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This paper describes how “pre-market activities” shape the competitive context. Such activities are neglected in both empirical and conceptual studies of strategic management scholars. Thus, pre-market activities have not yet been covered in the concept of the “competitive context.” Pre-market activities let firms collaboratively prepare for industry transition; firms also collaborate in standard-setting and gathering a shared view of future competition. Therefore, pre-market activities also shape next technologies’ business ecosystems where product offerings are systemic in their very nature. The author takes a Hayek–Schumpeterian economic perspective. In other words, markets are taken as the processes of making, integrating, searching, and destructing knowledge. Such a perspective is applied to competence-based theory because competences are built on knowledge in a broad sense.

Business sustainability urges firms to simultaneously address economic, ecological, and social concerns. It innately combines different potentially competing organizational elements. Therefore, sustainability represents a suitable context for the study and practice of hybridity. Based on an understanding of hybridity as a continuum, in this chapter, the author distinguish between four different forms of hybridity for business sustainability, depending on the degree of integration and autonomy of sustainability initiatives in business organizations. With ceremonial hybridity, businesses only leave the impression to pursue business and sustainability goals but focus their practices on conventional business priorities. Contingent hybridity denotes an approach where ecological and social concerns are only pursued to the extent that they align with business goals. With peripheral hybridity, firms pursue sustainability initiatives in their own right but do not integrate them with core business activities. Full hybridity puts both business as well as sustainability at the core of the organization without emphasizing one over the other. These different forms of hybridity in business sustainability are illustrated with examples from various business organizations. By characterizing different degrees of hybridity in business sustainability, the argument and the examples highlight how organizational hybridity and business sustainability can fruitfully inform one another. The author develop research opportunities for using business sustainability as a context for studying different degrees as well as the dynamics of hybrid organizing and for using different degrees of hybridity for achieving a better understanding of different pathways toward substantive business contributions to sustainable development.

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.¹ I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.²

Purpose: The purpose of the chapter is to analyze the experience of managerial decisions in modern North American business systems, to develop an American model of decision making in modern business systems, to determine the possibilities of making of optimal decisions according to this model, and to substantiate the perspectives of its improvement.

Methodology: The authors use the methods of systemic, problem, and logical analysis, as well as modeling and formalization.

Conclusions: An American model of decision making in modern business systems is compiled – it is based on divisional organizational structure. This model is contradictory and, like other regional models, has advantages and drawbacks. On the one hand, an important advantage of the American model is making of well-balanced managerial decisions that conform to the interests of all interested parties in the business system (investors, management, employees) and beyond it (consumers, society). This advantage is achieved due to active and systemic marketing, which ensures the fullest consideration of the possibilities of business environment and high adaptability of business systems to its changes. Managers' readiness to take a risk allows them to make nonstandard decisions, thus strengthening the uniqueness and competitive advantages of the business system. On the other hand, high risk component of managerial decisions leads to unsustainable development of business systems in countries of North America and their strong susceptibility to internal and external crises. Another drawback of the American model of decision making in modern business systems is duration of this process due to necessity for consideration of opinions of all interested parties and marketing at all stages.

Originality/value: It is determined that in the conditions of crisis, the American model cannot ensure timely decision making, and this leads to their nonoptimality, which defines the perspectives of improving this model.

While extensive knowledge on branding and communication has focused on business-to-consumer context, despite the nourishment of the importance of strategic alliances between businesses in terms of co-branding has become discernible, a little attention has been given to business-to-business (B2B) context. This chapter tries to take attention to dual marketing communication, where they are trying to market their products and services to both individuals and businesses. More specifically, this chapter aims to emphasise ingredient branding as a form of co-branding considered as one of the revolutionary dual marketing communication strategies. Notably, the importance of ingredient branding is highlighted for industries and companies who have to design a strategic multi-channel communication plan not just for their customers but also for retaining the competitive advantage, increasing the brand strength for both sides and stimulating the sales. Further, this chapter elaborates the subject with prominent examples of ingredient branding, as well as explains how a communication strategy became an asset for manufacturers and suppliers who are in downturn and lead them to have a growth opportunity with maximising their brand values.

The prime goal of this chapter is to discuss what the notion of rhetorical citizenship as a normative aspiration might entail for corporations.

The chapter draws on a pilot study of the Facebook pages of two banks. A rhetorical criticism of these pages was conducted.

We suggest that while corporations are assuredly entities very different from the individual citizens who hold civil, social, and political rights – which do not directly apply to corporations – rhetorical citizenship is nevertheless a suggestive and constructive metaphor for corporations to communicate by.

Rhetorical citizenship for corporations must, we argue, be(come) rooted in organizational reality, and should involve a continued critical questioning as to what might constitute citizenly communication for corporations under any given circumstances. The chapter is, however, built on limited data from a pilot study and needs to be complemented.

We suggest from our pilot study that the active engagement of corporations in social media may currently be seen as one form of rhetorical citizenship that the public expects corporations to enact. Thus, we argue, corporations in general might as well attempt to do their best to act as rhetorical citizens.

The chapter highlights how communication is a set of practices in which social responsibility must be enacted. We find that this is not a prevalent perspective in the existing literature on CSR and communication.