Search results

Ecological systems comprise interdependent human and other living beings, along with their life-giving natural environments. The sustainability of such systems has become a critical global concern, both generally and in relation to business practice. This chapter considers the cultivation of care among business students as one important way of fostering engagement with such concern, with particular attention given to a specific and under-attended area in business research and practice: that of human sustainability. In order to overcome potential limitations of diverse and often disparate streams of research on care, this chapter considers Mayseless’ (2016) integrative framework for understanding caring motivation, and builds upon the four points of intervention for cultivating care that were articulated within that framework. Extant pedagogical research within business and management is used to elaborate additional insights and methods for developing caring skills, caring values, caring teaching and learning communities, and a more extensive vision of care that includes those who might be unknown, different from or distant to us. The framework, insights, methods, and examples discussed in this chapter provide a foundation that can help guide future care-related, ecologically focused pedagogical research and practice.

Microfoundations of institutions are central to constructing place – the interplay of location, meaning, and material form. Since only a few institutional studies bring materiality to the fore to examine the processes of place-making, how material forms interact with people to institutionalize or de-institutionalize the meaning of place remains a black box. Through an inductive and historical study of Boston’s North End neighborhood, the authors show how material practices shaped place-making and institutionalized, or de-institutionalized, the meaning of the North End. When material practices symbolically encoded meanings of diverse audiences into the church, it created resonance and enabled the building’s meanings to withstand environmental change and become institutionalized as part of the North End’s meaning as a place. In contrast, when the material practices restricted meaning to a specific audience, it limited resonance when the environment changed, was more likely to be demolished and, thus, erased rather than institutionalized into the meaning of the North End as a place.

In today’s hypercompetitive, digital-first, knowledge-based economy, organizational creativity has never been more important as a potential source of competitive advantage. The foundation stone for every innovation is an idea and all ideas are born of creativity. The innovation process thus starts with creativity and the new ideas it yields are ideally based on insights that will lead ultimately to novel outcomes (such as new products, services, experiences or business models) and thereby to a sustainable competitive advantage. In established businesses, until relatively recently, creativity was called on only for specific, often high-profile occasions, for ‘hackathons’ or for major ‘innovation jams’, but today it is an essential, everyday necessity of routine work. However, attaining the right level of creativity from within is a challenge for many organizations and so they need to establish an appropriate and effective way to import it into their teams, projects and, ultimately, culture. The arts are a pure, unadulterated form of creativity. Mindsets, processes and practices from the arts can give organizational creativity a significant boost and can potentially offset the creative deficit in an organization. Here, the illustrative cases and practices that demonstrate how the arts can have a positive impact on business are examined.