Abstract This article revisits the view that UK business schools emerged as late and imitative responses to American models. Drawing on archival evidence and a longitudinal dataset of 130 institutions, it shows that the field developed incrementally from diverse origins, including mechanics’ institutes, civic universities, colleges of commerce and polytechnics. Using a field‐theoretic lens, the study traces four phases of development – emergence, status elevation, convergence and stratified expansion – to explain how coherence formed without institutional homogeneity. It identifies three mechanisms underpinning field emergence from diversity: symbolic alignment, structural integration and integrated stratification. The analysis shows that hierarchy was constitutive of field formation rather than a later outcome of competition, and that historical legacies continue to shape legitimacy, research capacity and market position. The article advances organizational field theory by showing how coherent fields can emerge from heterogeneous origins, while highlighting history as a strategic resource in contemporary business education.
Interest in the role of artificial intelligence (AI) within organizations has surged in recent years. However, we know little about the underlying mechanisms that connect AI usage in organizations to employee job outcomes. Drawing on self-determination theory and self-categorization theory, this study explores when and how perceived AI-supported autonomy influences employee performance outcomes, providing a new perspective in the service context. To empirically test our proposed research model, we collected data from 256 full-time employees working in star hotels in China. The results revealed that perceived AI-supported autonomy is positively related to employee service job performance and work innovation. This study further uncovers that AI techno-exhaustion and thriving at work serve as alternative underlying mechanisms that connect perceived AI-supported autonomy to employee outcomes. Additionally, interdependent self-construal has been identified as an important boundary condition in our model, indicating that the associations between AI-supported autonomy and employee performance outcomes are moderated by interdependent self-construal. Our research enhances understanding of the intersection between AI and workers' performance outcomes in organizations.
As global commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) intensifies, firms are increasingly expected to contribute actively towards achieving these goals. Drawing from the relational view, this study investigates how firms' alliance management capability enhances SDG performance, specifically through business model innovation and the moderating influence of strategic flexibility. A time-lagged survey of senior managers from large Taiwanese firms (1114 managers from 311 manufacturing firms; 793 managers from 245 service firms) empirically tested a conditional indirect effects framework in which business model innovation mediates the relationship between alliance management capabilities and SDG performance, and strategic flexibility moderates both the direct and indirect paths. This study significantly extends the resource-based view by demonstrating the crucial roles of business model innovation as a mediator and strategic flexibility as a moderator in translating alliance management capabilities into sustainability outcomes. Our findings underscore that strategically flexible firms are better positioned to leverage external resources from alliances for innovating business models that directly address SDGs 8 (quality employment) and 12 (resource efficiency). This research offers novel insights into integrated strategies for managing alliances effectively, emphasizing the importance of internal capabilities and strategic adaptability in enhancing firms' contributions to global sustainable development.
This paper focuses on pluralistic research designs in management and organization studies. While advocates often present such approaches as a means of reconciling practical relevance with scientific rigour, their philosophical coherence remains underexplored, particularly in relation to the paradigm debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that contemporary pluralistic strategies frequently adopt implicit forms of paradigm integration grounded within a predominately structuralist framework. In contrast, multiparadigm strategies that emphasize interplay also involve paradigm integration but operate within an anti‐structuralist framework. Pluralistic research designs resolve incommensurability by subsuming difference into either structuralism or anti‐structuralism at the substantive level. At the metatheoretical level, scholars therefore confront a dualistic choice between coexisting modes of integration. By conceptualizing pluralistic research designs as particular forms of paradigm integration, we show how it is possible to move beyond the perceived trade‐off between scientific rigour and practical relevance. This approach preserves philosophical coherence while expanding explanatory scope through the translation and incorporation of diverse conceptual resources.
This study investigates workers' perceptions of sustainable human resource management (sustainable HRM) practices in the metal sector through an ethnographic approach, incorporating visual methods, such as photos taken by participants, to deepen understanding of how these practices are perceived and their influence on workers' attitudes and behaviours. Using a qualitative methodology that triangulates archival data, interviews, field observations and visual analysis, the research offers a multidimensional exploration of sustainability in this industry. The findings reveal three key dimensions in workers' perceptions of sustainable HRM: emotional, strategic and social. The emotional dimension emphasizes how sustainable practices strengthen workers' connection to the organization, fostering a sense of belonging and commitment. The strategic dimension highlights sustainability as a catalyst for innovation and organizational growth. The social dimension underscores the positive influence of sustainable practices on workers' well-being and mental health. Additionally, the study identifies significant differences in the perception of sustainable HRM practices based on gender and hierarchical position, with distinct implications for organizational policies. By integrating visual analysis with other qualitative methods, this study illustrates how sustainable HRM extends beyond environmental concerns, contributing to the development of more resilient, collaborative and balanced organizational cultures.
