Do the activities of social movements (e.g., public protest, shareholder activism, boycotts, and sabotage) impact businesses, and if so, how do they impact businesses? When confronted by activist demands, how do firms respond, and does this response vary depending on who the activists are and what their relationship is to the firm? Answering these questions is critical for businesses and activists alike, as we move into an era of heightened activism directed at firms. A growing area of research that is situated at the intersection of economic and political sociology, social movement studies, history, and organizational theory, tackles these questions, in an increasingly methodologically sophisticated and nuanced manner. As a result, a number of important articles and books have been published, and several high-profile, interdisciplinary conferences have been held. This body of research shows that social movements have both direct and indirect effects on businesses, and that these effects are amplified by media attention to activism. For example, we know that activism impacts the financial performance of firms, as well as their reputation. And, we know that the activities of social movements have consequences on firm policies and practices. In turn, businesses have developed a varied repertoire of ways to respond to activist demands. While some businesses ignore activists, others decide to retaliate against activists. Increasingly, businesses concede to the demands of activists in material ways by changing policies and practices that are criticized, while others devise symbolic ways to respond to activist demands, thereby preserving their reputation without necessarily changing their activities.
Article
Social Movements and Their Impact on Business and Management
Sarah A. Soule
Article
Stakeholder Engagement in Management Studies: Current and Future Debates
Sybille Sachs and Johanna Kujala
Stakeholder engagement refers to the aims, practices, and impacts of stakeholder relations in businesses and other organizations. According to a general framework, stakeholder engagement has four dimensions: examining stakeholder relations, communicating with stakeholders, learning with (and from) stakeholders, and integrative stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder engagement is increasingly used in areas like strategic management, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainability management, while stakeholder-engagement research in marketing, finance, and human resources (HR) is still less common. Two main camps in the stakeholder-engagement literature exist: the strategic and the normative. To foster an inclusive understanding of stakeholder engagement, future research in both camps is needed. While the strategic camp necessitates a relational view, including both the firm and the stakeholder perspectives, the normative camp requires novel philosophical underpinnings, such as humanism and ecocentrism. Furthermore, there is constant debate about the argument that stakeholder engagement is, and should be, most importantly, practical. Stakeholder-engagement research should focus on solving real-life problems with practical consequences intended to make people’s lives better.
Article
Strategic Planning in the Public Sector
John Bryson and Lauren Hamilton Edwards
Strategic planning has become a fairly routine and common practice at all levels of government in the United States and elsewhere. It can be part of the broader practice of strategic management that links planning with implementation. Strategic planning can be applied to organizations, collaborations, functions (e.g., transportation or health), and to places ranging from local to national to transnational. Research results are somewhat mixed, but they generally show a positive relationship between strategic planning and improved organizational performance. Much has been learned about public-sector strategic planning over the past several decades but there is much that is not known.
There are a variety of approaches to strategic planning. Some are comprehensive process-oriented approaches (i.e., public-sector variants of the Harvard Policy Model, logical incrementalism, stakeholder management, and strategic management systems). Others are more narrowly focused process approaches that are in effect strategies (i.e., strategic negotiations, strategic issues management, and strategic planning as a framework for innovation). Finally, there are content-oriented approaches (i.e., portfolio analyses and competitive forces analysis).
The research on public-sector strategic planning has pursued a number of themes. The first concerns what strategic planning “is” theoretically and practically. The approaches mentioned above may be thought of as generic—their ostensive aspect—but they must be applied contingently and sensitively in practice—their performative aspect. Scholars vary in whether they conceptualize strategic planning in a generic or performative way. A second theme concerns attempts to understand whether and how strategic planning “works.” Not surprisingly, how strategic planning is conceptualized and operationalized affects the answers. A third theme focuses on outcomes of strategic planning. The outcomes studied typically have been performance-related, such as efficiency and effectiveness, but some studies focus on intermediate outcomes, such as participation and learning, and a small number focus on a broader range of public values, such as transparency or equity. A final theme looks at what contributes to strategic planning success. Factors related to success include effective leadership, organizational capacity and resources, and participation, among others.
