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Executives exert a pervasive influence on the organizations they lead. As such, scholars have long considered how to calibrate the risks inherent in executive decision making, often relying on incentives and compensation to calibrate executive risk behavior. However, there are shortcomings that reduce the efficacy of this approach, largely because incentives and compensation do not alter the work environment itself, which play a significant role influencing executive risk behavior. Consequently, in this chapter, we propose a conceptualization that integrates executive risk-taking with work design, framing three central features of the strategic leader job and work environment that may be manipulated to channel and shape executive risk-taking. Specifically, accountability, discretion, and relationships are proposed as the key higher-order characteristics of the executive work context, and they are examined with respect to optimal calibration in order to maximize both executive performance and well-being, as well as organizational coordination and control. Implications of this conceptualization and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper illuminates the distinction between individual and organizational actors in business-to-business markets as well as the coexistence of formal and informal mechanisms of coordination in multinational corporations. The main questions addressed include the following. (1) What factors influence the occurrence of personal contacts of foreign subsidiary managers in industrial multinational corporations? (2) How such personal contacts enable coordination in industrial markets and within multinational firms? The theoretical context of the paper is based on: (1) the interaction approach to industrial markets, (2) the network approach to industrial markets, and (3) the process approach to multinational management. The unit of analysis is the foreign subsidiary manager as the focal actor of a contact network. The paper is empirically focused on Portuguese sales subsidiaries of Finnish multinational corporations, which are managed by either a parent country national (Finnish), a host country national (Portuguese) or a third country national. The paper suggests eight scenarios of individual dependence and uncertainty, which are determined by individual, organizational, and/or market factors. Such scenarios are, in turn, thought to require personal contacts with specific functions. The paper suggests eight interpersonal roles of foreign subsidiary managers, by which the functions of their personal contacts enable inter-firm coordination in industrial markets. In addition, the paper suggests eight propositions on how the functions of their personal contacts enable centralization, formalization, socialization and horizontal communication in multinational corporations.

In everyday life, as well as in work organizations, we engage in frequent and quite comfortable discourse about the nature of reputations, and wealso see personal reputation used as a basis for important human resources decisions (e.g., promotions, terminations, etc.). Unfortunately, despite its recognized importance, there has been very little theory and research on personal reputation in organizations published in the organizational sciences. The present paper attempts to address this need by proposing a conceptualization of personal reputation in organizations. In this conceptualization, reputation is presented as an agreed upon, collective perception by others, and involves behavior calibration derived from social comparisons with referent others that results in a deviation from the behavioral norms in one's environment, as observed and evaluated by others. Implications of this conceptualization are discussed, as are directions for future research.

In this article, we make the point that managerial domination as described by pragmatic sociology is an appropriate notion to make sense of complex forms of domination in contemporary organizations. Based on Lemieux’s work on ‘grammars’, we complement approaches of complex domination put forward by pragmatic sociologists such as Boltanski and Thévenot. We illustrate these ideas by means of an ethnographic study of the financial intermediation industry. Our analysis sketches out an alternative conceptualization of power in such environments, and by so doing, helps us delineate the features that characterize complex financial domination. We conclude by arguing that this type of domination is the result of specific contradictions inherent to the grammars of financial intermediation.

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.

All teachers are leaders by the nature of their work. They lead within their schools, whether implicitly or explicitly, for good or for bad, proactively or reactively. In this chapter, we present a framework of teacher leadership that is an assemblage of our previously published works. We use this chapter to provide a consolidated view of how to help all teachers to acknowledge, understand, and use their “awesome” power as leaders to transform their classrooms, schools, and communities. Schools are sites of social, political, and economic influence and teachers play key roles in either maintaining the status quo or creating environments that are transformative and equitable for all members. We argue that a teacher's power is essential both within and beyond the walls of the classroom. Teachers have the capacity and power to participate in change decisions and efforts that traditionally either have been tacitly assumed by them or deliberately defined by others. By having an understanding of critical leadership or leadership for social justice, teachers will be more prepared to identify and resist the variety of contexts which threaten their professional expertise and contexts that deliberately question their professional knowledge.

