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This empirical study uncovers emotional sensemaking factors that cause changes in management perceptions about wicked strategic problems under dynamic complexity. These perception changes improve understanding of, and solutions to, the wicked problem.

Senior managers from three large organizations in different sectors participated in gaming simulation workshops. The strategic issues at stake were intractable and divisive. Qualitative methods captured participants' perceptions of the problems and the dynamic complexity that they faced and how they changed.

Flawed management perceptions were revised as sensemaking processes were catalyzed by emotions of shock/surprise that came from experiencing unexpected stakeholder conduct within a simulation. The plausibility of the conduct was strengthened because managers were role-playing stakeholders. The shock/surprise emotion uncoupled attachment to entrenched beliefs, leading to a willingness to revise the flawed perceptions. The changed perceptions created new insights for a solution to the wicked problem.

Practical implications are how management practitioners can improve the tackling of wicked strategic problems through the use of shock and surprise in a gaming simulation.

This research extends theory on the role of emotions in sensemaking under dynamic complexity. The authors uncover how a hierarchy of managers' emotions used in sensemaking explains the catalytic effect of the shock and surprise of unexpected stakeholder conduct on revisions to their perceptions of the outcomes of the dynamic complexity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of income generation projects as a pedagogic method to assess students’ learning about social enterprises. The authors are interested in how and why this innovative approach might improve students’ understanding of the different aspects and attributes of social entrepreneurship.

The study used thematic analysis of qualitative data comprising the reflective logs of 87 students on an undergraduate entrepreneurship module in a university business programme. The major attributes of social entrepreneurship were identified from a review of literature, and the paper uses the logs to judge whether students had learnt about these attributes.

The results show that students developed an understanding concerning social enterprises’ diverse stakeholder environment, market needs, social enterprises’ ideological foundations, resource mobilisation processes and performance measurement – both social and financial. In addition, they developed skills in reflection and self-awareness, communication, empathy and the generation of new ideas.

The study is limited in that it focused on only one cohort of students, undergraduates. The authors cannot claim that the findings are generalisable to other students or contexts.

Students are better able to understand the needs and values of social enterprises. However, this is a resource intensive process for educators with implications for curriculum design and management.

This study sheds new light on how experiential learning helps to raise students’ awareness of social enterprises.

This study sheds new light on how experiential learning in the form of income generation projects helps to raise students’ awareness of social enterprises. Its value lies in helping to develop a novel and effective pedagogy for entrepreneurial learning.

The aim of this paper is to present an exploratory study that examined the development of students' entrepreneurial skills over time within live projects.

In this study, students worked alongside real‐life entrepreneurs and financiers. Students' perceptions of their skills were assessed using both quantitative and qualitative data, which were gathered during weeks 1, 6 and 12 of the programme.

The results showed significant changes in students' perceptions of their skills over time. At the outset students were confident about their abilities across the 17 categories of entrepreneurial skills developed by Lichtenstein and Lyons and Lyons and Lyons. Later on in the projects, their confidence in certain skills declined significantly; what these were varied according to the time of data collection. The qualitative data provided more detailed accounts of students' perceptions of their skills and why they had changed over time.

This study makes a contribution in providing insights into the nature and practice of an experiential learning approach. The results indicate that the development of entrepreneurial skills can be improved by providing a learning environment in which students interact with real business people in live projects. They also indicate that entrepreneurship education programmes may be improved by scheduling skills training in a more structured and timely manner than typically occurs now. Students' perceptions of their skills declined substantially over the course of the projects, with some variations, suggesting that educators need to provide different and more timely learning interventions to cater for the specific needs of students working in live projects.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the idiosyncratic features of the adoption and institutionalization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.

This is a conceptual paper in which current theory on the institutionalization of practices within organizational fields is extended. This is achieved through considering how well established models of the institutionalization process accommodate the idiosyncrasies of CSR practices.

Established models of the institutionalization process do not properly account for the patterns of CSR adoption that are identified. This is because CSR has some features that differentiates it from other organizational initiatives, including idealism, delayed discovery of instrumental benefits, public attention, and the tension between public and private logics.

This is a conceptual paper which now needs to be explored empirically, either at the level of the CSR practice or at the organizational field. It is believed that a detailed examination is warranted of the effects of the truncated adoption process (a coercive bandwagon) on organizations' adoption of CSR practices. Neither has it been considered whether all categories of CSR practices are subject to the same dynamics or development path.

It is argued that prizes and regulations that are introduced before the organizational case has been worked through properly can have a negative effect on the adoption of beneficial practices throughout the wider field. Similarly, accusations of greenwashing of firms who implement CSR prematurely, and the negative publicity that results, can result in the valuable ideals of CSR being operationalised in a sub‐optimal form.

The paper offers a new conceptualisation of the path of the institutionalization of CSR practices.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Managers in firms fear for their own social and firm standing, and are therefore less able to change direction or admit mistakes unless shocked out of their intransience.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.