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Impact investment is an emergent field worldwide and it can play an especially important role in Africa. The aim of this study was to examine how impact investors in South Africa manage the tensions between financial returns and social impact.

The research was based on 15 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in the impact investment community in South Africa to understand the related challenges, trade-offs and tensions.

There are two opposing views expressed as to whether the tensions between financial return and social impact result in trade-offs. It is proposed that impact investors embrace this duality and seek to approach it through a contingency and a paradox view. The tensions can be approached by focussing on values alignment, contracting processes, engaged leadership and sector identification. The authors integrate the findings into a proposed framework for effective tension management in an impact investment portfolio.

This study was limited to selected South African interviewees. It would be valuable to extend the study to other African countries.

The issue of values alignment between investors, fund managers and investee firms is an important finding for practice. As is the four-part iterative framework for sensing the operating environment, defining impact, organising internally and defining the investment approach.

This study contributes empirical evidence to scholarship around organisational tensions, especially work in hybrid organisations. It affirms the value of a nuanced application of paradox theory. It examines these tensions through the lived experience of impact investing professionals in an emerging market context.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a model of leadership based on the characteristics of the most highly acclaimed leader in Jewish history, Moses. The lessons from his leadership that are applicable to modern corporate leaders are identified and related to management development and education settings.

This paper relies on a direct reading of books 2–5 of the Old Testament (see notes) to propose a model based on Moses’ leadership. Using Moses’ journey toward and during his leadership, a model for present‐day leadership is proposed. Examples are given to anchor this model in biblical texts and reference it to modern leadership thoughts, spirituality and practical wisdom.

While the leadership of Moses is known and widely discussed within Jewish learning, it has not yet found a wider, secular audience. However, Moses’ leadership characteristics present an opportunity to reflect on how creative tensions between different leadership traits could be reconciled and an ethical model of leadership could be applied.

This paper does not look beyond books 2–5 of the Old Testament for further supporting evidence of the leadership of Moses. Future research could broaden the model through these sources. Moreover, research could test the four dimensions of leadership proposed in this paper in contemporary contexts, with performance as a dependent variable.

Moses’ leadership has been discussed by theologists but this paper suggests drawing on it as part of the ongoing academic discourse on corporate leadership. The biography of Moses sheds a light on the formative experiences of an ethical leader and his actions demonstrate how such a leader can act under challenging circumstances. If further developed, this research promises to be a useful addition to current leadership thinking and management education.

The purpose of this paper is to address the paradox that individuals face in seeking to both generate new ideas and be committed to delivering standardised processes in a creative industry. The authors explore this tension in order to better understand how synergistic benefits are reaped at the intersection of these competing demands.

The paper adopts a longitudinal case study approach inside a global media organisation in the creative industries sector. Data derived from participant observations, manager interviews, administered survey instruments, and archival documentation.

The authors find that creative organisations experience explore/exploit paradoxes which are nested at three levels: knowledge, learning and motivation. Further, the authors find that managers are able to respond to competing tensions through organisational processes that allow differentiation/integration simultaneously. These management responses are supported and sustained by both structural and contextual organisational forms.

First, the authors provide a clearer theoretical explanation of paradox in creative organisations by accounting for competing demands to explore and exploit through nested tensions. Second, the authors extend the understanding of management responses to these paradox by showing how managers balance both demands simultaneously rather than cumulatively over time, thereby offering insight into how managers behave over time. Third, the authors outline the supporting role of organisational form in sustaining management responses within creative organisations at the same time in order to reap synergistic benefits.

The study aims to understand how practicing organizational performance evaluation (OPE) is related to the performance paradox (tensions between creative freedom and survival challenges) in “evaluation-hesitant” cultural and creative industries (CCI) organizations.

Mixed methods research, consisting of moderation analyses and unstructured expert interviews.

A conceptual model is developed to explain how creative freedom and survival challenges affect OPE in “evaluation-hesitant” CCI organizations.

The authors bring a new understanding to the factors that contribute to evaluation-hesitance in CCI. The paper contributes to discussing both the theory of paradox and flow theory in explaining the relations between OPE, creative freedom and survival challenges.

While audiences play a key role in the implementation and ultimate success of novel ideas, how audiences are reflected in negotiations about quality within the creative process remains undertheorized. We examine this question through a comparative ethnography of two settings where digital technology use magnifies the countless micro-decisions involved in producing a creative output and considerations of audience evaluation throughout the creative process – Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research. We find that actors encounter a fundamental tension between two competing standards of quality: the technically perfect, processed and ideal versus the empirically grounded, unprocessed and real. We show how actors navigate this tension vis-á-vis three different audiences – internal peers, extended community, and external reviewers – and how this manifests differently across audiences and the arts and sciences, depending on the audience’s expertise. Our study illuminates the tension between the “ideal versus real” in creative processes that is brought to the fore when creating with digital technology, extends extant research on audiences and organizing for creativity, and offers unique insights from our comparative ethnography across the arts and sciences.

The aim of this paper is to develop understanding of how open-access (OA) studios as creative social enterprises (CSEs) can negotiate coexisting creative, social and economic missions, and manage the motivations of stakeholders. In particular, it explores how this affects management practices and ways in which diverse social actors engage with the organisation and each other. This paper expands on the existing literature on social enterprises in relation to multiple value and stakeholder management and also contributes to the makerspace and wider creative industries literature.

This paper uses a qualitative, single-case case study of an OA studio established as a social enterprise based on analysis of secondary texts, interviews and observation.

It is identified that a multifaceted value system creates both challenges and opportunities in relation to communal resource management and community development. Tensions between the creative and economic priorities of members and both the economic imperatives of the organisation and its social mission are also highlighted. It is suggested that despite these challenges, the OA model presents an opportunity to develop more collective forms of creative practice and support a reframing of the creative economy.

