Social justice movements are often portrayed as unified, yet they are frequently shaped by internal tensions over meaning, priorities, and strategies for action. While Frame Theory recognizes that collective action frames are contested, existing research has tended to model framing as a relatively stable and linear process. This article examines how framing tensions operate as generative dynamics within feminist organizing rather than as obstacles to collective action. Drawing on transcripts of five multistakeholder roundtable discussions involving 35 actors in Lebanon’s women’s empowerment movement, we analyze how feminist actors navigate difference across organizational, political, and transnational contexts. We conceptualize frames as framings: recursive, relational, and epistemic processes through which collective meaning is produced in and through struggle. Building on this perspective, we introduce two analytic tools, sites of contestation and diagnosis-based prognosis, to capture how framing tensions are articulated and transformed through interaction. Our analysis shows that these tensions unfold differently across spaces and sites of contestation and along three epistemic axes: temporality; transnationality and localness; and reflexivity. Together, these dynamics shape how collective action strategies emerge, stabilize, and shift. We contribute to Critical Management Studies by conceptualizing organizing as a dynamic process in which intra-movement tensions are constitutive of political struggle and transformation. For social movement scholarship, the study advances a microprocessual understanding of framing by foregrounding the spatial, relational, and scalar conditions through which collective action becomes possible.

This curated essay collection reflects on the ethical responsibilities of scholars and institutions amid rising violence, crises, and (geo)political tensions. Bringing together diverse voices from the editorial community of the Journal of Business Ethics, the essays collated here explore how academic freedom, care, dissent, and responsibility are negotiated within increasingly politicised and marketized university environments. The contributions address the lived experience of moral injury and vulnerability in proximity to war, the suppression of dissent in corporatized universities, the fragility of academic freedom under political pressure, and the ethical obligations of business ethics scholars confronting structural violence. This essay collection challenges the idea of institutional neutrality and calls for renewed attention to and engagement with care, courage, and collective responsibility in defending academic freedom and sustaining ethical scholarship in increasingly turbulent times.

Academic communities situated in protracted crisis experience material, emotional, and relational ruptures that shape their collective capacity to respond and recover. This paper examines how collective healing unfolds in such environments through scholar activism, which we theorize as a form of institutional work that reshapes academic norms, relationships, and practices under conditions of creeping crisis. Drawing on a critical reflexive analysis of our experiences as scholar-activists working amid Lebanon's overlapping crises, we examine how purposive and relational forms of institutional action generate psychosocial outcomes within an academic community. Our analysis identifies five interconnected subprocesses. Recognizing and Witnessing creates conditions for shared acknowledgment of suffering and mutual visibility; Flattening Hierarchies disrupts status-based boundaries and fosters inclusive participation; Building Relational Solidarity cultivates trust and mutual care; Mobilizing Knowledge as a Tool leverages academic expertise to understand and address collective challenges; and Regaining Agency reflects how individuals and groups reclaim a sense of efficacy and purpose. By extending institutional work theory into the psychosocial domain, this study shows how scholar activism not only supports institutional change but also functions as a vehicle for collective healing in academic communities facing enduring crisis. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on collective trauma, mental health, and scholar activism in protracted crisis contexts.

While business studies on gender have increased, they continue to adopt traditional approaches with limited samples drawn from general populations (e.g., students and teachers). In contrast, we investigate gender differences with our focus solely on business professionals. Specifically, we study 40 societies using the four dimensions of subordinate influence ethics (SIE) behaviors: pro-organizational behaviors, image-management behaviors, self-serving behaviors, and maliciously intended behaviors. We employed crossvergence theory as our theoretical foundation, with its two competing forces, sociocultural (gender differences) and business-ideological ( no gender differences), which translates to a global-business-subculture effect. We found no gender differences for three of the four SIE behaviors and minimal differences for the fourth for our sample of business professionals. Thus, our findings differ significantly from those of previous general-population samples. We also tested for societal-level moderating effects of collectivism and individualism using the business values dimensions (BVD) measure. Our individualism findings, the primary values dimension associated with business success, in conjunction with findings from other studies, support our nonsignificant SIE differences findings. In sum, the truly minimal gender differences that we found provide strong support for the perspective that there is a global-business-subculture effect. Our findings also suggest that ethical differences between gen-ders are minimal across the global workforce. We discuss the implications for inter-national business. 2025 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.