Research on organizational ambidexterity has identified several important antecedents that impact a firm's ability to balance exploration and exploitation. However, behavioural motivations, particularly with respect to performance feedback, are largely underexplored. Drawing on the behavioural theory of the firm, this study examines how innovation performance above and below aspiration levels influences subsequent levels of innovation ambidexterity. Using patent data from 1682 US manufacturing firms between 1980 and 2003, the analysis reveals that both positive and negative innovation performance gaps reduce innovation ambidexterity. Furthermore, organizational size moderates these effects asymmetrically: while larger organizational size dampens the negative effects of performance shortfalls, the negative impact of positive performance feedback is amplified only among the largest firms. The study also finds that innovation orientation conditions firm responses to positive feedback: firms with an exploration-oriented profile maintain stable ambidexterity, whereas exploitation-oriented firms reduce ambidexterity in response to success. These findings offer novel theoretical and practical insights into the dynamic, context-dependent nature of ambidexterity and extend the behavioural theory of the firm into the innovation domain.
The role of business schools in exacerbating social and environmental issues has become increasingly apparent. However, substantive change is often stymied at both individual and institutional levels by a ubiquitous pressure on faculty members to conform to a specific embodiment of the 'successful academic'. This is a self that is performatively constituted through adherence to institutional rules and norms, with a particular emphasis on individual, research-centric achievements. Through drawing on interviews with 46 Early Career Academics in the field of Business & Society, located in 20 countries, we explore how academics disrupt and reconstitute this self through moral identity work. We identify and explain four key forms of moral identity work: retheorizing, rallying, reframing and reorientating. Via these bottom-up efforts, both implicitly and explicitly, our participants disrupt and reconstitute the norms underpinning the performative construction of the 'successful academic' in ways that hold potential to influence positive change. These findings therefore have broader implications for reimagining and retooling business schools as a force for nurturing more desirable realities beyond their own institutional boundaries.
Foreign entrants may threaten and, at the same time, present local companies with opportunities for favourable spillovers. Building on the awareness-motivation-capability framework, this paper aims to provide empirical evidence for a positive co-location or spatial proximity effect of foreign presence on local peer companies' exports. More specifically, through a spillover lens, this research examines how geographic proximity with Chinese-acquired companies and Chinese-owned wineries agglomeration density affect peers' exports to China. We empirically address these objectives using a panel database of 1751 Bordeaux wineries located in rural communes in which Chinese acquisitions have occurred. Our findings reveal a clear export spillover effect at the very local micro- (commune-)level. We also find a significant strengthening effect of Chinese acquisition agglomeration density on export spillovers.
The circular economy (CE) is often treated as a technological or system-design challenge. We argue that it is also a managerial transition that remains under-theorized. Rather than assuming that CE requires wholly new managerial frameworks, we revisit Fayol's functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling as enduring managerial ideals and examine how they are reworked under CE conditions. Using a problematization-based, abductive approach, we develop a dialectic-performative model showing how contradictions generated by causal ambiguity, systemic interdependence, stakeholder plurality and distributed authority reshape managerial work in practice. From this process, we theorize four performative practices: strategy, through which planning becomes adaptive yet directional; structure, through which organizing becomes ecosystem coordination; stewardship, through which leading becomes the alignment of plural stakeholder commitments; and synergy, through which controlling becomes relational accountability across dispersed actors. The paper contributes a processual theoretical account of how enduring managerial ideals evolve through practice in circular settings. In doing so, it shows how management can make a distinctive contribution to CE transition alongside technological and systemic change.
Business schools are often criticized for reproducing growth-oriented norms, but alternative pedagogies remain difficult to normalize. Drawing on Butler's theory of subversive performativity, this study examines how art-based pedagogy enables academics to challenge growth logics in business schools by transforming their identities over time. Based on a 17-year study of the Improbable seminar, combining autoethnography, archival analysis and visual semiotic analysis of 90 student artworks, we develop a process model of subversive performativity comprising three phases: doing, undoing and redoing growth norms. Across these phases, distinct identity perceptions, leveraging practices and layered conditions of possibility interact across organizational, pedagogical, student and field levels. Our findings show how professors come to inhabit hybrid academic-activist identities that make post-growth pedagogical practices both legitimate and institutionally viable, thereby contributing to research on performativity and management education.
