Efficiency is a pervasive yet insufficiently challenged managerial principle and an integral part of business school academia. However, while there is compelling evidence that efficiency gains can have severe undesirable social and ecological consequences that reduce overall welfare both in terms of well-being and natural resources, business school academsia remains ill-equipped to adequately understand the origins of these consequences. Furthermore, management education is limited in its critical thinking about potential alternative organizing principles to efficiency. In this conceptual paper, we mobilize literature from resource economics and the so-called ʻrebound effect' to show how and where efficiency can produce unintended harmful consequences. We illustrate this dynamic through two prominent cases where efficiency principles are particularly problematic: eco-efficiency and sustainability, as well as digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI). We then explore why efficiency continues to dominate business school academia despite its adverse effects, drawing on the notion of ignorance to explain how dynamics of segmentation, justification and valuation sustain its persistence. Finally, we use a performativity perspective to argue how a sufficiency-based approach as an alternative and complementary organizing principle can come into being to counter the dominance of efficiency. Our aim is to help reorient management education toward a more desirable, socially attuned and ecologically responsible future.
Despite persisting ethnonational conflict in Israel and Palestine, professionals in the information technology (IT) sector keep working together. They engage in professional cooperation by jointly developing software while embedded in societal narratives that cast the other as the enemy. We ask how individuals give meaning to their work when cooperating with their societal adversaries in such a context. Drawing on a qualitative case study that combines interviews, observations, and documents, we find that individuals use two main tactics to cope with the conflict context: depoliticizing and politicizing cooperation. We specify these individual-level tactics and show when they are used: depoliticizing in situations “at work” and politicizing in situations “about work.” We also show that these tactics are at times misplaced and hinder cooperation. Additionally, we find that physical and social interference can disrupt cooperation and thus set guardrails for it. Abstracting from our findings, we theorize a model that explains how individuals engage in what we term conflict-situated cooperation. We offer two main contributions to management research: We introduce the concept of conflict-situated cooperation to capture the distinct nature of professional cooperation in the context of ethnonational conflict, and we explain how individuals use and situate (de)politicizing coping tactics to give meaning to their professional cooperation.
Interdisciplinary research is widely promoted as essential for advancing understanding of complex managerial and organizational phenomena. Yet, while often celebrated rhetorically, authors keep facing significant challenges when they seek to integrate insights from other disciplines into management scholarship. To that effect, we outline four research-informed cornerstone practices to help management scholars craft interdisciplinary research. Employing a narrative-integrative review approach, we inductively develop an Interdisciplinarity Diffusion Framework that maps interdisciplinary research according to the proximity of the source discipline to management (proximal–distal) and the primary mode of diffusion (theory, methods, or phenomena). Drawing on exemplary studies to illustrate our points, we show how different positions within this framework create distinct opportunities and barriers for authors. We draw on these findings, as well as on our own scholarly experience to detail four cornerstone practices, which serve as practical guidance for authors interested in advancing management theory with interdisciplinary research. Finally, we shift attention to the responsibilities of reviewers, editors, and institutions in shaping an environment where interdisciplinarity can flourish. We argue that supporting interdisciplinary research should be a rich and shared endeavour, central to the future intellectual vitality and societal relevance of management studies.
Research on how to slow, halt, and reverse aging processes is making progress. Pharmaceutical, big-tech, and venture capital companies and their owners are making considerable investments in potential (epi)genetic, molecular, cellular, and organ-based interventions and therapies. This essay considers implications for entrepreneurship in the case that such interventions would eventually result in a doubling of the human healthspan. A vastly extended middle age would imply potential changes in opportunities, the future time perspective of entrepreneurs, the pace of time as experienced by entrepreneurs, and the relationship between age and entrepreneurial success. The essay also outlines a range of wider considerations: The need for new life phases in the now vastly extended middle age; the meaning and function of of the last life phase; changes in health beliefs; implications for sustainability; and implications for inequality. The final section ties the essay together by discussing how entrepreneurship scholarship can help move the longevity domain forward.
Climate change adaptation has for a long time been the neglected half of the climate equation, as most attention has been directed toward mitigation. Yet, the catastrophic effects of a changing climate are already occurring, unavoidable, and in many cases irreversible. Organizations need to identify ways of adapting to present and future climatic conditions. In this editorial, we make the case for climate change adaptation as a research topic on par with mitigation. We outline how and why management and organizational scholarship should work toward an integrated approach of mitigation and adaptation in responding to climate change, suggesting three key avenues of research for future inquiry. In so doing, we encourage more impactful and ecologically relevant management research that will make a difference to society at large.
To effectively tackle climate change, the strategic management enterprise needs to fundamentally reinvent itself. In their Point, Bansal, Durand, Kreutzer, Kunisch and McGahan forcefully argue for such a turnaround and outline a ‘new strategy’ paradigm that integrates the constraints of planetary boundaries and Earth systems not as an afterthought, but as the basis of inquiry. This, however, doesn’t come without fierce contestation, as shown by the Counterpoint by Foss and Klein and the further Counterpoint by Davis and DeWitt. In this introduction to
the Point-Counterpoint debate on strategic management and climate change, we argue that this contestation is largely due to what we call three epistemic fault lines that cut through how strat-
egy scholars understand climate change, devise possible solutions, and assume the relationship between theories and reality. We specify these fault lines and connect them to important avenues for future research that expand the strategic management conversation about climate change.
