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The purpose of this paper is to provide a meaningful, integrated, and re‐interpreted framework of Chandler's ideas regarding corporation's growth, offering an understandable conceptualization of how these insights are applicable to explain family firm's transitional stages – even when, in 1977, Chandler was not aware of it.

Grounding ideas on Chandler's insights regarding corporate firm's growth, and drawing on Gersick et al. family ownership evolutionary model, this paper develops an integrated framework of family‐controlled corporation's growth which allows family business researchers to reconcile with Chandler's perspectives, recognizing that his ideas contributed a lot to the family business literature.

Chandler's ideas regarding family firm's management are based on a narrow definition (and perspective) of family firm ownership. When allowing not only family‐owned firms, but also family‐controlled ones in his capitalism classification, his developmental stages make perfect sense when applied to family enterprises.

This paper intends to reinterpret Chandler's views on family firms, stating that the processes described for corporations are also applicable for family enterprises – when their definition becomes broader (including not only family‐owned, but also family‐controlled firms). The latter, bridges the gap between Chandler's envisioned historical evolution of corporations, and the development, professionalization and survival of family firms.

Alfred D. Chandler was the most important business historian of the twentieth century, who described and analyzed how large industrial firms are organized and managed in the USA from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries.

This paper is a personal memoir and tribute to Dr Chandler and examines his methods, selected writings, and his legacy.

His concepts and models are widely accepted and applied to North America, Western Europe, and most advanced industrial economies, taking on an air of universality. At the close of the twentieth century, however, a rise of high‐tech industries and rapidly growing, non‐western economies challenged many of the universalistic assumptions embedded in Chandler's work. At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, Chandler's writings suggest nothing more than how much time, place, and people matter.

This paper adds a more personal touch to Dr Chandler.

In 1950, the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan) was given a perpetual water license for a large section of Northern British Columbia, Canada. The benefit to the original owner of the water rights, the Province of British Columbia, was economic and population growth. The purpose of this paper is to follow the contestation over these rights from 1948 to 2016.

An institutional logics perspective was taken to analyze the main actors and how their relative power (dominant versus fringe) changed in the institutional field. Archival data and selected interviews were mapped to institutional logics across three time periods.

In the inter-temporal setting, many of the actors that were fringe in 1950 became more dominant by 2016. For example, the local indigenous peoples, the Cheslatta Carrier First Nation, were flooded off their land to make way for Alcan’s dam. They ended up as very powerful players in the institutional field. The perpetual rights given to Alcan made it a dominant actor across all time periods, despite changes in the logics of the institutional field.

A single case was studied; other comparative settings should be explored to contrast and compare. The data were primarily archival, supplemented by only three interviews of those related to the case study. This case study is also one where water rights were privatized in perpetuity, which may not be the case in other settings.

Current governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) should use this case to understand the long-term effects of resource policy decisions.

The building of large dams has been, and continues to be, used worldwide to provide power to create economic growth. Our setting provides insight into the long-term societal outcomes of using water rights in this way.

This is an original use of institutional logics around a natural resource-based institutional field. Using institutional logics in a multi-period setting, focusing on the power relations of the key actors, and how they can be constrained by historical forces, provides a contribution to the literature.

Capitalism, religion and science (including calculative sciences such as accounting) have a long and turbulent relationship that, today, is manifest in the “War on Terror”. As social ideologies, religion and science have played a sometimes decisive influence in the history of capitalism. What can one learn from these past encounters to better understand their relationship today? This paper explores the historical origins of this relationship as a struggle over the ideals of the Enlightenment: – as decline of the modern and the rise of the postmodern. The paper begins by tracing the evolution of Christianities and their different potentials in both resisting and accommodating the extant social order. Islam, in contrast, has,until recently, enjoyed a relatively sheltered existence from capitalism, and today, some factions present a militant stance against the market and the liberal democratic state. Overall, the Enlightenment and modernist projects are judged to be jeopardy – a condition fostered by orthodox economics and accounting ideology, where it is now de rigueur to divide the secular from the non‐secular, the normative from the positive, and the ethical from the pragmatic or realist. Finally, the mechanisms behind this Enlightenment regression are examined here using literary analysis, as a modest prelude to developing a new politics for a progressive accounting; one that seeks to restore the integrity and probity of the Enlightenment Ideal.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how much the basic tenets of conscious capitalism could favor organizational change and anticorruption strategies.

The paper questions the vagueness of the tenets and principles of conscious capitalism. It unveils the idealized worldview of conscious capitalism, as it is based on a “pseudo-humanistic and pseudo-holistic” philosophy. The paper analyzes various kinds of rationale for justifying anticorruption measures and explains how the conscious capitalism movement should assume the challenge to develop one or the other rationale.

