Journal of Management Studies

Comparing two distinct deglobalization periods, this study shows how Finnish multinational enterprises (MNEs) used corporate diplomatic activities (CDA) to influence Finland's alignment with a struggling great power. Drawing from hegemonic stability theory and new institutional economics, we argue that the power's collapsing global networks and institutions exposed Finnish MNEs to cross‐border constraints typical of small states – reliant on but unable to govern the rules set by great powers. We identify two distinct CDA responses aimed at sustaining cross‐border activities: in one period, Finnish shipbuilding MNEs adopted a defensive approach to maintain alignment with the struggling power; in the other, Finnish paper MNEs pursued an explorative strategy to reposition Finland toward alternative powers. Informal institutions at home explain these divergent responses: they either discredited or legitimized existing geopolitical alignments. These CDA mechanisms produced contrasting outcomes: shipbuilders' defensive stance drove de‐internationalization after the collapse of the great power's global networks and institutions, while the paper MNEs' explorative strategy turned shifting geopolitics into an opportunity for renewed internationalization. By showing how MNEs influence diplomatic processes between their ‘small’ home country and great powers, we call on management scholars to take more seriously structural power asymmetries that shape global politics that constrain MNE behaviour during periods of geopolitical instability.

Constant connectivity through smartphone use represents a major societal challenge, particularly in relation to work performance and work–nonwork boundaries. This research leverages an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, crisis settings, and a cross‐cultural approach (France and the United Kingdom) to specify the impacts of smartphone use on work performance and work–life interfaces, before and during the COVID‐19 crisis, among large samples of employees (NPilot = 229; N1 = 938; N2 = 1042). An empirical test of this integrative model shows that smartphone use influences work performance directly, work–life balance negatively mediates this relationship, and work–family conflict moderates it. It advances knowledge by considering both dimensions of work performance, generic task performance and adaptive performance, which is crucial for adapting to technologies and crises. This research also emphasizes the need to consider the context in which smartphone use affects work performance, notably in situations marked by high pressure, such as crises that become chronic. By introducing the marketing concept of perceived value as a mediator, this research shows that utilitarian value improves work performance while hedonic value decreases it, thus advancing the scholarly conversation and helping to manage constant connectivity.

Brokering between actors such as Indigenous producers and Western multinationals participating in global market relations typically requires bridging different worldviews, each with different implications for economic activity: a ‘nature’ worldview where production is often limited to preserve ecological balance, and an ‘environment’ worldview where nature is a resource to be exploited. Given these differences and the traditional hegemony of Western actors, the question of whether and how brokers can facilitate market relations that are beneficial for Indigenous and Western actors alike becomes pressing. Building on recent decolonial literature that has highlighted the possibility of rendering traditionally Western‐dominated market relations ‘more Indigenous’ or ‘less colonial’ and cultural brokerage scholarship, we conducted a case study of a Western consulting firm brokering between an MNC and Indigenous communities in Costa Rica. Based on an effective brokering process after a perceived crisis point, we theorize the model of ‘Indigenizing brokerage’ to explain how brokering between the two worldviews can lead to mutual benefits through three interrelated processes. Contributing to the literature on cultural brokerage and decolonial scholarship, the model introduces a much‐needed framework to better understand what ‘more Indigenous’ could mean in global market relations and adds insights into supply chain brokerage.

Hubs and participants of mature ecosystems increasingly compete with de alio entrants that are hubs of more innovative ecosystems. Prior research shows how these asymmetric de alio entrants frame to win over participants from mature ecosystems and suggests that hubs of these ecosystems should respond by encouraging innovation among participants. However, extant theory does not explain how hubs frame to achieve this goal. We address this issue by studying a European carmaker who faced Google as an asymmetric de alio entrant. We find that the carmaker encouraged innovation by framing the future. Interestingly, it did so not through business narratives (as entrants do), but through narratives from technology policy discourses – it thus engaged in a politicized framing of the future. We identified two variants of this framing mechanism. First, the carmaker engaged in visionary politicized framing of the future, thereby encouraging innovation in enabling technologies. Second, it pursued idealistic politicized framing of the future, which promoted innovation in modular technologies. We develop a framework that explains when, how, and why hubs of mature ecosystems frame to encourage innovation in the face of asymmetric de alio entrants. Our study contributes to scholarship on incumbent framing in ecosystems, temporal framing, and inter‐ecosystem competition.