As a single case study in the geographical context of the United Kingdom, limited generalisations on OA management in other countries can be made without further investigation.

There are practical implications for OA and other CSE founders in relation to resource and membership management and facilitating inclusive access. There are creative industries policy implications in the encouragement of more sustainable collaborative approaches.

This paper contributes to the literature on social entrepreneurship, makerspaces and the creative industries by developing the understanding of OA studios and CSE management and the internal dynamics that influence organisational and social outcomes.

Co-creation as a collaborative process between organizations and customers generates unique value for both internal and external stakeholders for the company. Research generally examines and portrays customer-company co-creation as a balanced and harmonious relationship. However, a successful co-creation strategy involves understanding the shared interests of the parties and resolving tensions between internal and external stakeholders to avoid co-destruction. This study aims to draw on the intersection of organizational behavior and marketing literature and to examine shared interests and conflicting tensions involved in the co-creation in the context of sports entertainment. This context allows the researchers to unpack and present a more complex process of co-creation that fosters co-creativity and innovation.

Based on a qualitative case-based approach of a major university in the USA, the authors draw on interviews and observations from their athletic administration and fans engaged in a men’s Division I team through an entire season.

This qualitative study illustrates an alternative, more complex dilemma of co-creating emotional and symbolic value based on shared interests while reconciling conflicting internal and external stakeholder interests. The findings suggest a tug of war based on tensions, where management adopted contrasting managerial strategies ranging from attempting to reconcile tension through organic co-creation to controlled manufactured creation.

Emotional and symbolic game experience value is an interdependent process which cannot be created without consumer engagement. Both emotional and symbolic values are enhanced during games to the extent consumers perceive participation in the creative pre-game stages.

This study draws on sports entertainment to identify sources of tension in co-creation and discuss type of solutions among internal and external stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the paradox inherent in the term “Creative Industry Management”. The challenges of applying creative industry experiences within a managerial context are explored through a careful selection of papers that identify linkages between creative industry practice and management theories.

The paper is a narrative commentary using the Jurassic Park franchise to highlight the potential application of management theory to explain the success or failure of a creative venture. The analogy of filmmaking and the creation of blockbuster movie sequels is useful in determining the tensions between creative production and management of a profitable franchise.

This paper identifies opportunities for theory building at the meso level in the management domain, born of the experiences of those in the creative industries. The papers presented add to the continuing discovery of ways of applying management theory in the creative industries. However, there remain opportunities for a cross-pollination of theory from the creative industry to management domains.

It is not possible to claim more than observation and exploratory inference from the selection of papers presented. The special issue has only uncovered one half of the theoretical perspective, namely management theory that can be applied in the creative industries.

The approach taken to liken the challenge of managing creativity to the production of creative works in moviemaking is novel and highlights the dearth of creative industry experiences that currently influence management theory.

This paper aims to present an original conceptual model that captures the orientations of new business founders in the fashion design sector as they navigate the tension between creative endeavour and business practice.

The start‐up experiences of 38 fashion designers from the four main fashion centres in New Zealand were examined using an interpretive narrative approach. The designers' enterprise development narratives were analysed using in‐depth literary and conceptual analyses to reveal the nature and context of their start‐up behaviour and the conceptual frameworks they employed to make sense of their start‐up behaviour.

The designers were, to varying degrees, preoccupied with a perceived tension between creative processes and business practices. This tension was typically experienced as a disjunction between self‐identity and the identities supported by the business models designers worked within. Successfully navigating this tension could require significant conceptual shifts or fundamental adjustments in business approaches which challenged designers' original rationales for start‐up. The analysis of designers' responses to the creativity‐business tension and how they made sense of this produced a conceptual framework, a space delineated by three basic enterprise orientations: creative enterprise orientation (CEO), creative business orientation (CBO), and fashion industry orientation (FIO).

This conceptual framework has major implications for policy makers and providers of design education and business support as it offers a means of differentiating between the lived‐in experiences of designers. In so doing it could be used as a tool for tailoring support more appropriately to designers' needs. The narrative approach produced rich, contextualised insights and a template for the further studies that will be required to establish the wider applicability of the framework.

The original conceptual framework presented here provides much needed insight into creative business start‐ups that will allow better targeting of education, support and policy development. The approach used to create this framework is an innovative example of how narrative and sensemaking approaches can be combined to provide rich insights into enterprise creation from the entrepreneur's perspective.

Festivals are conceptualised in this chapter as temporary organisations embedded in more permanent structures (e.g. festival lead organisation). Festivals face a series of paradoxical tensions common to temporary organisations in creative fields. These tensions arise, in part, from the diversity of actors involved in festivals and the distinctive values and priorities they bring to their festival organisational involvement. Lucca Comics & Games (LC&G), which is one of the biggest comic-cons in the world, operates in the intersection of different institutional contexts, which include a wide range of actors involved. Thus, tensions appear within the LC&G domain as a result of these actors’ different levels of involvement in the festival organisation and their diverse identities. These tensions and their resolutions will be analysed from the perspective of extant theory on paradox. A specific focus of this chapter is on the belonging paradox, which concerns the role of competing identities among different types of festival participants and how these competing identities are manifested in the organisational identity of LC&G, its structures and processes. Our study provides evidence of identity tensions as both/and relationships that are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. The authors also suggest that ‘place identity’ requires further examination as a distinctive feature of temporary organising in festivals, considering its role in mediating tensions arising from the belonging paradox amongst festival main actors (exhibitors, artists, public bodies and lead organisation employees).