British Journal of Management最新文献

Firms are increasingly expected to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in reaction to external crises. Yet, we still know little about how they do it. This study discusses what we can learn from how large global firms responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a cluster analysis on Fortune Global 500 firms, our findings reveal that to meet both institutional and economic pressures posed by the crisis, global firms adopted what we call a synergistic multi-stakeholder approach by addressing the needs of multiple stakeholder groups simultaneously through transferable response strategies. These strategies varied by firm, ranging from donations and educational initiatives to collaboration and minimal support. We discuss the characteristics and potential drivers of each strategy. Our findings suggest that synergistic CSR strategies combine (social) value creation with operational efficiencies across stakeholder groups, with critical implications for how firms may respond to future disasters and crises.

The literature has called on business and management scholars to help understand the global challenges we face and to find solutions. The prevailing narratives that have implicitly informed our understanding of business and management knowledge and practice as good need to be reimagined. We question whether our existing theoretical lenses, along with fundamental underlying assumptions about what constitutes labour, value and its creation, and the nature of assets, liabilities and materiality, act as a barrier to advancing business and management practice as a force for good and explore whether we need to go beyond applying existing theory to new research questions. Both Agency Theory and Stakeholder Theory have proven ineffective in aligning social and economic interests, while our disciplinary and publishing customs constrain our imagination and impede conceptions of fundamentally new ways of practising business.  We explore why we need to reimagine business and management; what we mean by reimagining business and management and what it means to be a force for good. We conclude that if the purpose of business needs to be reimagined, business schools will also need to change to be major catalysts in this process.

Qualitative interviewing is the most common qualitative research method in management studies. However, researchers using this method tend to use a distinct ‘packages’ of practices, each of which is underpinned by a distinct onto-epistemological paradigm. In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how paradigms influence research by examining how researchers make an ‘epistemological leap’ from their interview data to a claim to know something about a phenomenon outside of the interview situation. Using illustrative examples from published management research, we develop a typology of five epistemological modes that differ according to how far researchers ‘leap’ and what they ‘leap’ to when making knowledge claims from interview data. We conclude by outlining the implications of our typology for those involved in conducting, teaching and evaluating qualitative interview research.

This study focuses on climate change regulatory pressures at the national/regional level, which can be considered emergent institutions – newly established and subject to change – in contrast to established institutions. We explore their impact on the environmental sustainability performance of multinational enterprises, advancing beyond the extant literature's focus on their binary compliance reactions. Utilizing a sample of Standard & Poor's 1200 firms, our findings indicate that variations in climate change regulatory pressures at the national/regional level can account for differences in environmental sustainability performance at the corporate level. Moreover, this relationship is moderated by two critical firm characteristics: foreign market exposure and industry carbon intensity. Foreign market exposure, particularly in the context of developing countries, can diminish the positive effects of a home country's climate change regulatory pressures, while industry carbon intensity can amplify these effects.

This paper explores ‘good work’ as purpose-driven organizing for positive social impact in the case of alternative food initiatives (AFIs). AFIs accommodate alternative ways of food production and consumption that tackle the world's pressing sustainability challenges. Considering the centrality of workers’ motives, beliefs for generating/sustaining alternative and spiritual work/organizational contexts, this study bridges the knowledge on AFIs and workplace spirituality (WS) through the individual-level perspective. The paper explores AFI members’ workplace motives and experiences to understand how these individuals make sense of their work, and to draw insights on what ‘good work’ entails in this organizational realm. Data were collected via a two-phase study from a total of 28 members of organizations based in Glasgow, Scotland. The results show that AFI members’ work drivers include spiritual (as other-regarding) motives and that the perceived value of their work is in contributing to the welfare of others through a workspace of belonging, freedom and care. The findings suggest that a WS perspective can help in understanding how AFI members approach their work to create (greater) good. Drawing on the lessons from the case analysis within the AFI context, this paper highlights the relevance of WS for repurposing work and organizing.

Democratic forms of enterprise and economic governance are needed to help address urgent societal challenges where hierarchical decision-making and governance approaches are clearly failing. There is insufficient understanding, however, of the capabilities needed by enterprises to implement and sustain organizational democracy in pressurized operational contexts. We focus on the role of collective capabilities, which arise from interactions between individuals to create collaboration and collective benefits. Interview evidence from 12 mutual social enterprises – organizations that trade with a social purpose – is used to explore the learning processes that underpin the generation of collective capabilities for organizational democracy. The analysis leads us to a theoretical model of collective capabilities development that responds to three fundamental areas of challenge: (i) Adaptive design of governance structures and processes, to balance ‘bottom-up’ democracy with ‘top-down’ stewardship control; (ii) Embedding, extending and revitalizing democracy, by supporting the voice, capabilities and confidence of workers and users to participate in collaborative governance; and (iii) Fostering deliberative learning, to navigate tensions and conflict between plural perspectives and achieve collective aims. In concluding, we reflect on some institutional and cultural barriers to organizational democracy and the case for more concerted policy action to realize its potential as a crucial component of economic democracy.