Scholars and practitioners have long sought to clarify ways to motivate employees to engage in stewardship behaviour, which involves personal sacrifices for the public interest. However, a critical question remains unanswered: How does a supervisor's cultural orientation, admiration, and status conferral determine the persistence or diminishment of employees' stewardship behaviour? Drawing on the moral virtue theory of status attainment, we argue that employees' stewardship behaviour either promotes or diminishes subsequent actions through increased or decreased admiration and status conferral from supervisors, depending on supervisors' cultural orientations. Study 1, a vignette‐based experiment involving 222 participants, revealed that supervisors with a collectivist orientation tend to admire and grant status to employees who exhibit stewardship behaviour, whereas those with an individualist orientation tend to decrease such feedback. Study 2, a four‐wave survey with 302 leader–employee dyads, replicated these findings and further explained the role of status conferral in sustaining or diminishing stewardship behaviour in the future. This research advances stewardship theory by revealing the complex dynamics that sustain stewardship behaviour and provides valuable insights for managers aiming to motivate employees to consistently engage in stewardship behaviour.

We identify managers' meta‐level talk about the positive purpose, meaning, and significance of their actions as an overlooked type of leadership behaviour and call it leadership meta‐talk. We outline why leadership meta‐talk is not necessarily truthful or deceptive, but selective and loosely coupled with leadership practice. We discuss varieties of leadership meta‐talk, namely aspirational, sub‐texting, and sensemaking meta‐talk, as well as principled, situational, formulaic, and casual meta‐talk. We show how all varieties of leadership meta‐talk draw people's attention to positive aspects of leadership practice and provide positive interpretations of it. Thus, leadership meta‐talk can positively influence attributions of leadership and portray workplaces as overly harmonious and well‐ordered, masking power imbalances and tensions and creating a quantitative and qualitative talking‐doing gap. We argue that these talking‐doing gaps are systemic rather than pathological features of the contemporary workplace because overly positive leadership meta‐talk responds to systemic pressures and opportunities for managers and provides egocentric, psycho‐relational, and public‐image benefits. In contrast, leadership practice that lives up to leadership meta‐talk is more costly, difficult, and time‐consuming than commonly assumed. Our theory reconciles attributional, behavioural, and romancing views of leadership, and offers new insights into key organizational and societal challenges, including managing healthy workplace expectations.

Most prior research has assumed that employees always appreciate coworker support. However, coworker support exceeding expectations can be considered a double‐edged sword in the workplace. Drawing on expectation violation theory, this research explores when and how coworker support exceeding expectations becomes a positive or negative expectation violation that influences employees' interpersonal behaviour. We propose that when employees have a lower level of workplace status, coworker support exceeding their expectations is more likely to be a positive expectation violation and, therefore, will be positively related to employee gratitude and interpersonal citizenship behaviour. In contrast, when employees have a higher level of workplace status, coworker support exceeding expectations tends to be a negative expectation violation and, in turn, is positively related to employee shame and interpersonal counterproductive work behaviour. Two multiwave field surveys with Chinese employees and two scenario‐based experiments with Western workers largely support our hypotheses.

Over the last two decades, a growing number of studies of novel forms of social‐symbolic work (e.g., identity work, boundary work, institutional work, values work, etc.) have appeared in the organization and management studies literature. This growing body of research – the ‘turn to work’ in organization theory – has provided important new insights into how actors purposefully participate in the social construction of organizations and their contexts. The aim of this special issue is to build on and extend these insights and in this introductory essay we begin by outlining a framework that provides a useful meta‐theory – the social‐symbolic work perspective – for integrating this stream of research. This perspective revolves around two key concepts: ‘social‐symbolic objects’ defined as meaningful patterns in a social system; and ‘social‐symbolic work’ defined as conscious, reflexive efforts to shape social‐symbolic objects. We then introduce the articles that appear in this special issue and identify important cross‐cutting themes. Drawing on these articles, we go on to identify potentially fruitful areas for future research on social‐symbolic work and end with a challenge to organizational scholars to build on this special issue to move our understanding of social‐symbolic work forward.

Research suggests that firms with good reputations will work to protect them, as good reputations are assets that attract resources and facilitate market exchanges. But good reputations do not just attract resources and facilitate exchanges; they can also buffer firms from scrutiny. Therefore, this study asks whether organizations with good reputations will still perform well, even if they are less likely to be watched or held accountable for doing poorly. The study bounds its focus to a form of performance that depends on external oversight, in this case through the regulatory governance process. The theory suggests that higher regulatory reputations, as measured through increases in ratings, will lead to weaker monitoring – which, in turn, allows performance to decline in the regulated domain. An analysis of public health outcomes in the cruise travel industry provides support for these predictions. Tests of moderating hypotheses suggest that the direct effect of ratings on performance is stronger when regulators have more power over the organization, and when the organization is not already under scrutiny for poor performance on other ancillary dimensions.

