Journal of Management Studies最新文献

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long held the promise of imitating, replacing, or even surpassing human intelligence. Now that the abilities of AI systems have started to approach this initial aspiration, organization and management scholars face a challenge in how to theorize this technology, which potentially changes the way we view technology: not as a tool, but as something that enters previously human-only domains. To navigate this theorizing challenge, we adopt the problematizing review method by engaging in a selective and critical reading of the theoretical contributions regarding AI, in the most influential organization and management journals. We examine how the literature has grounded itself with AI as the root metaphor and what field assumptions about AI are shared – or contested – in the field. We uncover two core assumptions of rationality and anthropomorphism, around which fruitful debates are already emerging. We discuss these two assumptions and their organizational boundary conditions in the context of theorizing AI. Finally, we invite scholars to build distinctive organization and management theory scaffolding within the broader social science of AI.

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.

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.