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The purpose of this paper is to address the decreasing role of professional associations in governing the work of entrepreneurial, knowledge-intensive professions such as management consulting. It presents the example of an alternative path to traditional professional regulation. This organic professionalization path is introduced through the concept of dispersed institutional entrepreneurship.

The paper builds on an in-depth qualitative investigation of professionals in the intercultural industry combining physical and digital ethnography in a multi-modal investigation.

The findings illustrate how an ideological divide within the professional community prevents an emergence of the traditional, association-led professionalization path. Instead, the investigated community follows an organic, bottom-up route, with competing individual entrepreneurs developing converging strategies and products. This process is labelled dispersed institutional entrepreneurship.

The findings indicate that current views on professionalization need to reconsider admission criteria and the professionalization paths that are generally assumed. Further research could focus on investigating organic professionalization paths among other professional groups.

With an in-depth qualitative investigation of an aspiring professional community this paper contributes to an ongoing discussion on the process of professionalization. The findings show that independent agents’ efforts could be at the centre of the process. They can prevent the professional association from leading the professionalization project while enabling the organic development of synergies across the community.

This chapter presents the principal interpretations that took place in Denmark and Sweden regarding the discourse on ‘Diversity Management’. We organise our presentation around three major themes that are central to the local Scandinavian context: gender equality, migration and moral grounds. This chapter shows the important role of gender equality work practices and how these practices now tend to be progressively incorporated in a broad Diversity Management construct, possibly leading to a less radical stance. Moreover, the comparison between Denmark and Sweden reveals the political associations with Diversity Management and migration in Denmark, but not in Sweden. Our third contribution unveils the tensions between the value of equality, which remains strong in the Scandinavian welfare state model, and the actual practices of Diversity Management.

This study aims to respond to repeated calls for more process-focused research on effectual entrepreneurship. It illustrates how effectuation takes place, particularly through gaining the commitment of actors with diverse resources, knowledge and needs in a context characterized by power disparities. It illuminates the ethical concerns faced by effectual entrepreneurs and the impact these concerns could have on the service design.

The qualitative investigation involved in-depth interviews with 30 intercultural trainers-entrepreneurs delivering repatriation training in the context of international assignments. The authors supplemented primary data with the analysis of training and promotional materials.

The authors identify four key elements of the effectual process, in which entrepreneurs aim to elicit commitment while reconciling potentially conflicting demands of the actors involved: surfacing needs; value framing; co-creation; and joint affordable loss. The authors show how the acquisition of commitment has a consequential impact on subsequent steps of effectual entrepreneurship. The authors highlight how the interdependence of entrepreneurs, their services, clients and end-users impacts the availability of means and goals. More importantly, the authors also demonstrate how resource dependence, knowledge disparities and power imbalance between actors partaking in effectual entrepreneurship can lead to numerous ethical concerns and result in suboptimal service designs.

This study demonstrates the dark side of effectual entrepreneurship in a resource-constrained environment. The authors show how power disparities and resource-dependence can lead to ethical dilemmas and inferior service designs, where entrepreneurs follow the lead of influential and resource-abundant stakeholders at the expense of the end-users.

This paper aims to focus on the phenomena of negative brand relationships and emotions to evidence how such relationships transpose into the willingness to participate in collective actions in anti-brand communities.

An online survey was carried out, targeting Facebook anti-brand communities, dedicated to sharing negativity toward technology products. A total of 300 members of these communities participated in the study.

The study shows that the two dimensions of negative brand relationship (negative emotional connection and two-way communication) lead to community participation in anti-brand communities, through the mediating role of social approval and oppositional loyalty. Anti-brand community growth is supported by members’ intentions to recommend the group and is the result of their participation.

The study’s focus on technology brands calls for further research on other brand types and categories and the inclusion of other independent variables should be considered to extend understanding of collective negativity in anti-brand communities.

The paper provides insight to brand managers on the ways to manage negativity around their brand online and understand the role that brand communities play in this process.

The paper proposes the first integrative view of brand negativity, encompassing emotions and behaviors of consumers as individuals and as members of a collective, which allows the understanding of the dynamics of anti-branding and highlights the mechanisms that facilitate anti-brand community expansion.

Concepts equip the mind with thought, provide our theories with ideas, and assign variables for testing our hypotheses. Much of contemporary research deals with narrowly circumscribed concepts, termed simple concepts herein, which are the grist for much empirical inquiry in the field. In contrast to simple concepts, which exhibit a kind of unity, complex concepts are structures of simple concepts, and in certain instances unveil meaning going beyond simple concepts or their aggregation. When expressed in hylomorphic structures, complex concepts achieve unique ontological status and serve particular explanatory capabilities. We develop the philosophical foundation for hylomorphic structures and show how they are rooted in dispositions, dispositional causality, and various mind–body trade-offs. Examples are provided for this emerging perspective on “Big concepts” or “Big Ideas.”