This paper extends theory by showing how occupational identity regulation operates jointly through both desired and feared identities which, in combination, enforce normative control. Taking a narrative identity perspective and drawing on an ethnographic and interview‐based study of veterinarians, we make three principal contributions to our understanding of identity regulation. First, we explain how, in high surveillance contexts, occupational members construct not just positively valenced desired identities but also negatively valenced feared identities, and how feared identities are antagonistic foils to desired ones that enhance their appeal. Second, we analyse how self‐discipline is exerted through dual processes of self‐examination: prideful talk that affirms desired identities and guilt‐ridden talk which casts doubt on their attainment and spurs auto‐correction. Third, we demonstrate how conformist identity work which (re)produces occupational identities through desire and fear reduces people's scope for resistance. This research highlights identity work that is non‐supportive of the (desired) self and how an appreciation of feared in addition to desired identities is vital to understand fully the tensional nature of occupational selves.

Organizational humour research is accelerating; however, scholars seem to disagree on how to conceptualize and operationalize interpersonal humour. A widely used approach draws from personality psychology and conceptualizes humour as a typology of four styles. This “humour styles” approach possesses conceptual shortcomings and introduces important questions about construct validity. Specifically, the humour styles tend to conflate inferred motives and outcomes within the definition of each style, raising concerns about circularity and tautology. Moreover, its typological foundation – originally developed for an intrapersonal context – becomes less tenable when applied interpersonally. To support the progression of humour scholarship, we begin by clarifying the core construct of humour, which serves as the basis for a broader conceptual critique of the humour styles approach. This critique is then illustrated through a multi‐study research program (N = 1086; six samples). We conclude by proposing the MOHM model (Model of Organizational Humour Motives) as a conceptually grounded alternative to guide future research on interpersonal humour. This research contributes to humour scholarship by clarifying the core humour concept, critiquing a popular approach (which is reducing construct clarity), and offering a forward‐looking framework to inspire more precise and impactful research on humour in organizational settings.

There is wide agreement about the potential for hybridity – the combination of plural organizational forms – to address complex societal grand challenges. Unfortunately, advancements in this area have been unduly constrained by the fragmentation of research along the organizational unit of analysis. This Special Issue advances research by offering a framework that bridges hybridity research across the organizational, inter‐organizational, and societal levels of analysis. We introduce a framework of transformational hybridity based on three interlinked mechanisms that drive societal transformation across different levels – Shape up!, Shake up!, and Shift up! Shape up! involves changes in organizational and inter‐organizational hybridity practices. In turn, Shake up! involves changes in hybridity boundaries through organizational and inter‐organizational arrangements. Through interplay, these two mechanisms may bring about Shift up!, a societal transformation that addresses a grand challenge. Taken together, this Special Issue paves the road for novel research directions and equips scholars and practitioners alike with a multi‐level lens for tackling societal grand challenges through transformational hybridity.

Repurposing management for the public good involves realizing alternative ideas to serve societal interests. Humanistic management is centred on such ideas as human dignity and well‐being. Realization refers to the generation and maintenance of social realities corresponding to these ideas. The conceptual lens of performativity is uniquely suited for studying realization but requires broadening to capture the wider set of practices involved. Accordingly, we explore the wider performative practices that realize humanistic management ideas and how they do so. We studied three cases through a thematic analysis of 165 interviews, secondary sources, and observations. Our framework explains how humanistic management ideas were realized through performative fabrics of practices, interwoven heterogeneous practices that make and keep the embedded humanistic management ideas real. Performing, interweaving, and reweaving dynamics continuously shape these fabrics of interrelated humanizing, seeding, and nurturing practices. The fabrics generated four types of realizations of humanistic management ideas: potentialities, anomalies, normalities, and transferabilities. We prime a change in the conversation from studies of individual performative practices to relational studies of performative fabrics of practices. We also advance the performativity discussion to understand generativity, stabilization, defence, and reformativity. Our framework contributes theoretically and practically to repurposing management for the public good and offers insight into desirable future making.

While gender diversity on boards of directors (BODs) has recently increased, gender diversity on major board committees (MBCs), which influence board decision‐making directly, has advanced more slowly. Our study therefore delves into the antecedents of gender diversity on MBCs. We look at two key drivers: national quotas (policies mandating a minimum percentage of women to be appointed to BODs) and firm ownership (state, institutional, and family ownership). Our results show, contrary to theoretical predictions that are currently prevailing in the literature, that quotas trigger emancipatory rather than tokenistic behaviour in relation to women's appointments to MBCs. More specifically, quotas have a positive effect on gender diversity on MBCs, even when controlling for gender diversity on the BOD. Quota‐based measures can thus be a stepping stone towards positions of real influence on BODs. Furthermore, we find that states and institutional investors are ‘emancipatory’ owners, which support relatively higher gender diversity on MBCs. In contrast, family firms are ‘conservative’ owners, which support relatively lower gender diversity on MBCs. Our study informs the literatures on gender diversity on BODs and ownership‐based perspectives on corporate governance.

