JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INQUIRY – July and April 2023 Issues
Apologies for cross-postings. Please enjoy free access to the July and April 2023 issues articles through August 30 by clicking on the URL for each article. Apologies for cross-postings.
VOLUME 32, ISSUE 3
EDITOR'S CHOICE
A Call for Activist Scholarship in Organizational Theorizing
Barbara Gray
JMI: Vol. 32(3) 179-185
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/CGWNRCZYHHZU4FFNMDNK/full
In this essay, I elaborate on my 2022 OMT Distinguished Scholar address to reflect on the field of organizational theory and, in particular, about our role as scholars in the years ahead.
Keywords: activist scholarship, impactful research, research legacy, societal change
ESSAY
The Mortality of Family Business Leaders: Using a Palliative Care Model to Re-imagine Letting Go
Nancy Forster-Holt, Susan DeSanto-Madeya and James Davis
JMI: Vol. 32(3) 186-199
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/3PU564TPHRRXKTVGTVDP/full
The succession literature frames a leader's reluctance to let go as the single largest deterrent to succession planning, and early literature pointed to the stronghold that mortality can have on letting go. The notion has not captured our continued curiosity, preventing a full understanding of the tensions and antecedents of family business succession. Most scholarship on letting go describes a quest for immortality and in this sense, 'mortality' has been misapplied and one dimensional. In an interdisciplinary boost to family business, we turn to palliative care, where it is believed that the acknowledgment of one's mortality will facilitate letting go. We develop four typologies of letting go by combining elements of mortality awareness and planning that offers nuance and insights into long-held beliefs about this most vital and finite 'soft issue'. We discuss emotion governance tools that help change the mortality awareness trajectory and support family business succession.
Keywords: health care, managing family & entrepreneurial firms, succession planning/management, work life: conflict, management or quality, change/transformation
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Mindful Members: Developing a Mindset for Reliable Performance in Extreme Contexts
Jori Pascal Kalkman
JMI: Vol. 32(3) 200-213
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/HUWMKSTNAFPVV96EBE6V/full
This paper aims to describe how organizational members develop a mindset that enables mindful operations in extreme contexts. Scholars have been divided over how collective mindfulness can be achieved. The literature on High Reliability Organizations (HROs) argues for heterogeneity through promoting skepticism, diversity, and dissent. Yet, studies on organizing in extreme contexts emphasize cohesion as a precondition for collective action under extreme circumstances. Thus, organizational members face competing needs for cohesion (integration) and heterogeneity (diversity). This longitudinal study of military officers joining Dutch crisis management organizations shows how they resolve this tension. Mindful members combine functional distance with social integration, mediated by a considerate approach based on sensitivity, tact, and trust. This mindset is gradually developed after a process that is initially characterized by fragmentation and inner struggles. When successful, organizational members cultivate a mindful mindset and contribute to reliable performance in extreme contexts.
Keywords: groups/group processes/dynamics, qualitative research, tensions, decisions under risk/uncertainty, high-reliability organizations
The UN Global Compact and the Ulama (Religious Scholars of Islam): A Missing Voice in Islamic Business Ethics
Farzad Rafi Khan, Muhammad Osama Nasim Mirza, and Tom Vine
JMI: Vol. 32(3) 214-227
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/TUIMGEVZSGH5INX3JDRE/full
Islamic business ethics (IBE) has overlooked a major voice in Islam: the ulama (Islamic religious scholars). To enhance our understanding of Islam and business ethics we argue for this voice's inclusion. We demonstrate these contentions by presenting findings from a qualitative study in which we interviewed 50 ulama in respect of Islam's views on the UN Global Compact. While the current view in IBE research is that Islam and the UN Global Compact are compatible, our findings reveal that the ulama reject this argument. By including the voices of ulama in IBE research, novel and alternative perspectives on business ethics are realized. Our research illustrates the salience of perspectives exogenous to Western modernity as a means of enlivening ethical debate and-by implication-averting moral closure in business ethics and in the wider field of management and organization studies in which it is embedded.
Keywords: ethics, corporate social responsibility, Islam, qualitative research, UN Global Compact
MEET THE PERSON
How to Create an Optopia? – Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry for the Future" and the Politics of Hope
Anette Mikes and Steve New
JMI: Vol. 32(3) 228-242
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/FDXNPG6JHI6B8ZBTH7ME/full
Kim Stanley Robinson-award-winning science fiction writer-has warned us that our current history is a choice between utopia or catastrophe. In this interview and in the following reflections, we explore the implications of this existential choice for the social science disciplines; in particular, economics, finance, accounting, and management. Our goals are to build a provocation and develop some propositions about the direction of capitalism and the purpose of management research in an age of climate crisis. Against the backdrop of dread and greed and the specter of plutocratic capitalism, we offer a politics of hope. We envision a green capitalism in which corporations are held accountable for environmental and social stewardship. Rather than falling back on government or the corporation as an "either/or" choice, we urge a "both/and" approach and call for the active inclusion of communities and citizens in climate response through democratic, polycentric governance structures. Within this agenda, we envision a new role for the academy as "Ministry"; namely, giving voice to future generations and the silent (or silenced) victims of the present and, by embracing pragmatic realism, inspiring a liveable future-an optopia-that we can still forge from where we are.