PurposeThe authors explore the entanglement of smartphone technology and power in this paper. This paper explores the following question: In what ways does the actualization of smartphone affordances result in empowering outcomes (i.e. increase or reduce oppression) in the daily lives of refugees? Leveraging both affordance and feminist theories, the authors develop a hybrid lens bringing attention to the contextualized relationship between social process goals and affordances for sociality, upon which the authors introduce the notion of “goal-affordance interrelations”. The authors then trace how the actualization of these interrelations increases or reduces oppression.Design/methodology/approachUsing an abductive approach, the authors analyze 32 semi-structured interview transcriptions conducted with Syrian refugees in Lebanon.FindingsThe analysis in this study reveals four categories of social process goals (meet financial needs, satisfy security needs, communicate and learn and maintain pre-existing social ties) that are intimate components of contextually meaningful affordances. When actualized, the goal–affordance interrelations fundamentally shape refugee experiences of power outcomes. The findings suggest forms of empowerment where powerlessness, marginalization, violence and exploitation are perceived to be reduced. Actualization outcomes are also found to increase perceived oppression. Additionally, the findings reveal that not all interrelations are actualized, such that the anticipation of an oppressive power outcome may limit the actualization of affordances for sociality.Originality/valueThis research raises considerations concerning technology and oppression, and that efforts to empower refugees through technology should critically question whether the lived experiences of oppression will be reduced. The findings of this study reveal various forms of less empowering (i.e. oppressive) outcomes for the refugees sampled, they also point to the potential politicization of the actualization of goal–affordance interrelations.

PurposeWe examined the attitudes of millennial-aged business students toward economic, social and environmental corporate responsibility (CR). Currently, these individuals are of an age that they have entered the workforce and are now ascending or have ascended into roles of leadership in which they have decision-making power that influences their company's CR agenda and implementation. Thus, following the ecological systems perspective, we tested both the macro influence of cultural values (survival/self-expression and traditional/secular-rational values) and structural forces (income inequality, welfare socialism and environmental vulnerability) on these individuals' attitudes toward CR.Design/methodology/approachThis is a multilevel study of 3,572 millennial-aged students from 28 Asian, American, Australasian and European societies. We analyzed the data collected in 2003-2009 using hierarchical linear modeling.FindingsIn our multilevel analyses, we found that survival/self-expression values were negatively related to economic CR and positively related to social CR while traditional/secular-rational values was negatively related to social CR. We also found that welfare socialism was positively related to environmental CR but negatively related to economic CR while environmental vulnerability was not related to any CR. Lastly, income equality was positively related to social CR but not economic or environment responsibilities. In sum, we found that both culture-based and structure-based macro factors, to varying extents, shape the attitudes of millennial-aged students on CR in our sample.Originality/valueOur study is grounded in the ecological systems theory framework, combined with research on culture, politico-economics and environmental studies. This provides a multidisciplinary perspective for evaluating and investigating the impact that societal (macro-level) factors have on shaping attitudes toward businesses' engagement in economic, social and environmental responsibility activities. Additionally, our multilevel research design allows for more precise findings compared to a single-level, country-by-country assessment.

In the wake of the Beirut blast, we use Lebanon as an empirical context to examine how a group of scholar-activists organized to support ongoing collective action in the context of creeping crisis. Using the lens of resourcing theory, we provide a process model of resourcing agency as a fractal and embodied form of critical action, augmented and transformed by critical reflection, and collective healing and striving. We make four contributions. First, we demonstrate why organizational scholarship needs to attend to the increasing relevance of creeping crises and we model an approach to understanding both the lived experience of creeping crises and the implications for the situated cultivation of agency. Second, we extend resourcing theory by uncovering resourcing agency as an integral, embodied process in the context of crisis, particularly creeping crises, and show how it is itself a vital instantiation of agency. Third, further extending resourcing and process theories, we identify two types of ampliative cycles (sustaining and transformative cycles) implicated in resourcing agency when organizing in support of collective action amid creeping crises. Finally, our findings demonstrate the benefits of using a processual approach that attends to the embodied and fractal nature of action in creeping crises and other extreme contexts. We close with a discussion of the implications for engaged scholarship as a framework for action.