A substantial research agenda remains. Public-sector strategic planning is not a single thing, but many things, and can be conceptualized in a variety of ways. Useful findings have come from each of these different conceptualizations through use of a variety of methodologies. This more open approach to research should continue. Given the increasing ubiquity of strategic planning across the globe, the additional insights this research approach can yield into exactly what works best, in which situations, and why, is likely to be helpful for advancing public purposes.
Article
Sustainability in Business: Integrated Management of Value Creation and Disvalue Mitigation
Markus Beckmann and Stefan Schaltegger
Sustainable development is about meeting the needs of current and future generations while operating in the safe ecological space of planetary boundaries. Against this background, companies can contribute to sustainability in both positive and negative ways. In a world of scarce resources, the positive contribution of businesses is to create value for diverse stakeholders (i.e., goods in the actual sense of good services and things with value) without social shortfalls or ecological overshooting with regard to planetary boundaries. Yet, when value-creation processes cause negative social or ecological externalities, companies create disvalue for current or future stakeholders, thus undermining sustainable development. Sustainability in business therefore aims at the integrative management of value creation and disvalue mitigation. Various institutions, such as sustainability laws as well as quasi-regulatory and voluntary sustainability standards, aim at providing an enabling environment in this regard yet are often insufficient. Corporate sustainability therefore calls for proactive management. Neither value nor disvalue fall from heaven but are rather co-created or caused through the interaction with stakeholders. Transforming from unsustainability to sustainability thus requires transforming the underlying relational arrangements. Here, market and non-market stakeholder relations need to be distinguished. In markets, companies transact with customers, employees, suppliers, and financiers who typically have voluntary exchange relationships with the firm. As a result, stakeholders can use the exit option when the relationship causes them harm. Companies therefore need to know and respect their value-creation partners, their potential contributions, and above all their needs. Sustainability can influence these market relationships in two ways. First, as sustainability addresses environmental, social, and ethical issues that are otherwise often overlooked, sustainability can relate to specific goals and motivations that stakeholders pursue when they care about these matters. Second, sustainability can be linked to transaction-specific particularities. This can be the case when sustainability features lead to information asymmetries, higher transaction costs, or resource dependencies. Non-market relationships, however, can differ in that stakeholders are involuntarily affected by the firm. In many cases, such as environmental pollution, stakeholders like local communities experience disvalue but cannot simply walk away. From a sustainability perspective, giving voice to non-market stakeholders through dialogue and participation is therefore crucial to identify early-on potential issues where companies cause disvalue. Such a proactive dialogue does not necessarily present a constraint that limits value creation in the market. Giving a voice to non-market stakeholders can also help create innovations and mobilize valuable resources such as knowledge, legitimacy, and partnership. The key idea is to find solutions that create value not only for market stakeholders but also for a larger circle, including non-market stakeholders as well. Such stakeholder business cases for sustainability aim at the synergistic integration of value creation and disvalue mitigation.
Article
The History, Development, and Contributions of the Work of Thorstein Veblen
Sean M. Haas
Thorstein Veblen was an American economist who lived from 1857 to 1929. He was born into a family of farmers in the state of Wisconsin. Veblen’s formal education was long and meandering, as he entered into Carleton College in 1877. He then moved to Johns Hopkins to begin a PhD in philosophy, which he then finished at Yale in 1884. After a 7-year hiatus, Veblen re-entered academia in 1890 as he enrolled in the doctoral program at Cornell. In 1891, Veblen moved to the University of Chicago, where he secured his first teaching position in 1892, but resigned in 1906. After departing Chicago, Veblen’s academic career remained sporadic. He taught at Stanford, the University of Missouri, and The New School for Social Research, each for a short period.
Veblen believed that classical economics was fundamentally flawed. He made many significant contributions to the field through his creation of institutional and evolutionary economics. Both perspectives involve the integration of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution into economic analysis. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Veblen viewed Darwinian evolution as a philosophical basis of inquiry that could be applied to all complex systems. This formed the conceptual basis for his rejection of classical economic principles, which he viewed as teleological, or seeking the definition of natural laws. Just as Darwinian evolution had transformed the natural sciences, Veblen aimed to rehabilitate the field of economics.
