.

Many organizations actively employ artificial intelligence (AI) tools to enhance the speed, scale and consistency of decision-making, including the resource intensive procurement process of supplier scouting—identifying and selecting high-quality suppliers. This process involves high-stakes procurement decisions that shape the structure and performance of supply networks. However, over time, outcomes from AI-aided supplier scouting often show a gradual drift as supplier diversity narrows, novel entrants are overlooked and recommendations increasingly mirror previous selections. This paper unpacks this problematic drift by constructing a middle-range theory of bias co-evolution grounded in ecological rationality, which defines decision quality as the fit between decision strategies and decision environments. We posit two second-order biases—status-quo bias in human judgement and machine-feedback bias in algorithmic outputs—that mutually evolve across repeated decision cycles, progressively reinforcing one another. This co-evolution creates a temporal trajectory where bias becomes increasingly embedded in both human and algorithmic decision systems. We formalize this theory through nine propositions linking market, data, algorithmic and human decision structures. In closing, we offer four design principles—monitor bias transitions, disrupt feedback loops, isolate decision parameters, create algorithmic circuit-breakers—to preserve decision fit and enable responsible AI-aided decision-making.

The entrepreneurial finance literature has hitherto largely neglected the role of non-Indigenous equity finance across different territorial jurisdictions. Invoking the concept of spatial myopia, this paper examines the role played by this specialist form of finance within different locations and how a firm's relative geographic location within a national economy plays a fundamental determinant shaping their ability to obtain this form of specialist equity funding. In particular, this study explores the spatial dynamics of international equity investments, with a specific focus on the UK's six major financial EE hubs. By integrating firm-level data from Crunchbase with city-level economic indicators, the analysis employs a multilevel mixed-effects probit regression model to assess the probability of firms attracting international investors. Our findings reveal that the famous ‘Golden Triangle’ of London, Cambridge and Oxford remain dominant in terms of attracting international equity investments. Spatial myopia significantly influences investment patterns, with increased distance from the Golden Triangle correlating with reduced probabilities of securing international equity finance. However, no distinct advantages are observable for early and late-stage ventures within the triumvirate compared to the other financial hubs. We conclude that overcoming myopic decision-making in international equity investors is a non-trivial policy objective to address.

The transaction cost theory of family firms posits that bifurcation bias (BB) – the preferential treatment of family assets regardless of the actual value they bring to the business – leads to inefficiency in decision-making and performance. Our study examines empirically three mechanisms that, according to extant literature, may help family firms mitigate the effects of BB: professional workforce training, engaging in technological collaborations and involving external investors. Drawing on panel data from the Spanish manufacturing sector (2006–2018), we test whether these mechanisms improve efficiency more in family firms than in nonfamily firms. Our findings suggest that mechanisms that combine resource augmentation with external accountability, such as technological collaborations and external investors, are more effective at alleviating BB than mechanisms focused solely on internal resource development.

The internationalization of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) into advanced markets is a critical area of research. However, limited attention has been paid to how domestic environmental engagement influences this process. This study addresses this gap by applying institutional and resource dependency theory perspectives to panel data from BRICS-based multinationals. The findings indicate a positive relationship between domestic environmental engagement and the degree of internationalization into advanced markets. Furthermore, the presence of a transnational board strengthens this relationship, while domestic social engagement negatively moderates it. The results suggest the crucial roles of transnational boards and domestic social engagement in shaping EMNEs’ environmental strategies, which, in turn, influence their international expansion. This study contributes to institutional and resource dependency theory perspectives by demonstrating that local environmental innovations can help BRICS EMNEs to navigate the more demanding and complex institutional environments of advanced economies, where sustainability expectations are higher. It also highlights the importance of transnational boards, suggesting that EMNEs should consider appointing international board members to better align with the expectations of advanced market stakeholders and enhance their environmental engagement capabilities.

Employee resource groups (ERGs), also known as diversity networks or affinity groups, are becoming an increasingly important element of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) management in organizations. They are recognized as a potential voice mechanism for under-represented employees and some studies highlight cases where ERGs have contributed to meaningful change. However, research examining ERGs through a voice lens offers limited evidence that they consistently function as influential voice mechanisms, and there is little knowledge of why their ability to influence change varies. We address this gap by investigating whether and how ERGs can function as a voice mechanism and the processes and circumstances that affect their influence in organizations. Through a qualitative study involving 36 in-depth interviews with EDI officers and ERG chairs, we find that ERGs can influence organizational change, addressing both group-specific concerns and more strategic EDI matters, but this depends on the nature and availability of formal and informal voice channels, organizational support and ERG self-governance. Drawing on these findings and abductively building on previous conceptual work on employee voice we develop a new model of ERG voice that can inform future research on ERGs and guide workplace practice to improve ERGs’ impact and contributions to EDI.

Sustainability tensions in business have increasingly received attention in prior literature; yet, there is still a dearth of studies on how entrepreneurs in small- and medium-sized enterprises – and more specifically in sustainability-driven enterprises – navigate these tensions. Building on the process orientation strand of the entrepreneurial cognition literature, we examine how sustainability-driven entrepreneurs address sustainability tensions by using Weick's stages of the sensemaking process as an analytical lens. Undertaking a qualitative study of sustainability-driven ventures, we identify two distinct strategies for managing tensions. Firstly, entrepreneurs employ linear sensemaking when dealing with straightforward sustainability tensions, utilizing clear and focussed strategies. Secondly, entrepreneurs engage in elaborate, open-ended sensemaking for more ambiguous tensions, which requires more time and cognitive effort. These strategies consist of different patterns of scanning, interpreting and learning, highlighting the varied approaches entrepreneurs take to navigate sustainability tensions. As our theoretical contribution, we offer a finely grained process perspective to explain how the various combinations of the stages of the sensemaking process work together (or not) to create more aggregate cognitive concepts, like entrepreneurial motivation. We conclude by drawing out implications of our research for leveraging entrepreneurial decision-making in the context of the considerable uncertainty that sustainability entails.

While leadership practices are often assumed to be stable throughout the day, emerging evidence suggests that leaders’ willingness to help their followers fluctuates based on daily experiences, highlighting within-person variability that remains underexplored in leadership research. Drawing on Affective Events and Broaden-and-Build theories, we adopt a temporal dynamic and leader-centric perspective to examine these fluctuations. We propose that leaders’ engagement in three common practices, including task-oriented, relation-oriented and change-oriented behaviour, earlier in the workday positively influences their affect later in the day, which, in turn, increases their likelihood of offering help towards their subordinates the following day. To test our hypotheses, we employed an experience sampling methodology (ESM), collecting data from 120 full-time front-line supervisors twice a day over 2 consecutive workweeks, yielding 839 observations. Our findings reveal that these distinct daily leadership practices significantly shape fluctuations in leaders’ positive affect, thereby enhancing their subsequent willingness to help followers. In doing so, our study challenges the conventional view of leadership as a static phenomenon and offers new insights into how daily variations in leadership practices contribute to the work lives of followers.