We investigate whether different individual-level microculture cohorts, as defined by respondents’ gender and life-stage, exhibit different organizational culture preferences in business organizations. We conceptualize the microculture cohorts by combining gender (male and female) with life-stage (young-adulthood and middle-adulthood) to form four microculture cohorts. Further, we take a holistic perspective with our model by including a meso-level predictor (Trust-in-Top-Management) and a macro-level moderator (Human Development Index) to better define the specificity of the environments surrounding these individuals. Using hierarchical linear modeling across our 40-society sample of business professionals, we identify life-stage as a primary influence in determining these microculture cohort preferences for organizational cultures (Clan/Adhocracy/Market/Hierarchy). Interestingly, we found that gender played a negligible role. Thus, contrary to previous studies using general-population samples (e.g., teachers, students), which have found a plethora of gender differences, we found that there were next to none in our sample of business professionals. These findings support the perspective that a global-business-subculture has evolved into existence, and that this subculture is different from the other sectors of societies in our 40-society sample. We discuss the organizational and societal implications of our research relative to less culture-specific research findings.

In this article, we conceptualize the under investigated and under theorized relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and business responsibility. As an urgent social issue, IPV-understood as abuse of power within the context of an intimate partner relationship, mainly perpetrated by men and involving a pattern of behavior-has been studied for decades in many disciplines. A less common yet vital research perspective is to examine IPV as it relates to the business and to ask how organizations should engage with IPV. In response to this question, we contribute a framework drawing from two distinctions in the business responsibility scholarship: the assumed role of the organization (responsibility to the firm/market; responsibility to the broader socio-political-economic environment); and the second focused on the approach to conceptualizing ethics (justice/fairness; ethics of care). Thus, we explicate four approaches to business responsibility and IPV, which serve the purposes of mapping three selected contributions, identifying limitations of these approaches, and opening up future research opportunities.

Introduction Gendered differences in career paths of medical graduates persist globally. We aim to explore the impact of domestic tethers on the career paths of physicians by studying gendered differences in domestic burdens of physicians as well as differences in perceptions around the impact of domestic work on professional advancement. Methods A web-based survey including 38 questions was sent to all 3866 physician alumni of the top academic medical school in Lebanon. Data was collected between November 2018 and January 2019, with up to three invite reminders. Overall, 382 were included in the final analysis, 124 women (32%), 258 men (68%). Results The study had a response rate of 10.4%. Findings show that a greater percentage of men were married and had children (77.5% vs 62.1%, p = 0.004, 77.9% vs 51.6%, <0.001, respectively). Majority of both women and men held full-time positions (82.1% and 87.1%), having children however reduced the odds significantly [OR = 0.2, 95% CI: (0.1-0.6), p = 0.01]for women, while only older age reduced it for men (OR = 0.1,95% CI: (0.04-0.2), p<0.001]. Among full-time physicians, men and women spent similar time on professional activities (60.2hrs/wk vs 58.3hrs/wk, p = 0.32). Women spent more time on parenting and household work (23.5hrs/wk vs 10.4hrs/wk, <0.001; 8.9hrs/wk vs 6.0hrs/wk, p = 0.001, respectively). Women physicians' spouses contributed to 14.5 hours/week of total time on domestic activities whereas men physicians' spouses spent two folds more time on domestic activities (35.0 hours/week, P<0.001). Of physicians with children, a higher percentage of women than men reported that children prevented their career advancement or their participation in development opportunities (43.8% vs 15.9%, p<0.001; 50.0% vs 19.4%, p<0.001, respectively). A greater percentage of women than men scaled back their career after first child (31.3% vs 3.5%, <0.001). Of married/partnered physicians, fewer women than men reported their career took priority over their partner's when conflicts arose, (52.0% vs 86.0%, p<0.001). Conclusion These findings highlight the heavier impact of domestic tethers on the career paths of women physicians than men physicians. Men are more likely than women to hold full-time positions in the early advancement defining phases of their careers. Full-time women shoulder more domestic work than men and experience more professional advancement concessions. Closing persistent gender gaps in medicine requires addressing inequities in domestic burdens through strategies that include mentorship on domestic tethers, support of on-site child-care and advocacy for parental leave policies that encourage shared care-work.