Although virtual influencers, that is, computer-generated personas, have been a growing trend in marketing, we still know very little about their impact on consumers’ attitudes and behaviour. To bridge this gap, this study: (a) explores individuals’ acceptance of influences induced by virtual influencers and (b) investigates how influence acceptance translates into behaviour. Drawing on Social Influence Theory, we first conducted a comprehensive literature review to extract the key attributes of virtual influencers (i.e. warmth, relatedness, interactivity, competence, empathy, uniqueness, fairness and credibility) as enablers of engagement that can determine influence acceptance. Then, based on 601 survey responses and using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we analysed the associations between the enablers of engagement, influence acceptance processes (i.e. compliance, identification and internalization) and behavioural responses (purchase intention and behaviour adoption). Our findings highlight various sets of virtual influencer attributes that lead to high degrees of compliance, identification and internalization, and behavioural responses. We contribute to the influencer literature by explaining the causes of the persuasiveness of virtual influencers and their effectiveness in stimulating behaviour. Our study also offers practical insights into how brand managers can leverage virtual influencers in online marketing strategies.

The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to investigate the moderating effect of the cultural value orientation of harmony/mastery on the relationship between board gender diversity (BGD) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance; and (2) to examine further whether cultural tightness amplifies the moderating effect of harmony/mastery orientation. Using a sample of 5135 firms across 25 countries during the period 2002–2021, our interaction model run with panel regression showed that the association between BGD and CSR performance is positively (negatively) moderated by harmony (mastery) orientation. Moreover, our test of a three-way interaction among BGD, harmony (mastery), and cultural tightness–looseness on CSR performance revealed that the moderating effect of harmony (mastery) orientation is amplified when cultural tightness increases. The findings suggest that harmony/mastery orientation matters more for the effects of BGD on firm CSR performance under tight cultural conditions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the study.

Investors and financial market intermediaries have been blamed for under-investment, low growth and low rates of innovation in the UK, with their behaviour being attributed to short-termism. Various reasons for short-termism have been identified, including undervaluing long-term earnings, increased financial obstacles associated with longer investment horizons, and the adoption of financial control systems to meet investors’ demands for quarterly earnings reports. As a result, firms may opt for suboptimal short-term investment projects while neglecting potentially valuable long-term initiatives. Most research has focused on large corporates, which constitute a small fraction of the economy and involve multiple stakeholders. There is a significant knowledge gap regarding small owner-managed firms that rely primarily on internal financing and bank debt for investment. Our study fills this gap by analysing a comprehensive UK finance and investment decision-making survey of 1501 firms across all classes. The survey reveals that investment appraisal relies on a ‘payback’ period. We find that 58.8% of firms choose a payback period of 3 years or less, with shorter payback periods more prominent among the smallest firms. This suggests that financial frictions impact the investment behaviour of the smallest firms, while shareholder-driven short-termism influences the largest firms but only in relation to research and development projects.

Although research investigating how organizational culture contributes to institutional failure has extensively conceptualized the causal factors (e.g. norms for behaving unsafely), how culture prevents such problems from being corrected is less well theorized. We synthesize theory on accidents, resilience and reliability and organizational learning to develop a conceptual model of ‘corrective culture’. This relates to distributed norms and behaviours for three interconnected elements: the detection of problems (‘identification’), appreciation of their meaning (‘interpretation’) and responses to prevent harm (‘action’). To investigate the model, and its role in institutional failure, we combined natural language processing and qualitative analysis to examine 54 UK public inquiries published during 1990–2020. Our mixed-methods analysis found that distributed malfunctions in identifying, interpreting and acting on problems cause a breakdown in organizations’ ‘corrective loops’, which enables originating problems to compound and grow (e.g. risky, unsafe or poor conduct) and cause an institutional failure. We theorize that double-loop learning is required to prevent this, whereby strong and unambiguous feedback compels organizations to acknowledge and address their problems in dealing with problems, thus enabling them to correctly identify, interpret and act on originating issues and thus prevent a spiral into failure.