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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the changing of institutional logics in an established field shapes the developmental networks of high‐achievers.

This research combines time series analysis of more than 80 years of historical data (1922‐2004) with qualitative analysis of induction speeches of 99 hall of fame players from the same period.

Findings indicate that a change in field logics from a more staid “insular” logic to a market or more business‐oriented logic coincided with changes in key players' developmental networks. In particular, the key players' self‐identified developmental relationships become both more numerous and more diverse in nature. Results of the time series analysis connect the shift in logic with the late 1950s which was an important time in Major League Baseball's history. It was during this period that, for the first time, each team had at least one African American player on their roster and each team had an average of at least one full‐time scout based in a country outside the USA – both indicators of MLB's increasingly global search for talent.

The study focuses on extraordinary career performers (versus all performers) in an all‐male professional sport where the nature of the sport and the number of organizations remains relatively stable over time.

These findings show how changes to industry level logics can affect individual level changes in mentoring and developmental networks. In particular, they demonstrate how organizations can create and remove potential developer roles as their respective logics change from era to era.

This is the first known study to explore the effect of macro level changes on mentoring and developmental networks at the individual level.

This study focuses on intra-industry determinants of acquisition performance. Seven years of printed research on acquisitions from 10 top-tier business journals is categorized on the basis of R&D intensity – that is, per industry classification: high-, medium-, and low-technology – and determinants of acquisition performance. Instead of broadly generalizing acquisition performance determinants across industries, this study focuses on how the practice of enhancing acquisition performance is different per industry classification and what acquiring firms need to take into account.

The purpose of this study is to develop a model for business to business salesperson performance (SP) with a service ecosystems perspective.

To achieve the research aims, classical grounded theory was used. The data was gathered through in-depth interviews with 20 sales managers and main sales actors.

After coding and analyzing the data, salesperson institutional performance is introduced as a core category including three main dimensions of regulative, normative and cognitive-cultural performance. Multi-level factors determining SP are identified and performance results are introduced in a multi-level long term way. The sales actors, macro variables, actors’ orientations and sales method are introduced as circumstances, while salesperson stressors are presented as covariants deterring the fulfillment of salesperson’s activities.

This study focuses on the contributions of the salesperson in the alignment of institutional arrangements or the results of their being institutionalized, as well as determining the factors and variables affecting it.

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.

In this paper, the authors aim to look at the relationship between divergent national corporate social policies as embedded in corporate governance regimes and the development of the firm’s organizational capabilities. More specifically, the authors illustrate how the different systems of corporate governance developed in the USA and Germany are major resource-based factors on the decision to develop production-related organizational capabilities. The authors develop an integrative framework, drawing on both the corporate governance, as well as strategic management literatures, to explain idiosyncrasies and commonalities in capability development. In the aggregate, this would lead to differential corporate social and economic performance between Germany and the USA.

This is a conceptual paper that develops a framework to link national corporate social policy as embedded in governance systems to corporate social and economic performance.

Corporate governance systems – embodying divergent corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientations vis-à-vis the firm’s stakeholders – can be viewed as determinants of group-specific resources that will not be transferable across different nation-states, leading to divergent corporate social and economic performance.

The analysis emphasizes that CSR is an essential element of corporate governance. The authors highlight that regulatory, normative and cognitive institutional structures and orientations help to utilize and configure important firm-specific, industry-specific and country-specific resources and capabilities. This framework also contributes to recent developments in the corporate governance and management literatures that position CSR as a central element of corporate governance institutions.

In light of recent enthusiasm over African private sector development, the purpose of this paper is to review the business literature on African enterprise development with a view of identifying lacunas in the literature and of developing an analytical framework that may guide future research on this issue.

The paper provides a review of the extant literature on African enterprise development by juxtaposing the traditional pessimistic view of African business performance with more recent, optimistic accounts. Based on the literature review, lacunas in the literature are identified and an integrative framework for analysing African enterprise development is developed. The framework is used to provide an overview of the received literature on African enterprise development, to identify voids and lacunas and to identify new research agendas.

While a growing number of studies suggest profound improvements in the performance of African enterprises, data limitations, conceptual ambiguities and absence of comprehensive studies still cautions against sweeping generalizations. The paper reviews the literature on factors shaping the performance of African enterprises, observing that while much research is focusing on the role of the African business environments for enterprise development, much less attention has been devoted to the role of firm-specific capabilities, strategies and management. The paper concludes by advocating a contingency approach to research on African enterprise development that emphasizes the interplay between firm-specific factors and the specificities of the African business environment.

The paper provides a comprehensive literature review on African enterprise development and presents a novel framework for understanding African enterprise development from a business perspective.

F.A. Hayek’s famous critique of the socialist planned economy turned on the role of information in markets. In competitive markets, decision-making is decentralized and relies on locally available market signals. Decision-makers do not have to be omniscient or predict the future; they simply have to focus on market prices. By contrast, socialist planners face a much more demanding situation where they have to acquire and process vast amounts of information in a centralized fashion. The author revisits Hayek’s early work in light of the contemporary revolution in information technology, using recent research on organizational decision-making. The author argues that a great deal of market information is produced by public and private institutions, and includes much more than market prices. The boundary between tacit knowledge and formalized knowledge changes as IT enables the spread of the latter. Furthermore, the growing “knowledge economy” underscores the importance of intellectual property, and the legal institutions that support it. Overall, some of Hayek’s early insights hold up well while others need updating.