Journal of Management Studies最新文献

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’.

The climate crisis challenges management scholars to address the system-level factors that constrain and enable firms’ climate action. We argue that to meet this challenge, we need to study the climate action capacity of alternative systems of political-economic power. We proceed in three steps. First, we develop a historically grounded map of four main types of power systems: ‘Oligarchy’, ‘Localism’, ‘Authoritarianism’, and ‘Democratization’. These types represent analytical categories – not clichéd labels – to examine alternative responses to the climate crisis. Second, we use this map to compare four cases in the taxi transportation sector, a sector which exemplifies the confluence of the digital and green revolutions in today’s political-economic landscape. Our analysis of these cases suggests that Oligarchy’s climate action capacity is weak because its climate action is limited to what is profitable for the dominant firms. Oligarchy has been challenged by Authoritarianism, whereas Localism and Democratization have yet to yield stable alternatives. Building on these insights, in the third step we identify three priorities for strengthening our field’s capacity for relevant climate action research: (a) a focus on the systems within which firms are embedded, (b) a focus on political-economic power, and (c) a programme of international comparative research.

Although debates around diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work might suggest a polarized population, many people feel ambivalent or hold mixed positive and negative feelings about such work. While ambivalence can be beneficial or harmful, scholars have overlooked the idea that bringing ambivalence about DEI work into conscious awareness may help to transform it from a potentially harmful emotion into a constructive one. In this paper, I conceptualize a ‘vicious system’ in which ambivalence about DEI work is unconsciously suppressed and contrast it with a ‘virtuous system’ where ambivalence about DEI work is consciously acknowledged and embraced. The model highlights three key forms of emotional work necessary for shifting from a vicious to virtuous system: discursive work, relational work and organizational body work. Ultimately, this paper advances theory in DEI, social-symbolic work and organizational ambivalence by demonstrating how engaging with ambivalence about DEI work can lead to more constructive outcomes.

The ‘iron cage’ of the (neo-) liberal-capitalist system prioritizes economic returns over climate protection. Formerly powerful nation-states are subordinated to the rule of markets, whereas business elites have been freed from substantial responsibility for social and environmental concerns. While we agree in principle with the Point that a reassertion of state power may facilitate more decided climate action, our Counterpoint adopts a cultural institutionalist perspective that highlights the embeddedness of actors in a broader cultural order. From this perspective, actors enact scripts while often lacking substantive agency towards protecting the natural environment. Cultural change in meanings, myths, practices, and rituals is needed to remodel the currently dominant scripts and templates of modern, liberal-capitalist ‘world society’, including the script of state actorhood. We suggest the notion of ‘quixotic institutional work’ as a way of envisioning and prefiguring alternative cultural templates when both the physical and the social reality start showing cracks due to the climate crisis. Quixotic institutional work follows the logic of appropriateness rather than consequential purposiveness, and thus constitutes a different, often overlooked and mocked, form of agency for systems change relevant in the light of powerful forces towards maintaining an unsustainable world order.

This special issue advances our understanding of organizing and strategizing in extreme contexts by focusing on temporality, emotions, and embodiment. Extreme contexts – marked by unpredictability, high stakes, and urgency – challenge organizational capacities and demand innovative responses. Drawing on the foundation of extreme context research, this introduction explores three perspectives: extreme as an event, a situational context, and a socially constructed practice. Together, these perspectives illuminate how organizations navigate, adapt to, and construct extremeness through temporal, emotional, and embodied processes. The contributions span diverse empirical settings and theoretical frameworks. By examining the contributions in the light of these dimensions, this introduction highlights the evolving and contested nature of extreme context research. The introduction concludes with a call for future studies to deepen engagement with materiality, relational dynamics, and methodological innovations, reinforcing the relevance of this field to broader management and organization studies.