Business schools are increasingly subject to critique for advancing instrumental, profit-oriented logics, reproducing social and ecological harms and prioritising metric-driven research over teaching and public engagement. While such critiques are often attributed to governance failures or misaligned incentives, this paper argues that they point to a deeper legitimacy problem within contemporary business education. Specifically, it conceptualises the current moment as a crisis of scholarship-as-ethos: the weakening of a shared moral and epistemic orientation that historically linked inquiry, pedagogy and engagement. Adopting a genealogical approach, the paper traces how neoliberal, Eurocentric and anthropocentric assumptions about scholarship emerged through political, colonial and economic projects and were subsequently normalised through audit cultures and managerial governance. This analysis helps explain why decolonial and relational posthuman perspectives function not as external critiques but as responses to enduring epistemic exclusions shaping dominant models of management learning. Building on, and moving beyond Boyer’s typology, the paper reframes scholarship as ethos—situated, relational, materially mediated and ecologically embedded—and develops this framing through selective engagement with Indigenous and non-Western traditions (e.g. Ubuntu and Buen Vivir), Confucian accounts of moral cultivation and relational posthuman thought, treated as plural and historically contingent. The paper concludes by outlining implications for management learning including reforms to evaluation practices and curricular designs that reconnect scholarly work, pedagogy and ecological responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to explain and update Kurt Lewin's concept of topological psychology and show how it can improve how we think about and undertake organizational change. To illustrate the use of this concept, we have created an imaginary dialogue in which Lewin helps an organization to move from fixed- to hot-desking. In this dialogue, we draw on Lewin's writings to show how he might have responded to criticisms of his work (e.g., that his diagnostic approach is too mechanistic to work in a socially constructed world). Based on our discussion of topological psychology, we offer three recommendations to better connect theory building with managerial thinking: (1) use plain language to explain your concepts; (2) use drawings to illustrate and explain the change situation; and (3) focus on the exceptions and not the rules in order to generate a better understanding of the nature of organizational life.

In the 1940s, Alfred Marrow and the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation played a key role in laying the foundations of participative management. Concurrently, they were also accused of being antitrade union. These accusations resurfaced in the 1960s with the publication of five articles in Trans-Action, which were initiated by William Gomberg, a former International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) official. This paper examines those articles and Gomberg's relationship with Harwood. It draws particular attention to the "a role reversal in the running of factories" whereby Harwood sought to democratize many of its practices by giving some control to workers, whilst the ILGWU sought to act more like an employer by taking on the industrial engineering role of managers in determining methods and times for jobs. The paper concludes that there is little evidence of antitrade unionism, there was a clash between Harwood's worker-centered approach to industrial democracy and ILGWU's industrial engineering-centered approach.

For most of his working life, Kurt Lewin was known as a pioneering child psychologist. In 1939, Lewin appears suddenly to move his focus from children to adults and from laboratory experiments to changing behavior in the real world. This paper examines when and how, as a supposedly laboratory-based child psychologist, he developed the motivation, skills, knowledge and tools necessary to become the "intellectual father" of social and organizational change. It investigates Lewin's formative years, his education - especially his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin, and his military service in WW1. The paper concludes that rather than seeing Lewin as a pioneering child psychologist, we need to see him as a pioneering and campaigning psychologist, who had been studying human behavior (adult and child) and how to change it since beginning his doctoral studies in 1911, and applying this knowledge to organizations for almost as long.

Business schools are in danger of having outplayed their role as harbingers of increasing professionalization and democratization in society. As conduits to elite access for some, they are becoming a barrier to sustainable development for all; their cachet for elites limits democratic leadership. While elitism channels technological innovation it often serves to limit social innovation and entrepreneurship. However, there is no reason why business schools should not play a pivotal role in inculcating purpose, mindset, skills, capabilities, and orientations necessary to reform and rebuild business and other organizations. There is no necessity in being dedicated to one-dimensional values such as to profit without purpose, to production and distribution without sustainability, or to managing without regard for all human rights, identities, and opportunities. For business schools to stay relevant as the world around them changes they need to take the lead on leadership, reframe their existential foundations, and question the good that they serve through asking themselves: how, and for whom and for what, are we making a difference?

This chapter provides a commentary on how academics need to take a position on organizational change leadership and ethics rather than regarding it as merely a concept, in essence being intelligently disobedient in challenging leaderism currently at work in the HE sector.

Thoroughly revised and updated to include contemporary terms that have gained importance such as furlough, unconscious bias, platform work, and Great Resignation, this second edition of the Encyclopedia of Human Resource Management is an authoritative and comprehensive reference resource comprising almost 400 entries on core HR areas and concepts.

In this chapter, a one-day teaching workshop is envisaged in which organizational change leadership, and ethics are treated as interdependent. The chapter is informed by the research, teaching, and scholarship of the author. The intention is not to prescribe a best practice, instead the chapter offers a more modest account of my practice.