Despite their ubiquity, there is much uncertainty as to whether performance appraisals work, and considerable evidence as to their shortfalls. Drawing on the sociological literature on routine dynamics, we examine the embeddedness of the performance appraisal, the role of emotions, exploring what goes on during the process, and how as a routine, appraisals may be diverted onto a trajectory increasingly incompatible with organizational goals. Previous studies have explored how managers may successfully intervene when routines become dysfunctional; we explore when and how this becomes difficult or impossible. We assess how negative emotions introduce a layer of backstage complexity to the appraisal routine. It is based on professional service firms' subsidiaries in a Middle Eastern context, where informal rules and network ties may subvert formal organizational ones. The study identifies distancing, working around, and buffering, as key responses to current and anticipated future negative affective events. It highlights how emotions are not simply antecedents or consequences in the appraisal process; they are experienced throughout the process, accompanying each action, interaction, and event. This study extends routine dynamics and performance appraisal literature by highlighting the emotional dimension's intervening role and examining actors' contending subjectivities. We emphasize how actors shape appraisal routines in diverse and individualistic ways at the micro‐level.

This study advances our understanding of new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition by broadening the epistemological scope of our theory to be inclusive of non‐Western contexts. We conducted a qualitative study of entrepreneurs from India, Kenya, and Mexico seeking impact investments from Western impact investors to better understand how entrepreneurs in non‐Western contexts contend with perceived legitimacy tensions that arise when pursuing financial resources from non‐local investors. In contrast to the prevailing assumption that non‐Western entrepreneurs are resource‐constrained and adhere to existing strategies to seek legitimacy from financial resource providers, we find that such entrepreneurs perceive their local institutional environment to have important non‐financial resources that impact how they seek legitimacy from financial resource providers. This study offers a novel conceptualization of new venture legitimation by acknowledging non‐Western and Western institutional environments as important considerations in how entrepreneurs navigate legitimacy with both financial and non‐financial audiences over time.

Whether mothers become entrepreneurs after childbirth may depend on the generosity of the parental leave that they receive. We apply a resource perspective to disentangle the impact of the policy's time and money components on mothers' likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs. Against the common belief that generous parental leave discourages entrepreneurship, we suggest that offering more time and monetary resources through parental leave can promote mothers' entrepreneurship. In a natural experiment (n = 181 mother entrepreneurs from the German Socio-Economic Panel), we find that a German time-contractionary policy reform (2001) reduced the odds of mothers becoming self-employed by 17 per cent. A subsequent money-expansionary reform (2007) was unrelated to mothers' entrepreneurial entry. Our second study, a conjoint experiment (n = 2176 decisions nested within 136 women), confirms these findings, showing a significant effect for only the time but not the money component of parental leave on women's likelihood of self-employment. We further explore boundary conditions that underscore nuanced effects of these policies depending on household burdens and socioeconomic context. We conclude that it is the time component of parental leave policies that matters most, while money affects the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur only among mothers heavily burdened with household responsibilities.

Professions continue to be central to understanding organizing in the 21st century. The literature on professions is segmented into theoretical conversations that offer different conceptualizations of professions and theoretical concerns. Through an analysis of the literature, we unpack four lanes-teleological, institutional, ecological, and cultural-that co-exist to make up the literature on professions. We synthesize the theoretical conversations generated within each lane, identify key distinctions across lanes, and assess the future potential of each lane, noting where there is space for contribution. Beyond making the dominant paradigms, their plurality, and their central distinctions recognizable, we encourage researchers to move beyond studying professions qua professions to articulate the role and impact of professions in organizations and society. We offer seven proposals for enlivening the research agenda on professions, including prioritizing real-world problems and outcomes over paradigmatic perspectives.

Business collective action (BCA) has long been a topic of interest to management scholars. However, our theoretical understanding of this important phenomenon has been hindered by its fragmented development in the literature. To address this shortcoming, we conduct a comprehensive review of BCA across a wide range of disciplines in management, including corporate political activity, private regulation, strategic management, and organizational institutionalism. Based on this review, we develop an integrative framework that identifies the triggers, outcomes, and internal political arrangements associated with BCA. In doing so, we help develop a common vocabulary that unites different market and non‐market forms of BCA, thus deepening our understanding of the role of business collective action in society.