We investigate the relationships between gender-role-orientation (i.e., androgynous, masculine, feminine and undifferentiated) and subjective career success among business professionals from 36 societies. Drawing on the resource management perspective, we predict that androgynous individuals will report the highest subjective career success, followed by masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated individuals. We also postulate that meso-organizational culture and macro-societal values will have moderating effects on gender role's impact on subjective career success. The results of our hierarchical linear models support the hypothesized hierarchy of the relationships between gender-role-orientations and subjective career success. However, we found that ethical achievement values at the societal culture level was the only variable that had a positive moderating impact on the relationship between feminine orientation and subjective career success. Thus, our findings of minimal moderation effect suggest that meso- and macro-level environments may not play a significant role in determining an individual's perception of career success.

Following the August 2020 blast in Beirut, a national grassroots initiative, Khaddit Beirut, came together. KB’s efforts range from co-creating “community-led, evidence-based, and locally-driven” schools and community healthcare centers and rebuilding small and mediate enterprises damaged by the blast, to creating new models for civic activism and engagement and framing and enacting “expertise in action” as a process. All of which had to be done in situated ways commensurate with the constraints imposed by local history and the needs created by the shared experience of catastrophe. Building on Lawrence and Phillips (2019), we explore which forms of social-symbolic work (SSW) the KB undertook, and combined, as it built an ecosystem of cooperation, civic engagement, and organizational and institutional innovation in a geographically and historically bounded context characterized by endemic toxic institutional conditions, political corruption, societal division, and catastrophic economic collapse. We find that amidst crisis, SSW unfolds in each of three main domains, self, organization, and institutional work, but the capacity to perform one kind of work may be contingent on the ongoing engagement in another kind of work. Organization work enabled the self work of claiming expertise and working through trauma, which in turn enabled the organization work of putting that expertise in action. Without both, the institutional work social change appears out of the question. We make contributions regarding SSW, participatory action research, and the use of feminist geography and epistemology in enhancing organizational perspectives on the situatedness of SSW.

In this editorial for our Special Issue, we focus on ways to better understand the role of organizations, organizing, and the organized during social and institutional change in response to disruption, division, and displacement. The papers in this Special Issue provide important insights into the hardships and heartache arising from social disruption, division, and displacement; in addition, they provide glimpses into potential ways of moving forward. To set the stage, we develop a framework building on extant literature that highlights several analytic approaches to understanding the consequences of eroding, or inadequate, institutions, the challenges of building anew when the status quo is destroyed, and what such novel and complex realities entail for organizational analysis. We offer a temporal view of responses to disruption, division, and displacement that draws on the papers in this Special Issue to identify and explain potential risks and challenges that arise at different points in time. To conclude, we provide a short summary of each paper, and call for a reinvigorated research agenda that goes beyond the excellent work featured here by broadening and deepening our focus on approaches to organizing that expressly address disruption, division, and displacement.