The call for transformation in Management Education (ME) has intensified amid global crises, including the climate emergency, social inequality, and recurrent corporate misconduct. While Responsible Management Education (RME) has emerged in response to these challenges, it often struggles to move beyond symbolic gestures towards substantive change. This paper proposes a conceptual framework, inspired by Paulo Freire's notion of untested feasibility and grounded in a Global South epistemological perspective, as a heuristic for re-specifying progressive performativity in RME. First, it advances debates on performativity in Management Education by theorizing untested feasibility, together with critical transitivity, as a performative mechanism for situated, reflexive, and iterative transformation. Second, it addresses longstanding criticisms of RME's limited capacity to move beyond rhetoric by articulating Transformative Responsible Management Education (TRME) as a critically transitive orientation that supports the enactment of desirable futures within business schools. Third, it provides a pedagogical process-oriented framework that supports educators and institutions in moving towards contextually desirable futures, combining the previous contributions. The paper concludes by indicating avenues for future research on how responsibility can be enacted through performative educational practices across diverse institutional and cultural contexts.
We investigate the strategic implications of CEO inside debt in the context of serial acquisitions by challenging the traditional view of inside debt as solely a risk-curbing mechanism. Drawing on the choice-bracketing theory, we argue that inside debt encourages CEOs to adopt a broad bracketing cognitive frame, evaluating acquisition sequences as an integrated portfolio rather than as isolated events, which in turn promotes greater international diversification. Using a sample of 1461 serial acquisitions by U.S. firms from 2006 to 2020, we find that CEOs with higher inside debt pursue greater international diversification, reflected in both depth (number of international acquisitions) and breadth (diversity of target regions) of acquisitions. This relationship is amplified when acquisitions occur in close succession and within family-led firms, but is attenuated by high international exposure or market uncertainty. We contribute to the literature by revealing a novel cognitive pathway through which executive leadership and compensation shapes sequential decision-making and long-term organizational resilience.
Efficiency is a pervasive yet insufficiently challenged managerial principle and an integral part of business school academia. However, while there is compelling evidence that efficiency gains can have severe undesirable social and ecological consequences that reduce overall welfare both in terms of well-being and natural resources, business school academsia remains ill-equipped to adequately understand the origins of these consequences. Furthermore, management education is limited in its critical thinking about potential alternative organizing principles to efficiency. In this conceptual paper, we mobilize literature from resource economics and the so-called 'rebound effect' to show how and where efficiency can produce unintended harmful consequences. We illustrate this dynamic through two prominent cases where efficiency principles are particularly problematic: eco-efficiency and sustainability, as well as digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI). We then explore why efficiency continues to dominate business school academia despite its adverse effects, drawing on the notion of ignorance to explain how dynamics of segmentation, justification and valuation sustain its persistence. Finally, we use a performativity perspective to argue how a sufficiency-based approach as an alternative and complementary organizing principle can come into being to counter the dominance of efficiency. Our aim is to help reorient management education toward a more desirable, socially attuned and ecologically responsible future.
Since small enterprises face diverse opportunities and challenges across their domestic and international markets, coopetition (cooperation among competitors) could have different performance outcomes and boundary conditions in these arenas. Therefore, guided by resource-based theory (RBT), this study unpacks the coopetition-small-firm performance relationship in domestic and international markets. Two phases of survey data were collected from small wine producers in New Zealand, respectively examining domestic and international coopetition activities. The results showed that domestic coopetition negatively affects small-firm performance, but competitive intensity positively moderates this link. In contrast, international coopetition positively impacts small-firm performance while competitive intensity negatively influences this association. Subsequently, qualitative evidence was utilized to explain the counter-intuitive quantitative findings. Collectively, this study contributes to the strategic management literature with unique insights about the varied performance outcomes and boundary conditions of coopetition across domestic and international markets. This investigation also advances the extended facets of RBT (inside-the-firm factors, alongside issues pertaining to environmental forces and stakeholder relationships) as a lens for conceptualizing coopetition domestically and internationally.
The UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) is one of the world's most established performance-based research funding systems, shaping universities' strategic choices. While the REF emphasizes investing in research inputs to enhance output quality, the investments in research environment inputs can, at some point, become counterproductive and lead to diminishing returns. Drawing on the research production function approach and the resource-based view (RBV), we examine how universities transform research environment inputs into research outputs and impact. We empirically investigate whether the production functions relating research environment inputs (external research income and doctoral programme size) to research outcomes (output and impact quality) follow an inverted U-shaped curve. Using REF2021 data on 108 UK business schools, we confirm that initial gains plateau and eventually decline as resources are stretched. We further find that Russell Group (RG) business schools operate under distinct production functions, enabling them to sustain research output quality with higher levels of external research input than non-RG peers. However, they do not exhibit superior production functions for research impact as defined by the REF, despite potential advantages in global reach, suggesting that different institutional types have developed equally effective but distinct approaches to generating societal value.
