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This paper aims to introduce eristic decision-making in entrepreneurship. A decision is eristically made when it utilizes eristics, which are action-triggering short-cuts that draw on hedonic urges (e.g. sensation-seeking). Unlike heuristics, eristic decision-making is not intendedly rational as eristics lead to decision-making without calculating or even considering the consequences of actions. Eristics are adaptive when uncertainty is extreme. Completely novel strategies, nascent venturing, corporate venturing for radical innovation and adapting to shocks (e.g. pandemic) are typically subject to extreme uncertainties.

In light of the relevant debates in entrepreneurship, psychology and decision sciences, the paper builds new conceptual links to establish its theoretical claims through secondary research.

The paper posits that people adapt to extreme uncertainty by using eristic reasoning rather than heuristic reasoning. Heuristic reasoning allows boundedly rational decision-makers to use qualitative cues to estimate the consequences of actions and to make reasoned decisions. By contrast, eristic reasoning ignores realistic calculations and considerations about the future consequences of actions and produces decisions guided by hedonic urges.

Current entrepreneurial research on uncertainty usually focuses on moderate levels of uncertainty where heuristics and other intendedly rational decision-making approaches pay off. By contrast, this paper focuses on extreme uncertainty where eristics are adaptive. While not intendedly rational, the adaptiveness of eristic reasoning offers theoretically and psychologically grounded new explanations about action under extreme uncertainty.

RATIONALISM VERSUS ERISTICS: At this stage in the development of my theme I need to introduce readers to a term which is unfamiliar to most of them. That word is ERISTICS; it fills a need which grows as one studies this subject more deeply.

Stakeholder paradigm has been gaining currency over the past few decades and technological breakthroughs have been influential in building its momentum. Hyper-Transparency is emerging as a building block and as an indispensable concomitant of stakeholder paradigm. The crux of a Hyper-Transparent organization is trust. The new paradigm requires substituting translucent and opaque business practices with fully transparent ones under which lasting trust can be built between the organization and its stakeholders. However, the nub of the stakeholder paradigm is the changes inside the organizations as well as changes in relation to their external environment, and transparency is both a driver and a resultant of these changes. Transparency is an integral part of corporate social responsibility debate and an eristic issue for the stakeholders. Moreover, Hyper-Transparency empowers the stakeholders to considerably influence the decision making sphere. In this chapter, transparency, its drivers and tools as well as the power of stakeholders in the new age of Hyper-Transparency alongside a number of case studies are presented.

In Phoenix 19 we traced the development of worker participation in Britain which took place between 1971 and 1977: eight traumatic years of unmitigated disaster for British management, progressively fighting a rear‐guard action, throughout the entire period, against the encroachment of the bureaucratisation and the politicisation of management. We pick up the story again at that point.

The objectives of this article are: 1 to give an overview of some basic ideas that were outlined in an earlier review paper by the author; 2 to bring it up to date by outlining the more important theoretical developments that have been reported since then; 3 to mention briefly some speculations arising from work in progress which has not yet been published.

The independent shopkeeper in France has always played a very important role, and historically they have been supported — if only in theory — by government intervention. Hypermarkets began to develop in France in the early 1960s and it was not long before their increasing share of total retail trade began to alarm the smaller operators. In 1973 the Loi Royer, which attempted to restrict hypermarket expansion beyond certain limits, was introduced. Has it had any effect? Or has the slowing down in hypermarkets in France has been due to a number of other causes? Steve Burt suggests that the law may not have had the restrictive effect that was expected. Any decline in the number of large units opened may be attributable to changing economic conditions and organisational trends.

An operating system utilises resources to transform or convert inputs into outputs in the form of goods or services. Conventionally operations management is defined as the task of designing, establishing, planning, running, controlling, maintaining and improving such systems. The identification of both goods and services as the output of such systems establishes operations management as a field of activity somewhat broader than production (or manufacturing) management which rests solely with the provision of goods or artefacts. However the distinction between goods and services is unclear and the latter category is broad and heterogeneous. It may therefore be worthwhile to have a more detailed definition, e.g. as follows — “An operating system is a combination of resources combined for the purpose of manufacture, transport, supply and service”; where these four functions are defined as below:

FOR many years most transport aircraft throughout the world have used a uniform windscreen construction with a single ply of tempered glass for pressure resistance, combined with a thick polyvinyl butyral interlayer and one, or more, thin facing ply glasses. The thick interlayer is usually reinforced at the edges with a metal insert and acts as a diaphragm to provide bird impact resistance, and also serves as a secondary load path to contain pressurisation in the event of failure of the primary glass ply. Installation of this type of windscreen is by conventional bolts, passing through the edge reinforcing metal insert.

Management style is associated with McGregor and his Theory X‐Theory Y, which he introduced in 1960. Comparatively little change in ideas about preferred styles took place throughout the sixties and seventies, once McGregor had established his approach, until around 1976 or so when social scientists began to look more closely into Japan's successful formula. As a result, one group of investigators claim to have identified an A style which grows out of American culture and a J style which grows out of the Japanese. These differ fundamentally in essential details and one new approach is to seek a hybrid style, known by the investigators as the Z style, which incorporates the best of both cultures. The terms A, J and Z, though not yet in wide usage, are beginning to creep into the literature and might eventually find their way into the manager's vocabulary, but in any case, the review of these new styles makes a valuable contribution to the study of management style. As seminar material this article is important in that it relates management style to the socio‐political environment.

It has been reported in previous papers that X‐ray studies of the magnetic iron‐nickel‐aluminium ternary system resulted in the discovery of a new phase α', as well as a complete change both in the ternary equilibrium diagram and in the explanation of the cause of the high coercivity in this system.