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This paper aims to analyze the political background of the Hawthorne criticisms, positing that the political atmosphere of the 1940s, influenced by the decline of the new deal liberalism and the rise of the conservative coalition, stimulated scholars to challenge the Hawthorne studies.

Primary sources used in the guise of archival commentaries, journal articles and other published works (books and book chapters). Secondary sources are offered to provide additional insight and context.

The findings show that politics unnecessarily discredited Mayo. As a result, contemporary scholars failed to recognize Mayo’s work as an important part of the basis for modern management theory.

The purpose of the research is to look into the political context of the Hawthorne studies to understand how management practice and research is impacted by ongoing political issues.

To date, no work has fully accounted for or understood the political climate of the time in considering the criticisms of the Hawthorne studies. By more fully understanding the political context, scholars can reevaluate the weight they place on the then criticisms of the Hawthorne studies.

The purpose of this article is twofold. Its first objective is to bring to the fore the unexplored and neglected origins of social exchange theory (SET) to critique this body of conjecture. This unearthing is illustrated through focusing on the way the theory was developed and how this development was mischaracterised in literature. Its second objective is to invoke the methodological assemblage of ANTi-History and the “close reading” notion using multiple archival sources to demonstrate their usefulness within the critical qualitative method debate.

The historic character of management and organization studies is exemplified through utilizing a combination of textual sources to examine how SET emerged from within the human relations school of thought throughout much of the twentieth century. Specifically, an array of sources (including archival data) is deployed and closely examined to trace how SET formed and became prevalent in organizational studies over the last decades.

SET is not only indebted to the human relations movement in general and to Elton Mayo’s work in particular (as is well-known), but also to logical positivism and behavioralist-school psychology. As such, Homans’ work marked the beginning of a new era in organizational behavior research.

The article highlights the role of historical analyses in interpreting mainstream constructs in organizational behavior. In doing so, it reveals how critical qualitative research leads to understanding some shortcomings of a theory and indicates potential remedies.

The purpose of this paper was to analyse the academic context of the Hawthorne studies from 1936. More specifically, great attention was paid towards those articles that were critical of the Hawthorne studies. This study aimed to analyse why the Hawthorne studies were so criticized during the time period.

The author analysed various critical articles/books from the time period. The author developed the sample through the use of Landsberger’s Hawthorne Revisited. The author used one of the first critical articles, Daniel Bell’s, as a means to analyse the critics. In addition, secondary literature was used to place the articles in context.

The author found that the majority of the critics were sociologists; these criticisms reflected larger debates in sociology in terms of theory, method and ethics of research. They reflected the great changes that occurred in sociology during the time period, as opposed to industrial/organizational psychology, for example, where there was little criticism at the time.

The purpose of this study was to continue the work of Muldoon (2012) and Hassard (2012) and place the work of the Hawthorne studies in a larger academic context.

The purpose of this article is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Evolution of Management Thought (EMT), a critically acclaimed text in management and organizational studies for its value in historicizing the practice of management.

The authors asked Daniel Wren and Arthur Bedeian in their own words to their contribution. In addition, the authors offer commentary and critique of 16 leading management historians who share their reflections on the intellectual significance of Wren and Bedeian, and the punctuation of EMT as a canonical text in the field of management history.

The legacy of Wren and Bedeian can be felt across the academy of historical research on business and organizations. Their work has separately made significant contributions to management studies but together they have forged a fruitful partnership that has given rise to multiple generations of scholars and scholarship that continue to shape the field to this day.

The contribution of the authors in this article is to mark the significant milestone of EMT’s five-decade success by hearing from the authors themselves about their longstanding success as well as giving space to critique about the past, present and future of our collective historical scholarship shaped by Wren and Bedeian’s legacy.

This study aims to argue that opportunism is central to management thought and illustrate its evolution into a central element of the entrepreneurship theory. The authors show that many criticisms of opportunism tend to conflate the concept with other theoretic traditions.

The authors trace foundational works by Taylor, Mayo, Fayol, Barnard, Follett and Simon to limit opportunism under the guise of promoting cooperation in organizations.

Opportunism is conceptualized in transaction cost economics as one of the most controversial concepts in management. While modern management is based on handling opportunism, it is bad for practice, as it ignores innovation, and damages trust and goodwill among organizational members. These interventions serve as a knowledge filter, damaging organizational entrepreneurship.

By tracing the roots of opportunism in early management thought, the authors clarify ethical and entrepreneurial issues of mutual obligations in organizations. The authors also place workplace conflict to be a more coherent framework that better reflects the core concept of opportunism.

Using social relations theory, we argue that entrepreneurship ecosystems must also include relationships such as market pricing, equality matching, authority ranking and communal sharing to be successful and thrive.

We theorize using Fiske’s typology that a successful entrepreneurial system must have certain characteristics to be successful.

