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The role and contributions of blue and gray collar employees in strategy making in practice are generally ignored, and left out of scientific inquiry. However, the authors argue that they are “hidden actors” in the strategy making process, and “silent heroes” of the strategy. Their participative role is generally seen limited to operational phases of strategy. Nevertheless, recent literatures have fruitful implications on blue and gray collars workers’ contributions in formulation phase. Upper echelon (Hambrick, 1987; Hambrick & Mason, 1984) and strategy as practice (SAP) literatures (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Whittington, 2006) are suggested to be closely scrutinized since the former has incorporated the middle- and low-level teams of management in the explanation (Carpenter, Geletkancz, & Sanders, 2004), and the latter takes “practice” as a prominent research perspective, and thus enable us to approach strategy phenomena from a wider context of practitioners, practices, and praxis (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2002). Overall, this chapter suggests that future studies could question the hidden assumptions behind strategy approaches to trace the assumed image and role of blue and gray collars in strategy making, and go further to integrate their deserved role in strategy process, content, context, and cognition.

Scenarios are cognitive aids for thinking about the future in a sustained and disciplined manner. Because scenarios must be facilitated, scenarios must be considered in the context of their practice. In the strategic management literature, there has been a considerable conversation on the practical difference between “hot” and “cold” cognition. Thinking in this conventional literature demonstrates how the facilitators of scenario planning workshops establish and channel the productive cognition of their clients away from hot cognition and toward cold cognition. But how? As a thought experiment, we examine whether the sociological concept of “emotional labor” helps explain the cognition management of clients by facilitators during scenario planning. We end by considering how a deeper practical understanding of emotional labor might help facilitators identify mechanisms and adapt their tools to better manage the cognitive-affective dimensions of scenario planning in practice.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

Building upon institutional pressures on firms to deal with corruption, this study aims to investigate the association between a firm's engagement with anti-corruption disclosure quality (ACD_Q) and earnings management (EM). Also, this study examines the moderating role of audit quality in the association between ACD_Q and EM.

The authors constructed an ACD_Q index based on the 2010 UK Bribery Act and taking into account a wide range of rules on corruption and bribery, including those of the OECD, World Bank, UNCTAD, UNGC, UNCAC and GRI. Generalized method of moments and panel regression were used to examine the association between ACD_Q and EM.

Using a sample of 2,695 firm‐year observations of the UK’s FTSE-350 from 2008 to 2018, this study finds ACD_Q is negatively associated with EM. In addition, this negative relationship is contingent on audit committee independence and audit committee expertise. This finding is supported by additional robustness and sensitivity analysis.

The empirical evidence reiterates the crucial need for more concerted efforts to ensure corporate engagement in anti-corruption practices with a view to reducing earnings manipulations.

This study contributes to the limited evidence that investigates how ACD Q influences EM in the UK after the introduction of the UK Bribery Act in 2010. Furthermore, by considering the period from 2008 to 2019, this study investigates the potential moderating role of UK corporate governance reforms in EM reduction. In particular, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study assesses for the first time the moderating effect of audit committee mechanisms on the ACD Q and EM nexus.

In this chapter, we reflect on cognitive aids and their role in strategy work. Strategy research and practice abound with frameworks, models, tools, and processes meant to describe and guide the strategy work of managers. These are all examples of cognitive aids. These aids guide and support managerial cognition, the way managers make sense of the world. What we collectively call the cognitive aids of strategy have a profound impact on the way managers learn about, conceptualize, share, and enact strategy work and strategies in their organizations. Despite the importance of their cognitive role, many cognitive aids in strategy are presented without reference to the underlying cognitive theory that explains why and how the aid might be useful. Tools are presented as useful for management thinking, but without any substantive reflection or exploration of the cognitive reasons. In this chapter, we provide a definition of cognitive aids in strategy and begin exploring the landscape of cognitive theories that can explain why something might be a cognitive aid. We then briefly outline the contributions to the edited volume “Cognitive Aids in Strategy,” and end with an invitation to expand your exploration beyond.