Keywords: climate change, sustainability, accounting, business schools
PROVOCATIONS & PROVOCATEURS
Letter to a Newly Invited Department Chair
Craig Crossland
JMI: Vol. 32(3) 243-247
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/GCCZHAKTRDGXBDFC8HZT/full
VOLUME 32, ISSUE 2
CURATED
It's a Different World: A Dialog on the Attention-Based View in a Post-Chandlerian World
William Ocasio, Basak Yakis-Douglas, Dylan Boynton, Tomi Laamanen, Claus Rerup, Eero Vaara, and Richard Whittington
JMI: Vol. 32(2) 107–119
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/CX5F8EZP88IKXI5HTX5P/full
In this Dialog, seven scholars consider the theoretical implications and research opportunities a changing environment presents for the Attention-Based View (ABV). With its roots in the 1950s Carnegie School, ABV is expanding and evolving in ways that accommodate the changes in the corporate context characterized by distributed, porous structures of organizational networks such as ecosystems and platforms. The authors emphasize a shift toward a more dynamic orientation of this research, one that addresses the challenges of sustaining coherent attention and sensemaking, a shift from quantity to quality of attention, and how corporate communications ranging from formalized strategy presentations to less formal social media communications can spin attention in ways that lead to intended as well as unintended outcomes. Emerging organizational trends open up radically different perspectives on attention: today's superstar firms draw new kinds of attention and many new business models are based upon the attraction and selling of customer attention.
Keywords: behavioral theory, cognitive perspectives, strategy
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Tactics of Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Ways of Operating in the Contested Terrain of Green Architecture
Christian Garmann Johnsen
JMI: Vol. 32(2) 120–133
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/VZBPDVT5QHBHCN2NZITR/full
This study explores the various tactics sustainable entrepreneurs use to meet the challenges associated with creating social and environmental solutions. Although often theorized as market imperfections, in this study, opportunities are considered as situations that allow things to be done differently within social settings. This approach opens up for research into the everyday practice of sustainable entrepreneurship and how sustainable entrepreneurs strive to find new solutions to counteract ecological degradation. To develop this view, I analyze the different entrepreneurial tactics actors employ to advance green architecture in the Danish construction industry. Rather than place an analytic emphasis on the end result of sustainable entrepreneurship, I suggest that the processes of developing solutions aimed at generating simultaneous economic, social and environmental value might warrant greater attention.
Keywords: sustainability, entrepreneurship, qualitative research
Resisting the Tide: The Roles of Ideology in Sustaining Alternative Organizing at a Self-managed Cooperative
Aurélie Soetens and Benjamin Huybrechts
JMI: Vol. 32(2) 134–151
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/WIJ4TZAIKGQPBWAYJPNA/full
This paper examines how organizational ideology can be collectively mobilized to sustain an alternative organizational form-a self-managed cooperative-in resistance to institutional prescriptions perceived as hostile. Based on an ethnographic study of the Venezuelan cooperative Cecosesola, we identify three roles through which ideology enables the reproduction of the alternative form over time: ideology as a mobilizing normative framework to justify resistance; as a cultural-cognitive framework to engage members and integrate them into the resistance project; and as a regulatory framework ensuring member compliance. However, we find that in parallel with sustaining self-management as an alternative form, mobilizing ideology may also paradoxically entail costs in terms of individual sacrifices, exclusion of members and reduction of group heterogeneity, leading to the creation of an authoritarian system. These findings shed light on the ideological drivers of institutional resistance and bring new insights to understand the challenge of sustaining self-management and other alternative organizational forms within a hostile institutional context.
Keywords: worker cooperative, self-management, alternative organization, degeneration, ideology, institutional resistance
Exploring the Process of Policy Overreaction: The COVID-19 Lockdown Decisions
Taieb Hafsi and Sofiane Baba
JMI: Vol. 32(2) 152–173
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/HUQXCRMMAYNCVPKUACGG/full
Policy overreaction is a common phenomenon, especially in complex and emergency situations where politicians are led to make decisions fast. In these emergency decisions, emotions run generally high and cognitive processes are often impaired. The conditions of policy overreaction are in place as emotions overwhelm decision makers' rational processes. Drawing on the response patterns of three countries to the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop a process model of policy overreaction which describes the effects of negative emotions and institutional isomorphism on policy decision-making. Our model highlights four critical stages: negative emotions buildup, propagation of fear, isomorphic decision-making, and leading to an intractable crisis. This article shows precisely how the cascading effect of negative emotions, particularly fear, is contagious and spreads to generate crowd effects, which bend considerably policy makers' ability to make rational decisions. Our theory provides a better understanding of the process by which policy overreaction takes place.
Keywords: decisions under risk/uncertainty, COVID-19, affect/emotions, public management, decision-making, team/organization
PROVOCATIONS & PROVOCATEURS
For Love and Money: Rethinking Motivations for the "Great Resignation"
Molly L. Weinstein and Paul M. Hirsch
JMI: Vol. 32(2) 174–176
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/D9VAXMSFTIIMHJWPEIFG/full
The Editors and Editorial Board of JMI thanks Sage Publications for its generosity in sharing published articles openly.
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Richard Stackman
Professor
University of San Francisco
San Francisco CA
(415) 422-2148
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