Although Kurt Lewin is a key figure in the history of organizational behavior, only a few scholars or practitioners can explain why he earned this status. In order to shine light on this dissonance, we elaborate on the reasons why Lewin’s ideas are seldom discussed in today’s curricula (e.g., Lewin’s work is difficult to pin down due to his interdisciplinary interest as well as his convoluted writing style). To highlight the enduring applicability of Lewin’s approaches, we link his ideas (e.g., psychological satiation) with more recent concepts, like burnout. To support the continuing relevance of Lewin’s work, we outline how his ideas can inspire current epistemology by discussing his distinction between Aristotelian and Galilean thinking and his quest to find unexpected observations to generate new knowledge. Furthermore, as Lewin is regarded as the “practical theorist,” revisiting his work will show how theoretical concepts can influence organizational practices. Specifically, we discuss how Lewin’s ideas can improve design thinking, which is a modern team-based approach to generate innovations.

Drawing on concepts of institutional work, legitimacy, and institutional logics, we investigate why countercultural markets experience institutional change and the actions institutional work market actors perform to inform institutional logics and ensure the legitimacy of countercultural markets. Although previous research suggests market changes and disruption, little attention has been paid to markets that originate from different institutional backgrounds, changes in the market experience in relation to its legitimization, and institutional work to attain legitimacy. The case of indie music in South Korea illustrates the evolution of a cultural market from the introduction of its ethos, the crisis caused by legitimacy pressures, and the transformation of the market. Using data gathered through in-depth interviews with indie labels and music consumers in South Korea, and archival sources, our research illuminates the source of market struggle and theorizes approaches that market actors perform to overcome the struggle.

The Internet is creating an increasing number of virtual communities and organisations. For many people, these virtual spaces are more real and important to them than anything in the physical world. The nature of these virtual communities and the way they are changing the relationship between market and non-market forms, are the focus of this article. As our study of the independent music scene in South Korea will show, fans have created their own virtual community, which has developed powerful non-market practices that coexist with and influence existing market practices to create a new, hybrid economic mechanism. To understand how this apparently chaotic and unregulated hybrid economic mechanism operates, we draw on studies of digital economy. This perspective seeks to understand hybridity in the economy and widespread participation and power equalisation as core factors in the development of virtual communities.

At the time of his death in 1947, Kurt Lewin was seen as one of the foremost psychologists of his day. He is now best known for his three-step model of change. However, this has been criticized for its “simplicity,” and it has even been suggested that Lewin “never developed such a model,” yet this ignores its links to the rest of Lewin’s work. Surprisingly, there appears to have been no rigorous attempt to understand the connection between Lewin’s early work on field theory and his later work on social and organizational change. In addressing this gap in the Lewin literature, this article will not only show that the three-step model of change is far from being simplistic but also that it was a well-thought-out approach to change based on his development of field theory. The main difference between the two is one of nomenclature rather than substance.

This single case study reports on the establishment of a multidisciplinary day care surgery at a Norwegian University Hospital utilising participating action research design principles drawn from sociotechnical theory. Data was collected through mixed methods including stakeholder analysis, document studies, observations of meetings, semi-structured interviews and participating group methods. The senior management at the hospital had decided to implement a department that diverged from organising around professional disciplines, and this decision evoked strong resistance among several professional groups in the first phases of this project. This case follows the implications of the decision to establish a multidisciplinary day care surgery through re-organising location, staff and management structures. The findings suggest that the hospital achieved the vision of creating an efficient multidisciplinary work environment, reducing the culture of tribalism between professions, and creating a work environment with a high degree of knowledge transfer. This case describes how action research can be used to reduce organisational silos and to improve multidisciplinary co-operation.

In this paper, we suggest that organisational leadership that is based (generally) on a neoliberal paradigm has contributed to an ‘intolerable situation’ that was recognised at the United Nations (2015a) Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We, therefore, attempt to re-frame organisational leadership based on a sustainability paradigm. In doing so, we draw on John Dewey’s thinking on publics: due to the need for greater stakeholder involvement in identifying how sustainability could be achieved and increasing pressure from governments, campaigning groups and public opinion for organisations to expand their boundaries further to interact with, and take seriously, the needs of the communities that they affect. Then―and for the implementation of this re-frame and cognizant of the community requirement―we will offer that guidance may be drawn from the emerging social movements literature, specifically the importance of narration, mobilisation and organisation. Finally, we present a revised framework for organisational leadership that is based on this sustainability paradigm.

This chapter examines how the success of change initiatives can be increased by designing the change communication process to create alignment between the values underpinning the type of change, the values of the people implementing the change, and the values of the people affected by the change. The authors use Graves' ECLET values systems methodology to show how change agents can understand and identify the dominant values systems within the people and organizations they are working with, which will enable them to express change communication in a way that creates values systems alignment. The chapter begins by examining why change fails. It then moves on to describe Graves' work and then to provide examples of how it can be used to improve the success of change projects. The chapter concludes by suggesting key questions change agents need to ask when undertaking change initiatives.