Search results

This article examines the leadership vision, values and vigilance of an emerging markets logistics firm in managing customer and humanitarian concerns and critical supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study explores how an emerging markets firm has contributed to global supply chain mobility and vaccine distribution in the pandemic – keeping cargo moving – drawing on vision, values and vigilance, including attention to the innovation momentum of the firm.

The article concentrates on an exemplar firm, leader and management team to illustrate challenges of helmsmanship during the pandemic for an emerging markets firm, Agility, that operates worldwide in numerous developed and developing economy markets. The article develops a case study analyzing how Agility has met the simultaneous challenges for innovation and transformation in the digital revolution and navigation through the crisis times of the global pandemic. The analysis derives from direct management communications, corporate documents and media sources.

The vision, values and vigilance of the leadership, with emphasis on digital innovations and disruptions, digital supply chains, humanitarian partnerships, focusing both globally and on emerging markets, and nurturing smaller as well as larger businesses, have enabled the firm to thrive. Given the importance of global supply chains during COVID-19, Agility is a pivotal example of partnering with governments and pharmaceutical companies worldwide in delivering the new array of vaccines, as well as personal protective equipment and other medical supplies, in the battle against the pandemic. Agility in addition illustrates the strategic value of partnering with other logistics firms in humanitarian collaborations as well as in business strategy transactions.

The article contributes to the emergent research stream on leadership, innovation and internationalization in the Arabian Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East North Africa (GCC/MENA) region and more generally on the strengths and proficiencies of emerging market firms and leaders. Future research could examine additional firms, industries or regions of the world during the pandemic or other crisis contexts. Further data sources and analyses can be used in validating and extending the findings.

Digital supply chains, humanitarian partnerships and an emphasis on digital communications, storage and transportation innovations can benefit firms from all regions of the world during the global pandemic and other crises, as well as in normal operations.

Emerging markets represent the majority of global population and economic growth, as well as of pandemic cases and mortality risk, signifying the importance of leadership, collaboration and innovation around issues such as vaccine delivery into emerging markets regions of the world.

The article takes a revelatory case perspective in the pandemic crisis context from a unique foundation of immersive field research and data access in the GCC/MENA) region.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence and advantages of leadership multiculturalism on global strategy development through cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) from emerging market multinational companies (EMNCs) expanding into emerged markets. The key contribution of asymmetric multiculturalism is a novel finding based on inductive research. We fill a gap by further linking business leader characteristics and corporate strategic actions and examining how multicultural business leaders from emerging markets can be highly effective at CBA and CSR.

The paper draws on in-depth interviews, observations and documentary evidence analyzed with iterative coding, construct definition and thematic development to understand how leadership multiculturalism affects CBA and CSR in an EMNC over time.

The new construct of leadership asymmetric multiculturalism describes strategic advantages accruing to leaders from developing markets who are culturally fluent in both emerging and emerged market milieus. The construct contributes to emergent research on the rise of multicultural leaders and their strategic advantages and delineates a pathway toward identifying advantages of emerging over emerged market business leaders.

The research addresses specific CBA and CSR strategies within one emerging market region and EMNC. Future research should further articulate and validate the key construct of asymmetric multiculturalism, further examine its sources, draw more explicit comparisons with data from emerged market leaders, and explore the applicability of these findings to strategic actions and advantages in both emerging and emerged markets.

Emerging market corporate leaders should identify and develop pertinent aspects of their own asymmetric multiculturalism in enacting CBA and CSR strategy with respect to EMNCs and firms from developed markets. Emerged market leaders should become more aware of and cultivate their own multiculturalism.

Asymmetric multiculturalism can be accompanied by heightened awareness of global citizenship — including codes of ethics, environmental challenges, community outreach and fair labor practices — which, in tandem with CBA, can strengthen emerging market firms’ performance and reinforce their global stature and reputation.

Asymmetric multiculturalism is a new explanatory construct in the sociological, economic and management disciplines. Emerging markets corporate leaders utilize their multicultural competence to accelerate global CBA and CSR activity and advance strategic opportunities for their firms. The identification of advantages deriving from emerging market leadership capabilities is an unusual finding given the more typical emphasis on the privileges of emerged market leaders and firms.

Merger waves have typically been viewed through the prism of either corporate strategy or macro-economics. This paper aims to broaden debate about factors that cause – or are associated with – mergers/merger waves over a 120-year period. It ascribes “personalities” to six distinct waves and draws an overarching conclusion about how merger architects are viewed.

Databases and interviews are used to piece together detail about CEOs associated with six distinct and recognized merger-waves during a 120-year focal period. The study establishes and defends, a priori, principles for interrogating data to get a sense of each wave-era’s corporate personality/idiosyncrasy. For each era, two exemplar CEO-profiles are presented and – through inductive-reasoning – held out as representative.