In the first section of the book, Maureen D. Neumann, Laura C. Jones, P. Taylor Webb, and Olga M. Welch examine the ways in which “new” notions of leadership have influenced leadership development programs. Neumann, Jones, and Webb in the chapter, “Developing Teachers Leaders to Transform Classrooms, Schools and Communities,” advocate for, and offer ways that teachers can become cognizant of their leadership and its effects, so that they can develop deliberate commitments towards social justice in schools which are sites of social, political, and economic influence. They propose a model for leadership that is an alternative to traditional allocations of power through positional hierarchies. According to Neumann, Jones, and Webb, “while school leaders may recognize their actions within a single frame of the model, the practice of leadership is the ability to move in and out of three different conceptualizations of leadership, managerial (transactional), professional development (transformational), and social responsibility (critical).” They propose that effective teacher leaders utilize all three aspects of the leadership domains as a way to adapt to, oftentimes, challenging and rapidly shifting political and economic climates within education. Neumann, Jones, and Webb conclude their chapter with a discussion of pedagogy of possibility and argue that pedagogical content knowledge is a marker of professional teaching competence, and teachers must engage students in the moral and ethical issues surrounding the use of knowledge in our democracy for any subject matter.

Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a priority for managers across industries, but it represents a notoriously difficult innovation, with several challenges, many of which are cognitive in nature. The received literature has variously suggested that one way to overcome challenges to BMI, including cognitive ones, and support the cognitive tasks is using visual representations. Against this background, we aim at offering a contribution to the emerging line of inquiry at the nexus between business models (BMs), cognition and visual representations. Specifically, we develop a new method for visual representation of the BM in support of simplification of the cognitive effort and neutralisation of cognitive barriers. The resulting representation – a network-based representation, anchored on the activity-system perspective and offering complementarity and centrality/periphery measures – allows to visually represent an existing BM as a network (nodes and linkages) of interdependent activities and to express information related to the degree of centrality/periphery of single activities (nodes) with respect to the rest of a BM configuration. This information, we argue, is potentially very valuable in supporting the cognitive tasks involved in business model reconfiguration (BMR). We guide the reader to progressively appreciate how the development of the proposed method for visual representation is anchored to two main characteristics of BMR, namely the discovery-driven nature of BMR and the path-dependent nature of BMR. We offer initial insights on the cognitive value of such a type of representation in relationship to the simplification of the cognitive effort and the neutralisation of cognitive barriers in BMR.

In this paper, we examine the elements of pricing approaches in export businesses and their performance in an international environment. The elements of pricing approaches consist of cost-based, competitor-based, and value-based decisions made by different levels of management. By providing an integrated, holistic view, we investigate how different types of export-pricing strategies influence export performance, and which elements strengthen or attenuate the outcomes of strategic actions.

Using data from a survey of 172 export managers, we test our hypotheses in a two-step approach. First, we use an unsupervised approach to group the export companies and to validate the cluster solution internally and externally. Second, we test our hypotheses regarding export performance.

The results show that the types of export-pricing strategies are unequally distributed, and the elements of the strategies have different complexities. Export performance varies significantly by type of pricing orientation used.

This chapter provides an overview of technology management to support retailing, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it focuses on the technologies developed and in use before the pandemic, the ones further developed as response to the pandemic, while the final part of the chapter proposes a new technology implementation process (cycle) to support retailers in introducing new technology. In particular, the process in based on seven main activities: (1) Technology need recognition; (2) Technology screening; (3) Initial development and testing; (4) Business analysis; (5) Technology development; (6) Market acceptance testing; and (7) Technology adoption, while monitoring and learning actions should occur constantly throughout the process to evaluate the benefit of the technology at each stage (or to discard for further investment).