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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.

As the world approaches the year 2020 – which has been the most looked-forward-to years since the Millennium, offering as it does the opportunity to use “20:20 vision” as a descriptor – it is perhaps useful to look back over those 20 years to understand how far sustainability and environmental concerns have developed with regard to business strategy. While these concerns were prevalent at the turn of the century, they were not mainstream in terms of how they were dealt with by firms, and there was considerable difference in how firms treated them depending on where they were based, how big they were and how it fed into their overall corporate strategy.

The briefing saves busy executives 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.

This paper explores how legacies of past logics spawn variation in the institutional landscapes of different geographic regions in China. Of particular interest is how this variation influences the ways that actors interpret and respond to broader societal and world society pressures. Employing a cross-level comparative research design, we examine the enduring legacies of previous state logics, which have given rise to distinctive material and symbolic resource environments in different regional communities across China. To the extent that institutional contexts direct the attention of actors toward particular environmental stimuli and provide the symbolic and material resources to respond, a better understanding of how contexts differ provides more accurate causal explanations of the variability of organizational behavior. We explore this phenomenon in the context of recent government-mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in China. Our examination of public and private CSR initiatives, along with the CSR activities of a sample of 714 listed Chinese companies, suggests that legacies from past state logics become embedded in local institutional infrastructures and shape how abstract, multifaceted CSR initiatives are interpreted and implemented.

Scholars typically view cross-legacy boundary spanners – employees who develop and maintain social relationships with coworkers from both legacy organizations – as the key integrators in mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Organizations even formally appoint employees with cross-legacy responsibilities to support the post-merger integration process. Recent research has started to emphasize, however, how difficult it can be to reap the benefits of a boundary-spanning position. Building and maintaining formal or informal boundary-spanning ties is costly because it requires time, attention, and political savviness. To better understand the perks and pitfalls of cross-legacy boundary-spanning, the authors identify and describe its structural and sociocultural dimensions and explain how they influence cross-legacy boundary-spanning in M&A contexts. The authors argue that the two dimensions can be seen as boundary conditions to the positive relationship between cross-legacy boundary spanning and post-merger integration. This chapter highlights the potential dark side of cross-legacy boundary-spanning and proposes a multi-dimensional model to explain how cross-legacy boundary spanners can avoid the pitfalls and promote the perks of their position in support of successful post-merger integration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what it means to be resilient in the context of environmental turbulence, complexity, and uncertainty, and to suggest how organizations might develop strategic resilience.

Sampling from the theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of resilience within the management and organizational literatures, this conceptual paper presents a model of strategic resilience and theoretical propositions are developed that suggest directions for future research.

It is proposed that strategic resilience is an emergent and dynamic characteristic of organizations whereby organizational legacy is a defining antecedent, top management team future orientation is a fundamental belief system, and problem formulation is a key deliberate process.

Although the conceptual inquiry of strategic resilience offers clarity on a complex phenomenon, empirical evidence is needed to provide a test of the concepts and their relations.

By asserting that the environment is turbulent, complex, and uncertain, this paper opens up new possibilities for the understanding and study of strategic resilience, whereby metamorphosis and innovation are requisites, and entrepreneurship is part and parcel of strategy. As such it highlights the importance of managerial beliefs and behaviors that facilitate proactively and deliberately challenging of the status quo.

The proposed conceptualization of strategic resilience in this paper connotes action rather than just reaction, and in so doing highlights the importance of the synergy between strategic management and entrepreneurship. As such, it proposes factors that may help organizations persist and create value within a context and future that they themselves also shape.

This paper aims to examine the barriers to the environmental sustainability practices of large-scale mining companies throughout a mine lifecycle, analysed in the context of the plural and competing logics and tensions in the broader institutional environment.

The paper used a qualitative methodology based on multiple cases involving multinational mining companies, regulators and other major stakeholder groups, as it offers an opportunity for analytical generalisations where the empirical results are compared to previously established theories.

The empirical results indicate that the environmental sustainability barriers are embedded within gaps in Ghana’s natural resources governance framework. The gaps arise out of contradictory interests and values, which hinder the direction and practices of large-scale mining companies.

The findings may only apply to the context of this study and is inadequate as the basis for assessing the effectiveness or otherwise of specific initiatives of large-scale mining firms in Ghana.

This study have implications on how large-scale mining companies and their stakeholders define their values and goals, and engage in a dynamic process to accommodate the multiple and competing logics by implementing effective structures at the organisational and institutional levels.

