British Journal of Management最新文献

At the core of each grand challenge is a society that is thought to have a need and organizations with an ambition to address that need. This article explores the necessary negotiations between organizations and society as they address a grand challenge involving an ambitious programme of change. Using Narrative Inquiry, we analysed 78 interviews conducted with organizations and society in rural Sarawak (Borneo) to understand the process of negotiating narratives of public value when intervening in the societal grand challenge of rural electrification. We found that organizations and society amplified and attenuated narratives of public value through a boundary object (electrical energy), where they pushed out and pulled in viewpoints to adapt narratives of the intervention's public value. The paternal nature of the organization's management of the intervention created conflict about what its perceived and real benefits were. The model we develop explains how conflicting narratives of public value are negotiated and adapted using boundary objects. In illustrating this process, we provide a theoretical model that management research can use to assess the boundary objects, narratives and public values that organizations apply when they seek to do good, and to understand the conflict and negotiation with society where they intervene.

The fashion industry makes a sizeable contribution to climate change. Research on grand challenges has now gained momentum in the management literature, given the vast array of grand challenges that are now globally affecting industries, societies and governments, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and global warming. By coupling paradox theory with the literature on circular economy, this paper investigates the end-of-life circular practices implemented by ‘born-circular’ Italian fashion companies. The paper focuses on upcycling and remanufacturing, which have been neglected in the literature and whose widespread implementation has been deemed suitable to tackle climate change. The analysis of several in-depth interviews with companies and industry experts results in the development of a process model. The model provides granular insights into the environmental value created by the implementation of end-of-life circular practices by fashion firms in their quest to tackle climate change. The study both suggests that paradox theory is likely to have broader applicability to reconcile a wide set of managerial and societal issues and also supports the argument that overcoming an intrinsic paradox could lead to a strategic pivoting within an industry that might yield a paradigm shift.

Digitalization can profoundly change resource mobilization, including the search, access and governance of resources. In this introductory paper to the Special Issue on Digitalization and Resource Mobilization, we review existing research to identify different approaches towards digitalization, different conceptualizations of what resources are in this context and different aspects of resource mobilization across studies and theories. Drawing on these insights, we illustrate contemporary research examples and outline the way forward for two research streams focusing on resource mobilization in a digital context – specifically, the crowdfunding and human resources literature. We conclude by proposing four new areas to further advance the field.