As one of the most influential theories in strategic management, Hambrick and Mason’s Upper Echelons Theory has yielded significant conceptual and empirical advancements linking executive characteristics and perceptions to decision-making. Specifically, work on this theory consistently shows that CEOs’ decisions are biased by personal characteristics to the benefit and detriment of firms. While this stream of research links executive decision processes to outcomes such as executive dismissals, analyst evaluations, and press coverage, surprisingly little is understood about if and whether the information CEOs convey is subject to the same filtering process by a firm’s key evaluators. Thus, in this chapter, we aim to extend Upper Echelons Theory by positing that a double filtering process occurs whereby the cognitive aids CEOs use can be informed by not only their cognitive base and values but also the characteristics and priorities of those who evaluate the nonverbal and verbal signals they send. To do so, we build on recent conceptual and empirical advancements to make a case for the decision-making biases and tendencies that influence signal interpretation by three key evaluator groups internal and external to the firm: boards of directors, financial analysts, and the media. We conclude by considering the implications of evaluators’ information filtering and how this more holistic view of Upper Echelons decision-making can enable executive teams to be strategic with the cognitive aids they use to influence evaluations.

Artifacts are rarely used today to visualize thoughts, insights, and ideas in strategy work. Rather, textual and verbal communication dominates. This is despite artifacts and visual representations holding many advantages as tools to create and make sense of strategy in teamwork. To advance our understanding of the benefits of visual aids in strategy work, I synthesize insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and management research. My analysis exposes distinct neurocognitive advantages concerning attention, emotion, learning, memory, intuition, and creativity from visual sense-building. These advantages increase when sense-building activities are playful and storytelling is used.

The study aims to investigate how enterprise information systems strategies-enabled strategy-making (ISS-SM) influences organizational agility (OA) via the mediated role of IT-enabled dynamic capabilities (ITDC) under environmental dynamism (ED). The study also investigates natural country moderation associated with the business context of the countries where the respondents are located might influence these relationships.

The study aims to investigate how enterprise ISS-SM influences OA via the mediated role of ITDC under ED. The study also investigates natural country moderation associated with the business context of the countries where the respondents are located that might influence these relationships.

The results demonstrate that ISS-SM influences ITDC to gain OA independent of the ED level. Indian and Brazilian firms show no different effects in the relationship of the research model. However, post hoc analysis revealed that strong ISS-SM on OA is fully mediated by ITDC under higher ED with a substantial coefficient of determination, more prominent for Indian firms characterized by young-age and middle-size firms, agribusiness and government sectors.

The fundamental to enabling practice and praxis of the strategy-as-practice approach to OA gains mediated through ITDC in different business context conditions.

The research contributes to extending the literature on the enterprise information systems strategy and information technologies capabilities.

The purpose of this study is to analyse historical events to argue the improbable prospect of radical accounting reform in corporate financial reporting (CFR) due to the absence of abstract accounting knowledge as part of accountancy professionalisation (AP).

A historical database of CFR and AP events in the UK is categorised and analysed to observe the evolution of accounting in CFR from the perspective of the sociology of professions relating to abstract knowledge in professionalisation.

CFR has always been a statutory function in the UK dependent on arbitrary accounting rules rather than expert measurements based on abstract accounting knowledge. Accounting rules have evolved as part of AP and currently form part of the statutory regulation of CFR. The accountancy profession has eschewed abstract accounting knowledge in a mutually beneficial and uncompetitive relationship with the law profession in CFR.

The study is limited to the history of CFR and AP in the UK and its findings are contrary to the sociology of professions regarding abstract knowledge, consistent with the accountancy profession’s 19th-century experience of court-related services, and indicative of normative accounting research’s redundancy.

Regarding CFR and AP in the UK, the accountancy profession is an expert subordinate branch of the law profession and has no incentive to alter the status quo of statutory accounting rule compliance prevailing over abstract accounting knowledge-based expertise in CFR.

The study questions the optimism of prior research of accounting in CFR that suggests the possibility of radical reform using abstract knowledge.