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The assumption of wealth creation as the dominant motive underlying entrepreneurial efforts has been challenged in recent work on entrepreneurship. Taking the perspective that entrepreneurship involves emancipatory efforts by social actors to escape ideological and material constraints in their environments (Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009), researchers have sought to explain a range of entrepreneurial activities in contexts that have traditionally been excluded from entrepreneurship research. We seek to extend this research by proposing that entrepreneurial acts toward emancipation can be guided by different notions of the common good underlying varying conceptions of worth, beyond those emphasized in the view of entrepreneurial activity as driven by economic wealth creation. These alternative conceptions of worth are associated with specific subjectivities of entrepreneurial self and relevant others, and distinct legitimate bases for actions and coordination, enabling emancipation by operating from alternative value system perspectives. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) work on multiple orders of worth (OOWs), we describe how emancipatory entrepreneurship is framed within – and limited by – the dominant view, which is rooted in a market OOW. As alternatives to this view, we theorize how the civic and inspired OOWs point to alternate emancipatory ends and means through which entrepreneurs break free from material and ideological constraints. We describe factors that enable and constrain emancipatory entrepreneurship efforts within each of these OOWs, and discuss the implications of our theoretical ideas for how entrepreneurs can choose among different OOWs as perspectives and for the competencies required for engaging with pluralistic value perspectives.

By theorizing choice as an information and decision problem, behavioral strategy research has not considered fully the agentic capacities of strategists. We argue that agentic capacities are distinct from decision-making and information-processing capacities as they rest on temporally anchored engagements with the world through habit, imagination, and judgment. We propose that understanding agency as temporally anchored action capacities is particularly important for research in behavioral strategy, as strategic phenomena encompass accumulated experience and path-dependencies (the past), ongoing competitive, market, and organizational interactions and exchanges (the present), and plans, visions, and forecasts for the future (the future). We outline how strategic choice and agency involve cognitive engagement in the three time horizons through distinct cognitive capabilities and the organizational processes that support them.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of ownership of community pharmacies on the perception of organizational identity and its relationships with organizational performance.

A survey was carried out on a sample of pharmacists working in community pharmacies in Portugal. The sample comprised 1,369 pharmacists, of whom 51 percent were owner-managers. Measures of pharmacies’ normative (community health oriented) and utilitarian (business oriented) identities, identity strength (clear and unifying), substantive (stockholder focused) and symbolic (society focused) performance were included.

Both owners and employed pharmacists rated the normative identity of pharmacies higher than the utilitarian identity. Compared with employed pharmacists, owners perceive a lower level of utilitarian identity, the same level of normative identity, and higher levels of identity strength. Normative identity and identity strength predicted symbolic performance. Normative and utilitarian identities and identity strength predicted substantive performance. The relationship between utilitarian identity and substantive performance was significant among owner pharmacists but not among employed pharmacists.

The limitations include the use of perceptive measures and the focus on the individual level of analysis.

In order to improve pharmacies’ performance, pharmacists who manage community pharmacies are challenged to reconcile tensions arising from the co-existence of business and community health identities and from their own agency (self-serving) and stewardship (altruistic) motives.

This study draws on institutional, identity and stewardship theories to understand how pharmacists, owners and employees, view the identity of community pharmacies and how identity relates to organizational performance.

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – composed of members in two or more countries who work together primarily using information and communication technologies – are increasingly prevalent in organizations today. There has been a burgeoning of research on this relatively new organizational unit, spanning various academic disciplines. In this chapter, we review and discuss the major developments in this area of research. Based on our review, we identify areas in need of future research, suggest research directions that have the potential to enhance theory development, and provide practical guidelines on managing and working in GVTs.

Strategic management research has shown growing interest in understanding the dynamic resource reconfiguration processes through which firms grow, evolve, and sustain profitability. The goal of our study is to understand how dynamic resource reconfigurations enable firms to pursue growth opportunities. We use the methods of inductive theory building from case studies to elaborate current theoretical understanding about how firms draw on both internal and external resources in the pursuit of growth. We examine the patterns of resource reconfigurations through which Yahoo and Google powered their early growth strategies in their first 10 years of existence. We analyze a total of 192 new product launches in 43 markets by the two firms to capture how they reconfigured resources dynamically. Our analysis reveals that both firms developed highly dynamic strategies exhibiting both surprising similarities and differences. These similarities and differences provided the basis for our theoretical insights about the development of what we term “dynamic resource platforms,” comprising of (a) dynamic resource shifts; (b) targeted resource orchestration; and (c) complementary processes balancing dynamism and capability development. These ideas contribute novel theoretical insights to current strategic management research on dynamic capabilities and on resource reconfiguration and redeployment.

Matt Bloom, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Management Department at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before receiving his doctorate he worked as paramedic, psychiatric technician, and then as a consultant for Arthur Young & Company and American Express. Matt's current research interests center on well-being at work and include exploring topics such as what work is like when people experience it as a calling and what conditions help people to be at their cognitive and emotional best at work. He is currently undertaking a program of research to study well-being among people in the caring professions.