Journal of Management Studies最新文献

Bansal et al.'s Point piece, "Strategy's Ecological Fallacy: How strategy scholars have contributed to the ecological crisis and what we can do about it," calls for reforming the strategy field to focus on the natural environment, ecological cycles, and interconnections across natural and social levels, in service of value creation for ‘a defined ecosystem that comprises respect for the natural environment’. We doubt that such new foundations are necessary or useful. We argue that Bansal et al. misconstrue the evolution and content of strategy thinking; downplay the usefulness of existing tools for dealing with their issues of concern; overlook problems of measurement, collective action, government failure, and cronyism encouraged by their preferred policies; embrace an unnecessarily alarmist worldview; and underappreciate the social benefits of the market-based institutions they criticize. We suggest instead that a market system based on clearly delineated property rights, prices that freely adjust to reflect scarcities, and an institutional environment that encourages entrepreneurship and innovation remains an underappreciated instrument for protection of the natural environment, one that is superior to centralized and regulatory alternatives.

How should academic fields take on the existential risks created by the climate crisis? What can business schools do to accelerate the decarbonization of business required to save our species? In their Point, Bansal et al. argue that the field of strategic management is complicit in bringing about our current crisis, and they propose to reformulate the field's very foundations to help get us out. In our Counterpoint, we show why we agree with the diagnosis but argue why we are sceptical of the cure. Strategic management incubated in business schools devoted to creating shareholder value, and its central frameworks commit it to this mission, making it fundamentally impossible to reform. The adjustments suggested by Bansal et al. might nudge what is published in journals but will not solve the bigger challenge. If we are to turn back from the climate disaster and begin the process of mitigation and remediation, we need to equip firms to decarbonize their operations as quickly as possible, and to create new kinds of enterprise to bring about the clean energy transition. Given its history and methods, organization theory may be better equipped to take on this role.

A fast-growing number of organization and management scholars are responding to calls to conduct research on grand challenges (GCs). Few among these, however, question the core assumptions that underpin their efforts. In this paper we argue that the intractability of GCs stems from a failure to recognize the fundamentally pragmatic, plural, and moral character of these problems, which generate conflicts between groups over what is the ‘right’ or most appropriate course of action to pursue. A theoretical lens frequently used across many disciplines to make sense of problems such as these is Boltanski and Thévenot's (1991, 2006) economies of worth (EoW). On this premise, we undertake a multidisciplinary review of articles that use the EoW for studying GCs. Based on our analysis, we develop a pragmatist framework that articulates the practices that underpin the conduct of ‘moral work’ that organizational actors engage in as they seek to agree on a common sense of justice in GC contexts. Our framework provides a useful roadmap for scholars interested in applying a pragmatist perspective to our understanding of GCs, and by so doing, explore different, more socially just, and potentially more impactful ways of tackling them.

This study takes a network approach to investigate coordination among knowledge workers as grounded in both formal and informal organization. We first derive hypotheses regarding patterns of knowledge-sharing relationships by which workers pass on and exchange tacit and codified knowledge within and across organizational hierarchies to address the challenges that underpin contemporary knowledge work. We use survey data and apply exponential random graph models to test our hypotheses. We then extend the quantitative network analysis with insights from qualitative interviews and demonstrate that the identified knowledge-sharing patterns are the micro-foundational traces of collective coordination resulting from two underlying coordination mechanisms which we label ‘invisible iterations’ and ‘bringing in the big guns’. These mechanisms and, by extension, the associated knowledge-sharing patterns enable knowledge workers to perform in a setting that is characterized by complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Our research contributes to theory on the interplay between formal and informal organization for coordination by showing how self-directed, informal action is supported by the formal organizational hierarchy. In doing so, it also extends understanding of the role that hierarchy plays for knowledge-intensive work. Finally, it establishes the collective need to coordinate work as a previously overlooked driver of knowledge network relationships and network patterns.

During the pre-merger phase of an acquisition, fundamental decisions are made concerning whether to buy, which company to buy, and how much to pay. Further, acquisitions carry significant firm-wide implications requiring input from multiple different specializations, and hence, they are the product of the judgements, decisions, and social interactions between top managers. We focus our theory development on a pivotal yet under-researched top management team characteristic, transactive memory system (TMS). TMS is the shared division of cognitive labour with respect to encoding, storing, and retrieving knowledge from individual areas of expertise. We theorize that TMT transactive memory directly influences the strategic decision making process, which in turn determines acquisition performance. We test our hypotheses with a sample of 109 acquisitions, combining survey and archival data. We find that TMT transactive memory increases reliance on expert intuition and procedural rationality, while reducing political behaviour; and each of these three strategic decision processes carries different implications for acquisition performance. Our study advances theory by explaining the team-level behavioural mechanisms that underlie acquisition performance.

In this study we examine the heterogeneous effects of being affiliated with different minority groups on employees’ career advancements in organizations. We draw on the categories literature and its concept of category distance to hypothesize why some minority groups may be more (dis)advantaged than others in their career advancements. To do so, we define category distance in terms of shared identity markers between groups, where identity markers are salient attributes that audiences commonly associate a group with. We test our hypotheses among religious minority groups using employment data from a large Indonesian government organization. Our results indicate that minority groups closer in distance to the organizational majority group are more penalized in their career advancements than minority groups further in distance. These results hold both at the group and at the individual level. Through our study we make contributions to the literatures on careers, categories, and the burgeoning study of religion in organizations. We conclude with implications for practice.