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The purpose of this study is to create an ethical norm that will help guide the human race toward long-term survival.

The project posits a new societal ethical norm designed around a fundamental principle: the long-term survival of the human race with individual dignity. This study examines the requirements of the new norm and what is needed to achieve that goal.

There are three types of organizations that have the organizational and economic capacity to be responsible for future outcomes: governments, religions and corporations. These three types of organizations must act as if they have a moral compass that will compel them to develop and uphold the requirements for the survival of humanity with individual dignity.

The analysis shows that a new, broader ethical norm must be established, and this norm implies that large organizations must act with a future embracing ethical behavior.

This study generates specific pathways for example: governments should adopt the just war principles and prohibitions on governments or other institutions from teaching any form of class superiority. These and other pathways are designed to diffuse threats to the fundamental principle.

The fundamental principle includes universal human dignity. This means that the notion of individual dignity must be defined or understood, and the requirements to attain this goal must be identified.

This project takes concepts from long-termism, forward-looking collective responsibility, corporate social responsibility and the global catastrophic risk institute to advocate for a new ethical norm.

After completion of the case study, the students would be able to comprehend the crisis at hand for Milkbasket, why did it resist Reliance’s takeover in the first place, then to evaluate the pros-cons and future prospects for the organization post-acquisition; to evaluate from an ethical standpoint the process of mergers and acquisitions using ethical frameworks to understand how, when, to whom and through what processes do mergers and acquisitions qualify the test of being ethical; and to analyse different hostile takeovers, especially through tender offers, proxy contests and toehold bidding strategy in this case.

Founded in 2015, Milkbasket was a micro-delivery start-up based in Gurugram (near New Delhi), India. Milkbasket would let its subscribers order till midnight and deliver groceries, milk and other everyday essentials to its subscribers before 7 a.m. next day. It had burnt a lot of cash and was facing difficulty in getting investors; as such they were engaged in discussions with many companies. Two of them – Reliance Retail Venture Limited and BigBasket – were not accepting the proposed valuation, but Milkbasket got term sheets from other two companies.

This case study can be used for graduate courses on strategic management, business ethics and corporate governance. This case study can also be used in corporate finance course to highlight the importance of making ethical/responsible judgements to protect stakeholder interests.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

In international business (IB), the discussion of COVID-19-related global value chain (GVC) models driving resilience has taken momentum since May 2020. The purpose of this study is to uncover insights that the pandemic provided as a unique research opportunity, holistically, revealing the significant role of non-lead firms in GVC outcomes and resilience. This allows to extend theory as the authors critically identify impact criteria and assess interdependence and valence, thus progressing the traditional (pre-pandemic) IB view of GVC governance and orchestration.

This study opts for an integrative review to help create a much-needed extension of IB theory by means of a critical perspective on GVC theory. The authors examine the extant body of IB literature as the relevant stock of collective IB knowledge prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, uncovering contributions – with a focus on the role of non-lead firms in orchestration and resilience – that allows to clarify what was not evident pre-pandemic. With this, the authors move the theory from its efficiency focus to a better recognition of the interdependencies of power and profit outcomes stemming from asymmetries of interrelationships. By design, the authors focus on the unique research period of the pandemic and orchestration complexities along the development of configurational arguments beyond simple correlations (Fiss, 2011), revealing key dependencies as key themes. The authors highlight further research avenues following Snyder (2019) that are called upon to strengthen that understanding and that helps extend theory.

This research provides a critical perspective on the application of the traditional IB views for GVC governance (designed for efficiency, cost and proximity to markets with pre-dominance for just in time), which has shifted during the pandemic to accommodate for adaptation and adjustment to resilience and just in case considerations. The holistic review reveals not only the key country- and multinational enterprise (MNE)-dependencies with residual impact determining the balance between just-in-time and just-in-case. Also, the authors advance the understanding of the (un)balance of the traditional GVC – focused on just-in-case rather than just-in-time through a lead and non-lead GVC participation and power lens yet rarely observed. The authors find that governance should not be construed as “management” such that it resolves into decisions undertaken in lead firms for execution in subordinate GVC participants. Autonomy allows to subsidiary units by MNE lead firms and/or exercised by (mainly, innovative) non-subsidiary GVC participant firms, is uncovered as a key driver in this. Greater delegation capacity appears to help provide resilience to loss in profit, with a recognition that there may be a dynamic trade-off between power and profit. In addition, the authors are able to identify correlations with innovation, demand elasticity, digital uptake, investment and other, that the authors trust will set the scene for additional research deepening and extending the findings.

Integrative literature reviews include a problem formulation (i.e. that is limited to published topics around an emerging theme) and are hence very focused in nature and approach. This applies to this paper. Data analysis in this method is not typically using statistical methods in contrast to meta-analyses. Also, the authors limit the sample to a relatively short time period with 33 publications analysed, purposefully focusing on the most prompt and “acute” insights into GVCs during the pandemic.

