Journal of Management Studies最新文献

Entrepreneurship research has long focused on exceptional, high-growth, venture-funded firms while overlooking the everyday and modest ventures that make up most entrepreneurial activity. This Special Issue calls for a recalibration of the field by decolonizing its assumptions and embracing its pluralism. We distinguish between conventional entrepreneurship, shaped by ideals of technology-driven innovation and venture-capital funded growth, and unconventional entrepreneurship, which reflects diverse and contextually grounded practices. Focusing on everydayness, pluralism, and decolonization, we draw on Santos’ concept of abyssal line to invite a shift from studying outliers to studying the ordinary. Using the metaphor of moving from a microscope to a prism, we call for theories that capture the full spectrum of entrepreneurial life across contexts and cultures. We discuss how papers in this Special Issue exemplify this prism approach and, in doing so, cast new light on how entrepreneurship can be understood, studied, and imagined.

How contexts shape organizational phenomena has long been a focus of management and organization studies (MOS), as has how actors influence contexts. This paper deepens this debate using a rhythm perspective, developed against the backdrop of entrepreneurship research, which has made context a priority but not fully clarified how entrepreneurial agency alters contextual conditions. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, we argue that the everyday provides a privileged vantage point for understanding how contextual forces permeate entrepreneurship and, conversely, how they are affected by it. Specifically, we theorize that the everyday forms a diverse and shifting symphony of rhythms, and suggest that entrepreneurial agency includes the transformative capacity to shape these rhythms to create tangible value. We refine our theorizing through the example of the Brukman textile factory, an entrepreneurial squat taken over by its former workers. The vignette explores how agency is enacted through the cultivation of moments of rupture (arrhythmia) and moments of rhythmic harmony (eurhythmia). Our contribution is to develop a rhythm perspective to spark new ways of thinking about context, agency, and transformative change. While our theorizing is rooted in entrepreneurship research, we identify ways in which it can stimulate MOS more broadly.

Leadership research has evolved towards increasing conceptual and methodological precision, yielding refined constructs and robust empirical insights. However, this editorial argues that a singular focus on precision risks fragmenting the field and distancing scholarship from the complex realities of organizational life. Drawing on contributions from JMS, this thematic collection illustrates how leadership is a dynamic, contextually embedded phenomenon shaped by interdependent forces. By ‘zooming out’, scholarship can better reflect the messy, adaptive nature of leadership and offer more actionable insights for leaders navigating today’s organizational challenges. We propose a multidimensional framework – breadth, depth, and height – to reintroduce complexity into leadership studies. Breadth captures the diversity of leadership styles and disciplinary perspectives; depth explores the psychological, symbolic, and relational undercurrents of those diverse perspectives; and height examines how diverse perspectives play out differently across hierarchical levels and systems.

While women’s entrepreneurship theory and practice have advanced significantly in the last few decades, the persistent challenges women entrepreneurs face suggest the need for novel theoretical insights that illuminate their experiences of entrepreneurship as an everyday, embodied practice. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s critical interpretive phenomenological account of affective economies and based on qualitative accounts from 58 entrepreneurs in India, this paper explores how gendered-classed experiences enable or constrain embodied practices of women entrepreneurs in the Global South. We make two key contributions to women’s entrepreneurship literature within management studies. First, we show how gendered and classed experiences orientate entrepreneurs when navigating the possibilities and restrictions faced in everyday spaces of commerce. Second, we develop a theoretical understanding of the affective and situated negotiation of entrepreneurial work in situ through what we call the embodied territories of entrepreneurship. We discuss how ‘embodied territories’ provides an important counterpoint to cognition-driven affect literature that dominates management research and advances the broader affective turn in management studies. Overall, this research presents an alternative way of understanding a hitherto overlooked perspective on how women embody, experience, and negotiate entrepreneurial spaces.

Through an abductive qualitative case study of a Colombian peacebuilding NGO, we explore how social intermediaries facilitate the integration of fragmented ex-combatant and campesino communities. Our analysis reveals a three-stage process by which the social intermediary simultaneously engages in enterprise-focused and community-focused activities to transform loosely connected ‘communities of circumstance’ into tightly integrated ‘communities of choice’. First, the intermediary uses ‘dirty boots’ to establish itself as a trusted, shared relationship between communities. It then employs an ‘accompaniment’ approach to cultivate shared spaces, shared practices, and shared interests among community members engaging in collective entrepreneurial activities. Finally, it shifts to ‘distant friends’ as it encourages communities to embrace a shared future together. By clarifying how intermediaries can use entrepreneurship as a force for community integration, particularly within necessity contexts of conflict and poverty, we contribute to research on social intermediaries, communities, and entrepreneurship as a tool to address grand challenges.

While social entrepreneurs’ pro-social motivation and other-oriented emotions often drive their collaborative efforts to tackle grand challenges like poverty or gender inequality in the Global South, we know little about how collective emotions shape Global South–North partnerships over time. Drawing on a comparative longitudinal study of two Ugandan-German social enterprise partnerships with the joint goal of achieving the Southern partner’s self-reliance, we problematize how collective emotions may lead to various stages of collective emotional dependency and hence foster postcolonial repercussions. We introduce collective emotional dependency as an inherent micro-level mechanism that may manifest, surface, and become (dis-)embedded beyond macro-level dependencies. Our findings illustrate the double-edged nature of the collective emotions in each phase of the partnership, as they can be both beneficial and detrimental. Our study shows that longstanding power inequalities, which South–North social enterprise partnerships set out to reduce in the first place, remain present in the everyday relational practices of organizing and collaborating.

Indigenous communities are resurging and harnessing this momentum to reshape their social world. As they reclaim their cultural resources, rights, and identities, they gain control over how and whether to engage with Western social structures. Using the metaphor of metal frame and grass basket materials, we conceptualize how First Nations communities mobilize scaffolding materials from different social realities and innovatively combine them to shape and reshape their social world. We theorize that the degree to which a community integrates different scaffolding materials is consequential for whether and how the community will engage with outsiders. We learn from First Nations communities across northern Turtle Island (Canada) by running a cluster analysis and identifying three different ways communities construct scaffolding using Indigenous and Western materials. Then, using a unique dataset of 240 Canadian First Nations communities, we use those clusters to predict the likelihood a given community will engage in a partnership agreement with an outsider, in this case a non-Indigenous mining company, and when they might do so. This analysis highlights a kind of entrepreneurial activity, the construction and use of scaffolding, and a context that is overlooked by mainstream entrepreneurship scholars and management scholars in general. We aim to contribute to the recalibration of entrepreneurship literature through a decolonial lens.

Over the last two decades, a growing number of studies of novel forms of social-symbolic work (e.g., identity work, boundary work, institutional work, values work, etc.) have appeared in the organization and management studies literature. This growing body of research – the ‘turn to work’ in organization theory – has provided important new insights into how actors purposefully participate in the social construction of organizations and their contexts. The aim of this special issue is to build on and extend these insights and in this introductory essay we begin by outlining a framework that provides a useful meta-theory – the social-symbolic work perspective – for integrating this stream of research. This perspective revolves around two key concepts: ‘social-symbolic objects’ defined as meaningful patterns in a social system; and ‘social-symbolic work’ defined as conscious, reflexive efforts to shape social-symbolic objects. We then introduce the articles that appear in this special issue and identify important cross-cutting themes. Drawing on these articles, we go on to identify potentially fruitful areas for future research on social-symbolic work and end with a challenge to organizational scholars to build on this special issue to move our understanding of social-symbolic work forward.