Journal of Management Studies最新文献

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.

This study investigates how the resilience process unfolds for Black entrepreneurs in the context of chronic racism, employing a novel qualitative approach that combines Group Model Building (GMB) and semi-structured interviews with 49 Black entrepreneurs. Drawing on the socio-ecological theory of resilience and leveraging Critical Race Theory (CRT), the research finds that resilience, shaped by the persistent nature of racism, requires ongoing adaptation rather than a return to a pre-adversity state. This continuous adaptation can lead to the depletion of coping resources. The study also illustrates how internal and external coping mechanisms interact, showing that over-reliance on internal coping mechanisms arises due to insufficient institutional and social support. Our research contributes to the literature on Black entrepreneurship, resilience, and race in entrepreneurship, while offering a comprehensive policy approach to both support and empower Black entrepreneurs. We advocate for decolonizing research practices that not only study but actively benefit the communities involved, fostering engaged and transformative scholarship.

Management scholars are increasingly interested in ‘future making’, observing and theorizing how organizational actors produce and enact the yet-to-come. However, the rapid growth of the conversation runs the risk of emptying the notion of future making, calling into question its meaning and relevance. In response to these concerns, our Point is that there is value in understanding future making from a practice perspective. A practice perspective, we argue, is empirically sufficiently open to account for the plurality and open-endedness of futures and future making amidst the continual emergence of interrelated crises, large-scale challenges, and intractable technologies. Thus, it reinforces the relevance of research on future making as a central part of contemporary organizational life. At the same time, the four practice-based dimensions elaborated in this Point provide sufficient conceptual specificity to discern what counts as future making and what does not, thereby providing solid ground for cumulative theory-building and research in this area. Our Point extends research on future making in management studies by substantiating the relevance of examining and theorizing future making, and by articulating and clarifying a practice perspective on future making that directs scholarly attention to important areas for future research.

In this Counterpoint, we argue for the importance of social movements in responding to the climate crisis by challenging the taken-for-granted practices and policies of corporate capitalism. These challenges politicize what is seen as ‘common sense’ and show that there are alternatives to the dominant social order of fossil-fuelled economic growth. More specifically, we set out three ways to minimise future harm and suffering by discussing (i) the required decarbonisation of the economic system, (ii) the eventual degrowth needed to address the existing crisis and avoiding the creation of another, and (iii) the strengthening of democracy essential to breaking fossil fuel dependence. Challenges to corporate capitalism are often accused of being naïve and unrealistic, but responding to climate change demands an epochal rethink of what should be seen as ‘sensible’.