The traditional GVC governance model is designed for efficiency, cost and proximity to markets with pre-dominance for just in time. The authors reveal dependencies that are instrumental to better understand lead and non-lead interaction and relative autonomy, with a focus on residual impact determining the balance between just-in-time and just-in-case that, if in the sought equilibrium and agile, can allow alignment with context and this resilience. This paper specifically provides practical insights and visualization that highlights stages/“ripple” effects and their impact and the questions to ask as stakeholders look for GVC resilience. This includes, int.al., firms and their role as strategic agents, prompting participants through the learnings from exogenous shock to realign their strategies, redistributed manufacturing of production across subsidiary and non-subsidiary non-lead firms, greater competition and hence power for suppliers leveraging resilience and innovation, greater understanding of localization and regionalization of production of essential supplies, interaction with governments, and of investment impacts abroad especially to secure GVC participation.

The insights provided through this extension of theory with its literature review reveal the importance of aligning IB research into GVCs to factors that became visible through alternative or unusual settings, as they have the power to reveal the limitations of traditional views. In this case, a mainly efficiency-led, just-in-time focused GVC governance model is reviewed through the literature that emanated during the pandemic, with a critical perspective, which helped uncover and underline the complexities and evolution of GVC governance, providing fundamental support to solutioning the continuing global supply chain challenges that started as a result of the pandemic and are yet again accelerated by the Ukraine and Middle Eastern wars and its impact with, int.al., concerns over possible severe global food, labour/migration and resources crises. IB holds a social responsibility to help identify critical challenges from the disciplinary perspective and help advance resilience for social benefit.

This paper supports the original IB theory development by extending GVC theory into the lead – non-lead dynamics that may, under certain conditions, provide a “Resilience wall” for GVCs. The value created through insights stemming from a unique period of time for GVC is significant. It allows us thus also to pave the way to an emerging and critical research adaption looking into equilibrium, nuancing demand elasticity, better understanding trade and investment impacts along GVCs and more. By examining views on the sources of pandemic risks in a possibly unique setting, the authors offer added value from extant IB research insights by combining them, revealing the importance for GVCs to investigate not only key dependencies between the exogenous shock, i.e. context, and the impacts assessed through this literature but to further use their inherent value to create a framework for further conceptualization and extension of the traditional IB view on GVC governance. This work illustrates the urgency and importance for IB to take a timely and possibly more critical approach to the investigation of governance models that have, to date, shown some significant limitations.

Wars, and violent conflicts generally, can generate significant institutional dynamics and new legitimacy pressures for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature or source of institutional pressures facing MNEs in war and to examine how MNEs respond and navigate these institutional pressures.

This is a conceptual paper.

Through the theoretical lens of institutional theory and drawing on insights from the devastating Russian–Ukrainian war in Europe, the study provides a framework that explains the nature of institutional pressures impacting MNEs in a major war conflict and how MNEs respond to these pressures. Central to the framework is the impact of formal and informal institutions on MNEs during war. As a result of regulatory and social pressures, MNEs have to make important strategic decisions either to protect their legitimacy or to defend their economic objectives against institutional demands.

As the paper situates the pressures of war for MNEs in a formal and informal institutional context, this offers a new approach to understanding the costs and pressures of war on MNEs.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The purpose of the article is to examine whether, if Bernays can be cast as “Dr Jekyll”, the personification of “good”, respectable public relations, and Goebbels as “Mr Hyde”, “evil”, disreputable propaganda, a comparison of their writing and work provides an insight into public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda or rather adds weight to the conclusion that both are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”.

A comparative analysis of writings and work of contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, gathered from original documents, speeches and interviews from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, as well as secondary academic and historical sources, was carried out. The analysis of their views on propaganda and “public relations” was organised using the point-by-point method.

The findings support the conclusion that both activities are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”. For Bernays and Goebbels, public relations and propaganda were always self-advantaging communication that drew attention to the positive values and behaviours of the interests they represented and masked the negative ones.

There are striking parallels between contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, including working in public opinion management for their respective governments and embracing propaganda as a means of “engineering consent”. Yet, while Bernays has been lauded as the “father of public relations” and “the PR profession's first philosopher and intellectual”, Goebbels is remembered as a “master manipulator”, “probably the most overt and arguably the most important, exponent of propaganda in history”. To the researcher's knowledge, there are no other point-by-point analyses of their work with a view to distinguishing public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s social balance theory is an important theme in many of his books, particularly The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Economics and the Public Purpose. Galbraith’s social balance theory states that forces driving private consumption in an industrial society will outpace the development and provision of public goods and services with consequences on the well-being of society (Stanfield, 1996, p. 49). The theory leads to several questions: (1) What is the specific relationship between private and public goods and consumption? (2) What is optimized with social balancing? (3) Does the relationship between private and public goods change over time? and (4) How do we evaluate the types of public goods we need? This chapter explores these questions and examines the type of public goods we need today to serve our communities better. For example, police presence and activities in many minority communities are now viewed negatively, as evidenced by the “defund the police” movement. Conversely, some have advocated for greater public spending on community mental health programs and new initiatives to deal with racism in communities.

This chapter examines the difficulties teachers currently face while attempting to teach toward more justice, more equity, and more healing in an increasingly challenging political climate. The author explores how Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been used by activists and politicians on the far right to shut down good faith debates about what students should learn about race in America and in the teaching of American history. The author suggests how progressive educators and teacher educators can best respond in this political moment and reclaim the debate over our shared values of freedom, justice, and democracy.