Veblen published ten books and wrote over one hundred essays and articles during his academic career. Much of his eminence rests firmly on one of his earliest works, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which is largely a critique of capitalism and wealth inequality in American society. Veblen’s approach to economics was multidisciplinary. As such, his work contains a variety of influences, from philosophical pragmatism and Darwinian evolution to both American and European socialism, as well as psychology and anthropology. Veblen’s contributions to economics have generally been classified as heterodox, primarily because of their theoretical nature and Veblen’s lack of a systemic comprehensive theory as well as his harsh critique of American capitalism.
Both institutional and evolutionary economics have retained varying degrees of relevance in the decades since Veblen’s death. The original form of Veblen’s institutional economics exhibited a degree of favor in the academic discourse preceding the New Deal in the mid-1930s. However, institutional economics was further developed in the mid-1930s to the early 1960s, through second-generation institutionalists, such as Clarence Ayres, John Commons, and Wesley Mitchell. In the mid-1970s, new institutional economics was established to shift the field toward a new paradigm. Despite its historical roots in Veblen’s heterodox writings, the importance of institutions in analyzing economic development, and in formulating public policy, has been adopted by the modern mainstream economic discourse. The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) and the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) continue to bring together economists who perform research from evolutionary and institutional perspectives. The AFEE honors Veblen’s legacy and his contributions to the field through its annual Veblen-Commons Award for outstanding research.
Article
The Impact of Reinsurance
Niels Viggo Haueter
Reinsurance is perceived to have a stabilizing effect on the direct insurance industry and thereby on the economy overall. Yet, research into how exactly reinsurance impacts various areas is scarce. Traditionally, studying the impact of reinsurance used to be in the domain of actuaries; since the 1960s, they have tried to assess how different contract elements can provide what came to be called “optimal reinsurance.” In the 2010s, such research was intensified in developing countries with the aim to deploy reinsurance to support economic growth and security. Interest in reinsurance increased when the industry became more visible in the 1990s as the impact of natural catastrophes started being linked to a changing climate. Reinsurers emerged as spokespeople for climate-related issues, and the industry took a lead role in arguing in favor of implementing measures to reduce environmental deterioration. Reinsurers, it was argued, have a vested interest in managing the impact of natural catastrophes. This triggered discussions about the role of reinsurance overall and about how to assess its impact. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, interest in reinsurance again surged, this time due to perceived systemic impacts.
Article
Whiteness in Organizations: From White Supremacy to Allyship
Donna Chrobot-Mason, Kristen Campbell, and Tyra Vason
Many whites do not identify with a racial group. They think very little about their own race and the consequences of being born into the dominant racial group. They do not think much about race because they do not have to. As a member of the dominant group, whites view their race as the norm. Furthermore, whites consciously or unconsciously typically view their experiences as race-less. In actuality whites’ experiences are far from race-less.
Many whites also fail to acknowledge the privileges their racial group provides. As long as whites continue to dominate leadership roles and positions of power in organizations, there will continue to be strong in-group bias providing unearned advantages to whites in the workplace, such as greater hiring and advancement opportunities. Additionally, as long as whites fail to acknowledge privilege, they will likely adopt a color-blind perspective, which in turn leads to a lack of recognition of microaggressions and other forms of discrimination as well as a lack of support for organizational initiatives to improve opportunities for employees of color.
In order to create a more inclusive workplace, it is imperative that both whites and white dominated organizations promote and foster white allies. For whites who wish to become allies, acknowledging white privilege is a necessary but insufficient step. Becoming a white ally also requires questioning meritocracy as well as working in collaboration with employees to implement lasting change.
