Abstract Subcontracting distributes production activities across firm boundaries, but little is known about how positions within subcontracting hierarchies are associated with occupational safety outcomes and learning from failure. Drawing on resource dependence theory and organizational learning research, this study examines workplace‐level panel data from South Korean manufacturing between 2015 and 2019. Conditional fixed‐effects Poisson models show that prime contractors and prime subcontractors experience fewer industrial accident casualties than noncontractors, whereas subcontractors do not differ significantly from them, revealing an asymmetric rather than monotonic pattern across positions. Learning from failure also varies by position. The negative relationship between prior own accident experience and subsequent casualties is stronger for subcontractors than for noncontractors, consistent with stronger direct learning. In the fully specified model, the negative relationship between other workplaces' accident experience and subsequent casualties is stronger for prime contractors, consistent with stronger vicarious learning. These findings identify subcontracting position as a structural condition associated with both recorded safety outcomes and the source of failure experience most closely related to subsequent improvement. They also suggest that safety‐learning systems should be tailored to firms' positions and connect local accident learning with cross‐firm coordination.
Abstract Upper echelons research infers executive dispositions from the traces executives leave in public view: shareholder letters, earnings calls, photographs, and video. This inference rests on a premise that the observable surface authentically reflects the person. This viewpoint argues that the surface is increasingly an organizational product. Investor relations staff, ghostwriters, coaches, and now generative artificial intelligence produce the executive persona, the publicly observable presentation of the executive, as a managed asset. This observation yields two ideas. The first is person–persona decoupling, the graded, channel‐specific divergence between the real, historically formed person and the persona the produced surface expresses. The second is two causal systems. Audiences act on the persona while decisions are made by the person, so effects attributed to executive personality may run through either path. The account suggests that trait‐measurement validity may be a variable with a history rather than a constant, and it sets out a falsifiable research agenda for testing that possibility.
Abstract Scholars have called for the corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse to be advanced by exploring CSR in different countries. Accordingly, this review presents cross‐national differences in CSR among four South‐East European (SEE) countries—Kosovo, Albania, Croatia and Greece. It addresses the state of the academic literature on CSR in SEE and probes what this literature reveals about the understanding and implementation of CSR in the region. An analysis of 45 CSR‐focused articles across these four SEE countries was undertaken using critical interpretive synthesis (CIS). The academic literature indicates that CSR research in SEE is at an embryonic stage. Similarly, CSR awareness in the region is lower than in other European countries. All four SEE countries demonstrate slow CSR adoption, but differences in implementation arise from their unique national contexts and levels of regional institutionalisation. This review emphasises the importance of a country's level of development for the application of CSR and highlights differences between developed (Greece and Croatia) and developing (Kosovo and Albania) countries. It proposes a typology of CSR practices across four actor levels—(1) company, (2) national, (3) regional and (4) international—and presents a conceptual framework illustrating institutional pressures at each level. Finally, it offers directions for future research to scholars interested in the region and provides guidance for SEE companies seeking to embrace CSR.
As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools is becoming increasingly common in all aspects of research, there is a growing debate as to how and how much such tools will influence theorizing as well. In this viewpoint article, I discuss three plausible scenarios that could arise from a combination of efficiency pressures, practice shifts and collective choices: (i) theorizing will remain human-centric while empirical research will be AI-centric; (ii) theorizing will become more data-driven and evidence-based thanks to AI, crowding out paradigm-based theorizing; and (iii) theorizing will be professionalized as an AI-enhanced workflow. I compare characteristics and major implications of each scenario, and reflect on skills we scholars need to develop to effectively theorize with and without AI going forward.
Abstract This special issue is dedicated to EURAM by its College of Fellows to commemorate EURAM's 25th birthday. It focuses on the future of the management educational and research (MERE) context and the role of institutions within it. As a professional academy, EURAM is one of those institutions that helps shape both organisations and individuals within it. A brief history of its ambition and contribution follows, and this is accompanied by an explanation of the evolution of this project. Primarily, it is designed to examine the world in which EURAM operates, shaped and controlled as it is by institutional pressures that can restrict strategic flexibility and reinforce a particular way of doing business. Faced with a portfolio of powerful external pressures, the future of the MERE is likely to change rapidly, and adaptability by business and management schools will be an important strategic weapon. Hence, the issue looks to explain the emergence of the shape of the present MERE domain through its moulding by institutional norms and the ‘rules of the game’ that they consciously or unconsciously reinforce. Then, the main papers in this collection are presented in an outside–in manner. They begin with the future imaginings of what the MERE might look like by examining the drivers of change that impact upon it. Then, through a series of articles that examine the types of business schools that might emerge into this new world, their responses to past and present institutional pressures, especially through accreditation, to new agendas in both sustainability and employability. The common themes are identified, as is the danger of ignoring impactful, localised responses in favour of uniform conformity and a prevalence for the status quo .