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. For much of the history of the Journal of Business Ethics, ethics was seen within the academy as a peripheral aspect of business. However, in recent years, the stakes have risen dramatically, with global and local worlds destabilized by financial crisis, climate change, internet technologies and artificial intelligence, and global health crises. The authors of these commentaries address these grand challenges by placing business ethics at their centre. What if all grand challenges were framed as grand ethical challenges? Tanusree Jain, Arno Kourula and Suhaib Riaz posit that an ethical lens allows for a humble response, in which those with greater capacity take greater responsibility but remain inclusive and cognizant of different voices and experiences. Focussing on business ethics in connection to the grand(est) challenge of environmental emergencies, Steffen Böhm introduces the deceptively simple yet radical position that business is nature, and nature is business. His quick but profound side-step from arguments against human–nature dualism to an ontological undoing of the business–nature dichotomy should have all business ethics scholars rethinking their “business and society” assumptions. Also, singularly concerned with the climate emergency, Boudewijn de Bruin posits a scenario where, 40 years from now, our field will be evaluated by its ability to have helped humanity emerge from this emergency. He contends that Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth) v. Royal Dutch Shell illustrates how human rights take centre stage in climate change litigation, and how business ethics enters the courtroom. From a consumer ethics perspective, Deirdre Shaw, Michal Carrington and Louise Hassan argue that ecologically sustainable and socially just marketplace systems demand cultural change, a reconsideration of future interpretations of “consumer society”, a challenge to the dominant “growth logic” and stimulation of alternative ways to address our consumption needs. Still concerned with global issues, but turning attention to social inequalities, Nelarine Cornelius links the capability approach (CA) to global and corporate governance, arguing that CA will continue to lie at the foundation of human development policy, and, increasingly, CSR and corporate governance. Continuing debate on the grand challenges associated with justice and equality, Laurence Romani identifies a significant shift in the centrality of business ethics in debates on managing (cultural) differences, positing that dialogue between diversity management and international management can ground future debate in business ethics. Finally, the essay concludes with a commentary by Charlotte Karam and Michelle Greenwood on the possibilities of feminist-inspired theories, methods, and positionality for many spheres of business ethics, not least stakeholder theory, to broaden and deepen its capacity for nuance, responsiveness, and transformation. In the words of our commentators, grand challenges must be addressed urgently, and the Journal of Business Ethics should be at the forefront of tackling them.

Purpose The #MeToo movement against sexual harassment (SH) has sparked a sense of familiarity, and collective anger among women, highlighting it as a pervasive and common experience across the globe. The purpose of this paper is to argue that despite shared experiences and such transnational movements, the ways in which SH is actually understood and combated are likely to be different in disparate National Business Systems (NBS). Through the analysis, the authors unpack these differences by paying specific attention to the multilevel power dynamics shaping how employers and their key stakeholders understand and respond to SH in Lebanon. Design/methodology/approach Against the backdrop of the complex and inefficient Lebanese NBS, the authors adopt a cross-cultural feminist analytic framework and engage in an iterative qualitative analysis of over 208 pages of transcriptions from relevant multisector, multi-stakeholder interactive sessions. Based on the analysis, the authors propose a series of first- and second-order concepts and themes that help us to trace how power shapes local SH understandings and related efforts. Findings The findings highlight the simultaneous influence of power through geopolitical forces external to Lebanon (i.e. power over through North-centricism and othering; power to through comparative perspectives and SDG regulations), combined with local forces embedded within the specific NBS (i.e. power over through negative attitudes and NBS specificities; power to through positive business efforts and local multistakeholder mobilizing). Originality/value The findings demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the interaction between power, contextual embeddedness and geopolitical considerations in attempts to advance SH theorization.

The Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) is regarded as a significant indicator of gender disparity worldwide. It’s useful tracking of the extent of access to resources and opportunities, and differences between men and women have been discussed across sectors and levels of decision making. The chapter encapsulates origin and history of GGGI, methodology for data collection and computation. The analysis covers critical aspects involving the four sub-indexes (dimensions): economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. These sub-indexes and their indicators for the development of GGGI have been elucidated. Based on the Global Gender Gap Report (WEF 2018), a brief overview of country comparisons and rankings has been provided. The application of the index for policy formulation and application in consulting, forms part of the chapter. The strengths and weaknesses of the GGGI along with suggestions have been provided for potential future use.