Journal of Management Studies最新文献

There is wide agreement about the potential for hybridity – the combination of plural organizational forms – to address complex societal grand challenges. Unfortunately, advancements in this area have been unduly constrained by the fragmentation of research along the organizational unit of analysis. This Special Issue advances research by offering a framework that bridges hybridity research across the organizational, inter-organizational, and societal levels of analysis. We introduce a framework of transformational hybridity based on three interlinked mechanisms that drive societal transformation across different levels – Shape up!, Shake up!, and Shift up! Shape up! involves changes in organizational and inter-organizational hybridity practices. In turn, Shake up! involves changes in hybridity boundaries through organizational and inter-organizational arrangements. Through interplay, these two mechanisms may bring about Shift up!, a societal transformation that addresses a grand challenge. Taken together, this Special Issue paves the road for novel research directions and equips scholars and practitioners alike with a multi-level lens for tackling societal grand challenges through transformational hybridity.

This study advances our understanding of new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition by broadening the epistemological scope of our theory to be inclusive of non-Western contexts. We conducted a qualitative study of entrepreneurs from India, Kenya, and Mexico seeking impact investments from Western impact investors to better understand how entrepreneurs in non-Western contexts contend with perceived legitimacy tensions that arise when pursuing financial resources from non-local investors. In contrast to the prevailing assumption that non-Western entrepreneurs are resource-constrained and adhere to existing strategies to seek legitimacy from financial resource providers, we find that such entrepreneurs perceive their local institutional environment to have important non-financial resources that impact how they seek legitimacy from financial resource providers. This study offers a novel conceptualization of new venture legitimation by acknowledging non-Western and Western institutional environments as important considerations in how entrepreneurs navigate legitimacy with both financial and non-financial audiences over time.

Achieving system-level change for climate transitions is needed, and incremental efforts are widely considered insufficient. Drawing on neo-Schumpeterian, cultural-institutionalist, and post-structuralist theories, this Point-Counterpoint debate explores the systemic barriers including neoliberal policies, corporate hegemony, and growth-driven cultural logics which inhibit the kind of change that is needed to mitigate increasingly devastating climatic conditions. Our contributors propose a range of potential solutions which may break these barriers and deliver the required radical system-level change. These include further and better democratization, quixotic institutional work so as to undermine dominant cultural templates, the use of various counter-hegemonic practices, and the development of alternative forms of organizing. In this introduction, we explore contact and departure points between the three positions and offer some critical reflections and future research questions on the idea of system-level change.

Future making, the work of enacting the yet-to-come by making sense of and giving form to imaginings of the future, has become topical in management studies lately. Triggered by pressing societal challenges like climate change, inequality and threatened democratic institutions vis-à-vis a societal ‘crisis mode’, management scholars have started to engage with the future as an open-ended temporal category, both as an object of analysis happening in and around organizations, as well as a way of scholarly inquiry. This Point-Counterpoint debate about future making in management research comes right on time, as future-making research seems to be at a crossroads, potentially heading to a bright – or not so bright – future. The contributions to this debate collectively ask: What is the future of future making in management research, and they could not be more different in the pathways they envisage.

In their Point, Wenzel, Cabantous, and Koch set out how future making encompasses a broad range of future-oriented practices, including but not limited to planning, foresight, agile, and design-driven approaches. In this Counterpoint, we contest that viewing future making as any future-oriented practice may also encompass unsuitable and detrimental practices, and may blur the concept to the point of hindering, rather than sustaining efforts at theorizing future making. Adopting a Pragmatist perspective, we suggest viewing future making as an emancipatory inquiry aimed at imagining and reifying desirable futures, that is, collective, value-based judgements of what the future might and should be. This entails a reflective conversation with the social and material world, whereby concerned actors collectively deliberate, based on values, what futures are desirable – for themselves, for future generations, and the natural environment. In advancing this view, we also reject Wright's Counterpoint on future making as a management fad that ignores long-standing research on scenario planning, and instead, we argue that future making should depart from the managerialism of scenario planning. The main contribution of our Counterpoint is to suggest a theoretical perspective for advancing our understanding of how desirable futures can be crafted in practice.

This Counterpoint cautions that future making research treats the future too simplistically and fails to acknowledge the fundamental uncertainty inherent in all futures work. First, future making scholarship overlooks existing academic research, in which similar concerns have been pursued, empirically and conceptually, for years. Second, utopian futures are considered achievable if only actors have a vision of what they wish to create. Finally, most future making statements around grand challenges rely on little more than hope, failing to account for the complex relationalities shaping them. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the scenario planning literature, Knightian uncertainty, and anthropology of future research. I also critique the Point's call for future making scholars to adopt practice-based approaches (Wenzel et al., forthcoming) in their empirical inquiries, arguing that the ‘as Practice’ move in management studies is yet to achieve its aspirations. Additionally, I caution against the other Counterpoint in this debate that future making requires the realization of desired and emancipatory futures (Comi et al., forthcoming), as this view is too restrictive for broad and deep future making theorizing to emerge.