This paper contributes to the sustainability and institutional complexity perspective by showing that plural logics are often contradictory, but may also be complementary in situations of complicit commonality, hindering sustainable outcomes. The authors argue that this is one of the few studies that have examined the barriers to environmental sustainability explicated in the context of institutional complexity.

We review previous research on intergenerational conflict, focusing on the practical implications of this research for organizational leaders. We explain how the interaction between the interpersonal and intertemporal dimensions of intergenerational decisions creates the unique psychology of intergenerational decision-making behavior. In addition, we review the boundary conditions that have characterized much of the previous research in this area, and we examine the potential effects of loosening these constraints. Our proposals for future research include examination of the effect of intra-generational decision making on intergenerational beneficence, consideration of the role of third parties and linkage issues, investigation of the effects of intergenerational communications and negotiation when generations can interact, examination of the role of social power in influencing intergenerational interactions, investigation of the interaction between temporal construal and immortality striving, and exploration of the ways in which present decision makers detect and define the intergenerational dilemmas in their social environments.

Given the current ecological state of the planet organizations now need to develop their sustainability to a significantly greater extent and at a faster pace. This paper aims to propose stakeholder collectives as a means for rapid and comprehensive sustainability, while also examining the moderating influence of firm size and change potential.

A theoretical analysis leads to the development of multiple propositions. The work concentrates on one research question: how can the authors bring about rapid and comprehensive organizational sustainability?

Arguments for the inability of individual stakeholders to drive the level of sustainability now required are presented. Propositions suggesting that sustainability can be obtained through stakeholder collectives, moderated by firm size and the change potential of the firm are developed.

Research using stakeholder theory has examined intra-stakeholder group collective action, but arguably the more important, inter-stakeholder group collective action, has received little attention. The authors elaborate the prospects for collective stakeholder influence strategies as useful for increasing sustainability.

The main contribution is the nexus between stakeholder influence strategies and the collective goal of sustainability. By examining an underdeveloped component of stakeholder theory, the authors answer the question how stakeholders can drive the extensive and rapid organizational sustainability now required.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Mobilizing a theoretical framework combining institutional logics and “imprinting” lenses, this paper provides an in-depth contextualized analysis of how historical imprints affect social and environmental reporting (SER) practices in Romania, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe.

The authors conduct a qualitative field study with a diverse dataset including regulations, publicly available reports and interviews with multiple actors involved in the SER field in Romania. The authors follow a reflexive approach in constructing the narratives by mobilizing their personal experience and understanding of the field to analyze the rich empirical material.

The authors identify a blend of logics that combine local and Western conceptualizations of business responsibilities and explain how the transition from a communist ideology to the free market economy affected SER practices in Romania. The authors also highlight four major imprints and document their longitudinal development, evidencing three main patterns: persistence, transformation and decay. The authors find that the deep connections that form between logics and imprints explain the cohabitation of logics rather than their straight replacement.

The paper contributes by evidencing the role of imprints' dynamics in the institutionalization of SER logics. The authors claim that the persistence (decay) of imprints from a former regime such as communism hinders (facilitates) the institutionalization of Western SER logics. Transformation instead has more uncertain effects. The pattern that an imprint takes hinges upon its usefulness for business interests.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the external and internal factors that contribute to assimilation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in the organization through the processes of adapting, routinizing and institutionalization of technology.

This research follows qualitative interpretive approach. The results produced in this paper are based on thematic analysis of responses from open-ended interviews with ERP stakeholders in large size Australian organizations. The research findings have been further triangulated with surveys and content analysis.

This research is still in progress; therefore, this paper presents the results of the field study conducted so far along with the instrument used to collect data. This instrument consists of a list of selected questions based on the thorough review of current information systems literature. However, the major finding of this study, thus far, is that the ERP implementation is a process of aligning technology with organizational, social, cultural, economic, technical, and other organizational environmental institutions.

The major research limitation of this study is that it is still in progress, therefore, the results reported in this paper are emergent and not complete. Another limitation of this paper is that it is Australian specific; therefore, the generalizability of the results in other settings cannot be ascertained. Nevertheless, this research contributes to the ERP implementation literature by applying a stage-based model which takes into account the pre-implementation, implementation and post-implementation stages of ERP assimilation into an integrated structure.

This research concludes that ERP assimilation is characterized and shaped by mutual interactions of various organizational, social, cultural, environmental, and other institutional factors. The research framework developed in this study may be mastered as a decision-making tool by business manager to guide the organization through various stages of ERP institutionalization.

Institutionalization of ERP technologies is a recent phenomenon and this field is far for being matured. This research is based in Australian settings where they have been no previous study of institutionalization of technology.