Article
White Supremacy in Business Practices
Helena Liu
Contrary to its popular use to refer to racially violent extremism, white supremacy in the tradition of critical race studies describes the normalized ideologies, structures, and conventions through which whiteness is constructed as biologically, intellectually, culturally, and morally superior. This socially constituted racial hierarchy was developed through European colonialism to justify the acts of genocide and slavery that extracted resources from “non-white” lands and bodies to enrich “white” elites. Despite prevailing myths that colonialism and racism are artifacts of the past, the cultural hegemony of white power and privilege remain enduring pillars of contemporary business and society.
White supremacy inextricably shapes business practices. Indeed, our current practices of business administration and management are themselves modeled on slavery—the possession, extraction, and control of human “resources.” White supremacist ideologies and structures can also be found in the highly romanticized discourses of leadership that continue to rely on imperialist myths that white people are more fit to govern. They likewise surface in entrepreneurship and innovation where white people are overwhelmingly cast in the glorified roles of geniuses and pioneers. Even diversity management, which purports to nurture inclusive organizations, ironically reinforces white supremacy, treating workers of color as commodities to exploit. Within liberal logics of multicultural tolerance, workers of color are often tokenistically hired, expected to assimilate to white structures and cultures, and used as alibis against racism.
White supremacy is an integral (and often invisible) dimension of work, organizations, society, and everyday life. Challenging white supremacy requires that we engage in frank, honest conversations about race and racism, and the brutal legacy of European colonialism that maintains these constructs and practices. The path ahead requires the relinquishment of beliefs that race is an immutable, primordial essence and recognize it instead as a socially constructed and politically contested identification that has been used for white gain. Two ways that white supremacy may be dismantled in our cultures include redoing whiteness and abolishing whiteness. Redoing whiteness requires collectively understanding the mundane cultural practices of whiteness and choosing to do otherwise. Abolishing whiteness calls for a more absolute rejection of whiteness and what it has come to represent in various cultures. Antiracist resistance demands people of all racial identifications to commit to thinking, doing, and being beyond the existing racial hierarchy.
Article
Women in the Upper Echelons: Women on Corporate Boards and in Top Management Teams
Jihae You, Siri Terjesen, and Diana Bilimoria
In light of the growing number of women in the upper echelons, it is necessary to integrate and synthesize research on women at the top of corporations. The extant literature occurs in several disciplines—appearing in the fields of management, strategy, finance, economics, organizational behavior, ethics, sociology, and industrial relations—and is disparate and fragmented. A large and growing set of scholars provide various theoretical perspectives and empirical findings addressing organizational demographics, supply side factors, and outcomes. A number of theories are employed to understand the issue of women in the upper echelons, including resource dependence, tokenism and critical mass, glass cliff, social identity, human capital, social capital, and signaling theories. Most articles use U.S. data and tend to deal with the effect of female CEOs or that of female representation on corporate boards and top management teams (TMTs) on various firm-level outcomes. The majority of the studies investigate a potential relationship between gender diversity and financial performance. Research on this topic can guide policy and practice, improving the performance of organizations and the individuals who work within them.
Article
Work-Family Conflict and Work-Life Conflict
Ellen Ernst Kossek and Kyung-Hee Lee
Work-family and work-life conflict are forms of inter-role conflict that occur when the energy, time, or behavioral demands of the work role conflicts with family or personal life roles. Work-family conflict is a specific form of work-life conflict. Work-family conflict is of growing importance in society as it has important consequences for work, non-work, and personal outcomes such as productivity, turnover, family well-being, health, and stress. Work-family conflict relates to critical employment, family, and personal life outcomes. These include work outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover), family outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction and family satisfaction), and personal outcomes related to physical health (e.g., physical symptoms, eating and exercise behaviors), and psychological health (e.g., stress and depressive symptoms, life satisfaction). Many different theoretical perspectives are used to understand work-life conflict: starting with role theory, and more recently conservation of resources, job demands and resources, and life course theories. Many methodological challenges are holding back the advancement of work-family conflict research. These include (1) construct overlap between work-family conflict and work-life conflict, and work-life balance measures; (2) measurement issues related to directionality and operationalization; and (3) a lack of longitudinal and multilevel studies. Future research should include studies to (1) advance construct development on linkages between different forms of work-family and work-life conflict; (2) improve methodological modeling to better delineate work-family conflict mechanisms; (3) foster increased variation in samples; (4) develop resiliency interventions that fit specific occupational contextual demands; (5) increase integration and sophistication of theoretical approaches; and (6) update work-family studies to take into account the influence of the growing prevalence of technology that is transforming work-family relationships.