This study explores how excess cash holdings are associated with the level of donations nonprofit organizations (NPOs) receive, emphasizing the mediating roles of overhead ratio and fundraising efforts. Drawing on interdependent utility theory, agency theory, the precautionary motive of cash and resource dependence theory, we develop a theoretical framework to explain donor behaviour in response to NPO financial management. Using an unbalanced sample of 5982 British charities for the period 2015-2022 (25,641 year-observations), we apply structural equation modelling (SEM) with clustered robust standard errors to address panel specificities. Our results suggest a mediating effect of overhead ratio and fundraising efforts on the relationship between excess cash holdings and donations. While donors do not seem to penalize cash accumulation directly, donations decrease because NPOs with excess cash holdings increase their administrative spending and reduce their fundraising intensity.
We propose an intangibility-driven stock liquidity hypothesis and explore the role of organizational capital in influencing stock liquidity. Using a sample of 42,682 firm-year observations, we uncover compelling evidence that firms' intangible organizational capital boosts stock liquidity. Our results remain robust across various endogeneity tests, including difference-in-differences, an instrumental variable and propensity score matching approaches. Our results are consistent when we consider alternative organizational capital and stock liquidity measures and different subsamples. Further, this positive relationship is more pronounced for firms with severe information asymmetry, weak corporate governance and deteriorating financial performance, supporting the theoretical arguments of the information asymmetry and agency theory, as well as resource-based views of stock liquidity. Overall, our unique findings emphasize the significance of intangible capital in driving stock liquidity.
Consumer complaints incorporate consumers in value co-creation with firms. As a pivotal HRM practice, the spillover effects of corporate overtime on consumer feedback warrant rigorous investigation. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2018 to 2023, this study constructs a firm-level overtime indicator based on daily satellite nighttime light data and machine learning methods, and analyses over 16 million consumer complaint behaviours. Drawing on the organizational slack theory and job demand control theory, the findings indicate that corporate overtime significantly increases consumer online complaints, mediated primarily through weakened firm-employee relationship and compromised product quality management. Under the ability-motivation-opportunity framework, we demonstrate that employee training (ability), female core employees (motivation) and employee engagement (opportunity) effectively mitigate the adverse effects of overtime. From the perspective of labour-product market interaction, this study deepens our understanding of the literature on firms' intangible slack resources, employee strain and consumer voice.
Strategy education has faced enduring criticism over the last decades. Experiential approaches like problem-based learning offer a promising pathway for strategy education by immersing students in the ambiguities of strategy work. Following Merton, we argue that experiential learning in higher education is not just about the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but ultimately about inhabiting new professional roles. In this sense, the strategy classroom becomes a site of transition: students learn not only about strategy and its analysis, but what it feels like to act as a strategist. This paper examines how ambiguity in problem-based strategy education shapes students' role transitioning and learning outcomes. Drawing on qualitative data from a post-graduate strategy course, we find that students experienced a sequence of unfolding ambiguity types ('entry ambiguity', 'content ambiguity' and 'outcome ambiguity') that closely mirror the ambiguities of real-world strategy work. The interplay between students' ambiguity experiences and their responses fostered a strong sense of the strategist role by the end of the course. This process was supported by evolving forms of peer collaboration and mentor interventions. We incorporate these findings into a conceptual model, contribute to strategy education literature and offer practical implications for strategy pedagogy.
The emerging literature on entrepreneurship-based algorithmic normative control examines how micro-and-small complementors are motivated to join and engage with platforms in pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. However, their entrepreneurial experiences on platforms are ambivalent-some achieve entrepreneurial growth, while others increasingly become vulnerable. We suggest the key to understanding this ambivalence lies in how complementors internalize algorithmic opacity while pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how micro-and-small complementors internalize such opacity during the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities within algorithm-driven environment. To address the research gap, we employ an explorative, case-study approach to collect data from various sources, including 79 semi-structured interviews with the complementors and platform, informal conversations and archival documentation. Our study provides a research model that explains how micro-and-small complementors internalize opacity in their pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Specifically, we identify three internalization mechanisms: adaptive identity work, selective (de)coupling and community-based continuous learning, and unpack their interlinking relationships. We highlight these internalizations foster algorithmically shaped entrepreneurial growth. This study advances the literature on algorithmic normative control, entrepreneurial effectuation and complementor response strategy.
