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The purpose of this paper is to continue and extend the ongoing conversation about greatness in American business.

This survey, conducted in 2021, replicates and extends McCormick and Folsom’s 2001 and 2011 rankings of the greatest entrepreneurs and businesspeople in American history. The authors’ pool surveyed 51 experts to develop an updated ranking and explore factors of greatness.

Henry Ford topped the ranking followed by John D. Rockefeller and Steve Jobs. Business scholars ranked Oprah Winfrey the greatest female and minority businessperson.

The authors extend previous research by surveying the authors’ expert pool about factors of greatness in American business history. “Ability to imagine or envision the future” ranked highest with “created wealth for shareholders” in last place.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

This study aims to explore the evolutionary trajectory of American corporations and their governance over the past few centuries, using a multidisciplinary investigative approach. The research focuses on the American business landscape because it has played a pivotal role in shaping the field of corporate governance theory and practice.

The author thoroughly investigates archival records, legal documents, academic publications, reputable databases and pertinent literature to unearth valuable insights into the key events that have influenced the evolutionary path of American corporations and their governance throughout history.

Delving into the evolutionary journey of American corporations and their governance reveals a multifaceted narrative, enhancing our comprehension of the impact of the external socio-economic environment, and the effectiveness and limitations of established corporate governance paradigms in addressing such transformations. This introspection establishes the groundwork for ongoing discussions concerning how corporate governance should adapt to meet the evolving needs and expectations of stakeholders and society as a whole, with a specific focus on the pivotal role that boardrooms could play in this regard.

The insights gained from this analysis offer practitioners a foundational resource to understand corporate governance in a complex business landscape. Armed with this understanding, practitioners can better align governance strategies with both historical context and contemporary requirements.

The research has significant social implications in the sense that history highlights the importance of the society in influencing corporate governance practices. It specifically emphasizes the need for the board of directors to consider both shareholder value and social responsibility, while also fostering public trust and confidence.

Many corporate governance concepts are often used with limited understanding of their initial intent, resulting in their unquestioned adoption. In this paper, the author offers a contextual exploration of historical events that have contributed to the development of these diverse corporate perspectives. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there are exceedingly few, if any, papers that present comparably insightful and multidisciplinary insights into the evolutionary path of corporations and their governance, especially within a dynamic and influential market like that of the USA.

Exploring how racism continues to persist throughout public and nonprofit organizations is central to undoing persistent society-wide injustices in the United States and around the globe. The authors provide two cases for identifying and understanding the ways in which philanthropy’s whiteness does harm to K–12 students and communities of color.

In this article, the authors draw on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, specifically Cheryl Harris' work to expose the whiteness of philanthropy, not as a racial identity, but in the way that philanthropy is performed. The authors characterize one of the property functions of whiteness, the right to exclude, as working through two mechanisms: neoliberal exclusion and overt exclusion. Drawing on this construction of the right to exclude, the authors present two cases: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the City Fund.

Whether intentional or not, the Gates Foundation and the City Fund each exclude communities of color in several ways: from changes to schools and districts, parents' experiences navigating school enrollment due to these changes, to academic assessments and political lobbying.

These cases provide a way for researchers and practitioners to see how organizations in real time reify the extant racial hierarchy so as to disrupt such organizational processes and practices for racial justice.

In 2023, the Leadership Pulse project will have been running for two decades. Since the inception of the program, we have engaged thousands of leaders around the world to quickly learn from them via short pulse surveys conducted multiple times per year. This chapter is the first overall discussion of what we learned during the last 20 years about leader energy, energy flow, predictors of energy, and outcomes of energy, which have been focused on individual and firm-level performance. Over the years, we learned that leaders are not immune to personal energy challenges; in fact, we find that their energy is continually tested by extreme demands within and outside their organizations. Also, we learned that there are solutions for helping leaders manage their energy better, and these do not have to be expensive, outsourced programs. In this chapter, we review key findings from the data and hope to help leaders continue learning to help themselves, their employees, customers, and the organizations they work in overall. I also will review three different interventions that we found to help leaders and employees work and stay at their best and enhance overall organizational goals and outcomes.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which using accounting as a multidimensional practice that encompasses technical, social and moral dimensions facilitates the instigation and advancement of a culture of sustainable development.

A qualitative approach was used to analyse the case of Waratah Coal Pty Ltd vs Youth Verdict Ltd – a dispute over a lease to establish a coal mine. The study draws on Carnegie et al.’s (2021a, 2021b) multidimensional definition of accounting and the Carnegie et al.’s (2023) framework for analysis to explore how different parties drew on accounting concepts to support their position over the sustainability of the mining lease proposal.

A multidimensional perspective on accounting appears to have clear transformative potential and can be used to champion a culture of sustainable development. This approach also has broad societal, environmental and moral implications that transcend Western financial metrics. This study shows that relying solely on accounting as a technical practice to pursue economic benefits can result in contested arguments. Overall, this analysis illustrates how the wider public, and notably First Nations communities, might challenge accounting methodologies that marginalise cultural and social narratives.

This paper expands accounting research by demonstrating how fully embracing accounting’s capacities can create a space for hearing multiple voices, including those silenced by Western accounting practices. Specifically, this study presents a unique case in which the authors incorporate the voices and views of those affected by accounting-based decisions.

The substantial cost of employee cyberloafing to organizations calls for research into exploring the factors that influence such behavior. Drawing upon social cognitive theory, the authors develop a theoretical model that unpacks when and why leader forgiveness induces employee cyberloafing. Specifically, the authors identify moral disengagement as a linking mechanism and employee empathic concern as a key boundary condition in the association between leader forgiveness and employee cyberloafing behaviors.

The authors conducted multilevel analyses to examine the authors' hypotheses by utilizing a sample of 71 supervisors and 306 direct reports.

Results showed that leader forgiveness encouraged employee cyberloafing via moral disengagement among employees with low empathic concern, whereas the indirect effect was not present among those with high empathic concern.

The authors contribute to the literature on cyberloafing and leader forgiveness. First, this study extends the cyberloafing research by considering leader forgiveness as an enabler, challenging the dominant notion that positive leader behaviors (e.g. leader mindfulness) constrain employee cyberloafing while negative leader behaviors (e.g. abusive supervision) elicit it. Second, although past studies have predominantly concentrated on the positive outcomes of forgiveness, the current research contributes to the balanced and comprehensive understanding of leader forgiveness by linking leader forgiveness with employee cyberloafing.