Article
The Work–Home Interface: An Integration of Perspectives
Lieke ten Brummelhuis
Work–family research has become a central area of research within organizational psychology and management. Since its inception around 1970, work–family research has seen tremendous growth, parallel to the increase in employees combining paid work with caregiving responsibilities. Fifty years later, a new trend is visible with an increase in single-person households and employees having a variety of other roles in addition to work beyond just family, suggesting that the relevance of the work–home interface will continue to grow. To understand how work and nonwork domains collide and interact with each other, various concepts have been introduced, including work–family conflict, work–family interference, work–family spillover, work–family expansion, work–family enrichment, work–family enhancement, work–family facilitation, work–family depletion, and work–life balance.
Whereas conflict, interference, expansion, and balance all describe outcomes of combining two roles simultaneously, spillover, depletion, enhancement, facilitation, and enrichment describe a process whereby one domain affects outcomes in another domain. With the goal of increasing concept clarity, work–family concepts can be organized by categorizing them per their valence and perspective. Valence divides work–family constructs into those that consider positive versus negative outcomes of combining dual roles. Perspective differentiates between combination constructs that examine the joint effects of multiple roles versus process constructs that clarify how one domain affects outcomes in another domain.
This typology clarifies what research question a specific work–family construct answers. For instance, if a researcher is interested in examining how often employees experience family (work) interfering with work (family), a combination construct is most fitting. If a researcher is interested in how work (family) can undermine or contribute to family (work) performance, a process construct is more suitable. By pinpointing the differences between work–family constructs, the framework can help determine which theoretical model is most suitable to explain a work–family phenomenon and how it can be measured best. The gained concept clarity fosters the design of empirical research that addresses novel research questions related to a diverse workforce that might occupy a variety of roles beyond work and family.
Article
Workplace Identity Construction: An Intersectional-Identity-Cultural Lens
Lize A. E. Booysen
With the development of an integrated cross-disciplinary framework to study workplace identity construction, the current theoretical discussion on workplace identity construction is extended—first, by focusing on intersectionality as theoretical lens and methodology in our thinking about workplace identity, highlighting the significance of an individual’s intersections of social locations in the workplace embedded in socio-historical and political contexts, and second, by focusing on the influence of national culture and societal landscapes as important macro contextual factors, adding a super-group level and a cross-cultural perspective on how individuals navigate their identities at work.
Using an intersectional-identity-cultural conceptualization of workplace identity formation elucidates the personal, social identity, sub-group, group, and super group level of influences on identity formation. It focuses on the interplay between individual, relational, collective, and group identity, and emphasizes social identity as the bridge between personal identity and group identity. It highlights the multiplicity, simultaneity, cross cutting, intersecting, as well as differing prominence and power differences of social identities based on differing contexts. It illustrates the relatively stable yet fluid nature of individual (intra-personal and core) identity as it adapts to the environment, and the constant changing, co-constructed, negotiated, and re-negotiated nature of relational (inter-personal), collective identity (social identity) as it gets produced and re-produced, shaped and reshaped by both internal and external forces, embedded in socio-historical-political workplace contexts.
Understanding the interplay of the micro-level, individual (agency), relational, and collective identity levels (social construction), nested in the meso level structures of domination, and group dynamics in the workplace (control regulation/political) in its macro level societal landscape context (additional control regulation) will help us to understand the cognitive sense-making processes individuals engage in when constructing workplace identities. This understanding can help to create spaces where non-normative individuals can resist, disrupt, withdraw, or refuse to enact the limited accepted identities and can create alternative discourse or identity possibilities.