Achieving system‐level change for climate transitions is needed, and incremental efforts are widely considered insufficient. Drawing on neo‐Schumpeterian, cultural‐institutionalist, and post‐structuralist theories, this Point‐Counterpoint debate explores the systemic barriers including neoliberal policies, corporate hegemony, and growth‐driven cultural logics which inhibit the kind of change that is needed to mitigate increasingly devastating climatic conditions. Our contributors propose a range of potential solutions which may break these barriers and deliver the required radical system‐level change. These include further and better democratization, quixotic institutional work so as to undermine dominant cultural templates, the use of various counter‐hegemonic practices, and the development of alternative forms of organizing. In this introduction, we explore contact and departure points between the three positions and offer some critical reflections and future research questions on the idea of system‐level change.

Future making, the work of enacting the yet‐to‐come by making sense of and giving form to imaginings of the future, has become topical in management studies lately. Triggered by pressing societal challenges like climate change, inequality and threatened democratic institutions vis‐à‐vis a societal ‘crisis mode’, management scholars have started to engage with the future as an open‐ended temporal category, both as an object of analysis happening in and around organizations, as well as a way of scholarly inquiry. This Point‐Counterpoint debate about future making in management research comes right on time, as future‐making research seems to be at a crossroads, potentially heading to a bright – or not so bright – future. The contributions to this debate collectively ask: What is the future of future making in management research, and they could not be more different in the pathways they envisage.

In this article, we explore how actors' intentionality emerges, develops, and co‐evolves with institutional change. Although intentions are essential in shaping institutional change agents' motivations and actions, our understanding of their dynamics is limited and biased by the assumption that intentions are usually identifiable prior to institutional change. Building on the works of philosophers, in particular Husserl's life exploration of consciousness and intentions, we argue that a more effective way to conceptualize intentionality in institutional change is to consider attentionality, that is, how actors direct their mental focus toward specific elements of their social reality. Empirically, we draw upon a phenomenon‐driven study of the Algerian agricultural transformation from 2000 to 2019, with a focus on the contributions of Benamor, a leading agri‐food business. We theorize a process model that differentiates between passive and active intentions. Passive intentions are virtual mental possibilities upon which active intentions are built to instigate change. Our findings highlight attentional conversion as a crucial mechanism that drives the transition from passive to active intentions. These findings have important implications for our understanding of institutional change theories.

This Counterpoint cautions that future making research treats the future too simplistically and fails to acknowledge the fundamental uncertainty inherent in all futures work. First, future making scholarship overlooks existing academic research, in which similar concerns have been pursued, empirically and conceptually, for years. Second, utopian futures are considered achievable if only actors have a vision of what they wish to create. Finally, most future making statements around grand challenges rely on little more than hope, failing to account for the complex relationalities shaping them. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the scenario planning literature, Knightian uncertainty, and anthropology of future research. I also critique the Point's call for future making scholars to adopt practice‐based approaches (Wenzel et al., forthcoming) in their empirical inquiries, arguing that the ‘as Practice’ move in management studies is yet to achieve its aspirations. Additionally, I caution against the other Counterpoint in this debate that future making requires the realization of desired and emancipatory futures (Comi et al., forthcoming), as this view is too restrictive for broad and deep future making theorizing to emerge.

Previous work on legitimacy has conceptualized its multi‐level nature, encompassing individual‐level propriety and collective‐level validity. Recently, scholars have introduced the construct of consensus, the degree to which evaluators agree in terms of their propriety beliefs. While validity and consensus can overlap, they can also manifest distinctly, with validity masking underlying disagreement (i.e., low consensus). Furthermore, some work has begun to theorize the effects of this validity‐consensus incongruity from a multi‐level perspective, but it has yet to systematically integrate micro‐oriented theory to explain how evaluators assess legitimacy. We address this limitation by examining the individual‐level consequences of the validity‐consensus incongruity following a negative shock. Specifically, using a multi‐level regression discontinuity design and data from 6260 evaluators across 17 countries, we examine changes in evaluators' propriety beliefs about the legitimacy of free markets following the 2008 global financial crisis. In contrast to prior research, we theorize that high validity amplifies a shock's negative impact on evaluators' propriety beliefs. In addition, we establish how consensus explains variation in evaluators' responses to a shock, particularly in high‐validity, low‐consensus contexts. By bringing together two important strands of the legitimacy literature, we extend prior theory and pioneer an empirical test of the nuanced nature of legitimacy.