Distinct personalities are associated with six merger waves. Each wave is given a summary anthropomorphic description which conveys a sense that it may be viewed as the non-rationale expression of aggregate and historically distinct CEO behavior within a circumscribed timeframe.

The work’s key limitation – explicitly acknowledged – is that it amassed data/evidence from disparate historical sources. However, the authors have developed and defended principles for addressing this concern.

Improved investment analyses, in particular. The work prefigures formal establishment of a new variable-set impacting share-price prediction.

The paper offers a perspective on how psychological/personality-related variables impact management decision-making, creating something of a bridge between mostly non-overlapping research disciplines.

The paper broadens debate about how and why merger waves occur. It removes the exclusive analysis of merger waves from the hands of economic historians and strategic management theorists.

This study aims to fill a gap in the literature. The notion of giveaways/free has not been well addressed in management history literature and arguably is a valuable contribution in that it has a strategic dimension.

This paper is conceptual. It is a structured survey of ideas/opinions about the notion of “free” in commercial endeavor. The survey is organized largely from a historical perspective.

Several categories of “free” are delineated and placed into a historical and strategic context.

The work has strategic implications and lays out a new research agenda for management historians.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of three managerial ideologies on the degree of employment contract breach perceived in connection with a downsizing.

Surveys were used to collect data from southwest China. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to explore the impact of three managerial ideologies on the perceived employment contract breach in connection with downsizing.

Results suggest that a strong belief in the ideology of market competition reduces an individual's perception that downsizing constitutes a breach of the employment contract between employer and employee. By contrast, a belief in employee worth has the opposite effect, strengthening the believer's perception that downsizing constitutes an employment contract breach. Belief in the third ideology, the ideology of shareholder interest, appears to have no influence on whether respondents perceived downsizing as an employment contract breach.

The results are important for understanding the way employees interpret common business practices like downsizing. Given the accumulation of enough confirmatory results, findings from studies like this paper might be used to inform the practice of management, which might result in a more satisfied and better performing workforce.

This paper contributes to the literatures on organizational downsizing and business ideologies. Specifically, it investigates ideological beliefs and their effects on perceptions of downsizing in a new arena – a country that is not used to the concepts of market competition and shareholder interest, and one that has only experienced large‐scale layoffs in very recent times. The view of the western business concepts such as psychological contract within the context of traditional Chinese philosophies and value systems provides in‐depth understanding of the challenges facing today's transitional economies such as China.

The purpose of this introduction is fourfold: (1) to articulate the reasons for the special issue; (2) to highlight some of the fundamental issues related to the management research on COVID-19; (3) to introduce the authors and to summarize their contributions to this special issue; and (4) to provide some suggestions for future research pertaining to global challenges and business in general.

This article introduces the special issue by addressing the following four points related to the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) conceptualization of the crisis, (2) the role of organizations, (3) challenges of the global pandemic and (4) business–society relationships. We briefly relate the papers in this special issue to these four points and we conclude with some thoughts on how to move forward on research in this domain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be one of the most important challenges to mankind and to organizations in recent years, and many organizations have proven to be very resilient in the face of this. Effective leadership, communication with stakeholders, global organizations and new organizational forms such as cross-sectoral collaborations have all proven important in dealing with this crisis. They will also likely be important for dealing with even more serious crises in the future such as climate change and other challenges referred to in the papers in this issue.

This paper provides an overview and summary of the implications of the papers in this special issue. As such, its originality derives mostly from the originality of the papers contained in this special issue.

In this study, the authors draw upon 10 years of collaborative teaching and research as two, White, women literacy teacher educators to theorize the role of humanizing pedagogies within literacy teacher education and share explicit examples of how these pedagogies might be operationalized in actual classroom settings.

This study is based on 10 years of qualitative, teacher inquiry research on authors’ shared practice as literacy teacher educators and has included focus groups with students, the collection of student work and extensive field notes on class sessions.

Contextualized within decades-old calls for humanizing teacher education practices, this study puts forward a framework for teaching literacy methods that centers critical, locally contextualized, content-rich approaches and provides detailed examples of how this study implemented this framework in two contrastive teacher education settings comprising different institutional barriers, regional student populations and program mandates.

The proposed framework of critical, locally contextualized and content-rich literacy methods offers one possibility for reconciling the divergent debates that perpetually shape literacy teaching and learning. As teachers are prepared to enter classrooms, the authors model concrete approaches and strategies for teaching reading within and against a sociopolitical landscape imbued with White supremacist ideals and racial bias.