In doing so, we suggest an alternative perspective of the role of exchange relationships in ecosystems which considers both the geographic context and social relationships as equally important ecosystem components. Our contributions include (1) exposing social processes as the explanatory mechanism for exchanges instead of solely market forces, (2) illustrating the role of regional cultural differences in exchanges and (3) emphasizing how entrepreneurs can better realize ecosystem benefits through understanding the methods of exchange in these ecosystems.

Social relationships include a wide variety of different types of resources and exchange mechanisms, so by their inclusion into the entrepreneurship ecosystem literature, a more complete view of ecosystems is possible.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether job meaning and job autonomy moderate the relationship between emotional stability and organizational citizenship behavior.

In total, 190 supervisor-subordinate dyads completed three surveys. Linear and curvilinear analyses were used to assess the data.

Results indicate emotionally stable individuals are more likely to perform OCBOs in low autonomy and/or low job meaning situations than are employees low in emotional stability. Conversely, individuals who have high autonomy and/or high meaning jobs are likely to engage in OCBOs regardless of personality.

As a survey-based research study, causal conclusions cannot be drawn from this study. Results suggest future research on the personality-performance relationship needs to more closely consider context and the potential for curvilinear relationships.

Managers should note that personality may significantly affect job performance and consider placing individuals in jobs that best align with their personality strengths.

This study sheds light on factors which may have led to erroneous conclusions in the extant literature that the relationship between personality and performance is weak.

This paper aims to attempt to clarify differences between organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and attitudes as well as explore job dedication’s role regarding OCBs. Using social exchange theory, job dedication is hypothesized to mediate the relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX) and OCBs.

Hierarchical regression analysis was performed on data obtained from 190 supervisor/subordinate dyads from a number of firms to test the study hypotheses.

Results indicate that job dedication fully mediates the relationship between LMX and OCBs directed toward individuals and the organization, thus playing a role in the production of OCBs.

Due to non-employment of an experimental design, causality cannot be determined. If managers use signals to determine performance, then scholars need to conduct further research to determine what the cues are.

Managers need to spend time in determining and care whether what they are actually measuring is accurate in terms of spontaneous behaviors performance.

First, this study has developed an explanation as to how managers can use job dedication as a means to track the behaviors of multiple subordinates based on social exchange theory. Second, this study provides empirical evidence of the mediating role job dedication plays on mediating the LMX/OCBs relationship.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the role of trust and distrust in social networks within the entrepreneurial ecosystem and to develop a conceptual scheme of the impact of trust and distrust on productive and unproductive entrepreneurship.

This study develops a conceptual scheme, founded on the social capital and resource-based view of a firm, by exploring the impact of trust and distrust on entrepreneurial behavior in a social network.

As the paper indicates, trust within an entrepreneurial ecosystem has a positive impact on productive entrepreneurship, while distrust within the ecosystem is expected to be unproductive and destructive (or potentially illegal) to an economy.

The research implication of this paper is that it connects levels of trust and distrust within the ecosystem to the type of the behavior exhibited by entrepreneurs leading either to productive or unproductive entrepreneurial endeavors. As this study is based on the theoretical review resulting in a conceptual scheme, it requires further investigation of proposed interactions.

This paper offers strategic alternatives for entrepreneurs seeking to enhance future endeavors by strengthening trust within social networks for the mutual benefits of the ecosystem and businesses within it.

This study highlights the importance of two social constructs of trust and distrust in maintaining existing and developing future ecosystems. It also reviews potential outcomes of entrepreneurial behavior and their impact on economies.

This research examines both trust and distrust (two separate social constructs) as significant predictors of future outcomes in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that go beyond productive entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of competitive memory that assists the new ventures to overcome challenges due to the liability of newness in the strategic adaptation stage.

This is a conceptual paper. Through a critical literature review on new venture survival and organizational memory, the authors identified the possibility for new ventures to learn from other firms from organizational learning and resource-based perspectives.

The authors found that new ventures can acquire and analyze the existing rivals' strategic moves documented in multiple sources, such as published yearbook, financial report, media, etc., and develop their own strategies. New ventures can also benefit from the relatively high degree of organizational inertia of existing rivals.

New venture survival and performance are substantially affected by the initial organizational learning and strategic decision-making. Applying the memory-inconsistent strategy (MIS), new ventures that lack competitive experiences can learn from their rivals by internalizing the rivals' competitive memory as strategic resources and utilizing such resources to develop a competitive strategy.

New venture research in competitive markets focuses on the challenges and difficulties due to the lack of experiences, neglecting the fact that new ventures can learn from competitive memories of existing rivals. However, the lack of competitive experiences also means a lower degree of organizational inertia and other strategic commitments. The authors introduce the MIS and suggest that new ventures can benefit from strategic flexibility and create a temporary competitive advantage by surprising existing firms.