The conscious capitalism movement does not have basic rationale for any self-justified discourse about anticorruption measures. The principles of conscious capitalism organizations can be coherent with a rationale of individual and organizational compliance. They could be suitable with a rationale of legal, industry and international compliance. We could expect that the principles of conscious capitalism allow radical changes in the organizational culture. However, the main principles of conscious capitalism are not explicitly related to any rationale for a corporate self-justified discourse about anticorruption measures.

The three kinds of rationale for corporate self-justified discourse about anticorruption measures are not exhaustive. There can be other kinds of corporate rationale. Moreover, the conscious capitalism movement appeared in 2000s and is still evolving. So, we should never take for granted that the present ideals and principles of conscious capitalism will never be improved and deepened.

The paper explains how the conscious capitalism movement remains unable to present its rationale for justifying anticorruption measures. In doing so, it provides three kinds of rationale that conscious capitalism organizations could use to develop their corporate self-justified discourse about anticorruption policies, measures and programs.

This paper aims to present Alfred Chandler's works as one of the main authors to face the business and society field. It synthesizes his conceptual achievements though national capitalisms that he has identified.

Alfred Chandler's works are summarized analytically. His historic comparative method pinpointed different types of capitalism through managerial hierarchy that enabled firms. National leaders were grounded in their society, and Chandler's works explain economic dominance of big business by organization form they developed.

Over his intellectual career, Alfred Chandler has conceptualized different types of capitalism related to national business history: the process of visible hands internalization, managerial hierarchy, organizational capability and path of learning; that reflect, respectively, USA, British, German and Japanese type of capitalism according to their own business history. History, society matters, due to Alfred Chandler's considerable influence could open alternative and valuable ways for management and economic studies.

This paper presents management and economic theoretical implications of a prominent leader of the business history field. Arguing why Alfred Chandler's concepts are unique and have opened the crucial importance of implicating management studies to society matters. These preoccupations constitute also – this paper would stress on this point – the core of Society and Business field.

Contemporary organisational landscapes offer opportunities for hybrids to thrive. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are one thriving hybrid form incorporating the use of resources and/or structures from both public and private sectors. The study examines the impact of such a hybrid structure on governance and accountability mechanisms in a context of institutional complexity.

This study uses an approach that draws on institutional logics and hybridity to examine governance arrangements in the PPP policy created for the delivery of UK schools. Unusually, it employs a comparative case study of how four local governments implemented the policy. It draws on a framework developed by Polzer et al. (2017) to examine the level of engagement between multiple logics and hybrid structures and applies this to the delivery of governance and accountability for public money.

The Polzer et al. framework enables a study of how the nature of hybrids can vary in terms of their governance, ownership and control relations. The findings show how the relationships between levels of engagement of multiple logics and hybrid structures can impact on governance and accountability for public money. Layering and blending combinations led to increased adoption of private sector accountability structures, whilst a hybrid with parallel co-existence of community and market logics delivered a long-term governance structure.

The paper examines the operation of hybrids in a complex education PPP environment in only four local governments and therefore cannot provide representative answers across the population as a whole. However, given the considerable variation found across the four examples, the paper shows there can be significant differentiation in how multiple logics engage at different levels and in varying combinations even in the same hybrid setting. The paper focuses on capital investment implementation and its evaluation, so it is a limitation that the operational stage of PPP projects is not studied.

The findings have political relevance because the two local government bodies with more robust combinations of multiple logics were more successful in getting funds and delivering schools in their geographical areas.

The study extends Polzer et al.'s (2017) research on hybridity by showing that there can be significant differentiation in how multiple logics engage at different levels and in varying combinations even in what was planned to be the same hybrid setting. It shows how in situations of institutional complexity certain combinations of logics lead to differentiation in governance and accountability, creating fragmented focus on the related public accountability structures. This matters because it becomes harder to hold government to account for public spending.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the direction of economic changes affecting the Polish economy after the political transformation of the early 1990s.

First, the author defines the phenomenon of cognitive capitalism. Subsequently, the social and psychological consequences of this form of management and its ideological character are presented. Finally, the effects of the application of cognitive capitalism to the Polish reality are considered and the desirable adjustments of the Polish capitalism are suggested.

According to the theses of the paper: the negative effects of the Polish economic transformation are largely the result of an uncritical acceptance of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism, and the fight against the high social costs of the functioning of market economy calls for an adjustment of the Polish economy, which would bring it closer to the Scandinavian model of capitalism.

The paper shows the process of economic transformation in Poland from the perspective of the changes taking place in the bosom of the western capitalism, in particular of the Anglo-Saxon type.

The author of the paper suggests a number of possible adjustments to the Polish model of capitalism, in particular calling for the introduction of elements of planning and state intervention into the model, the revival of municipal and cooperative ownership, as well as the introduction of corporatist practices.

The author of the paper criticizes the thesis of the inevitability of the radically liberal transformation of the Polish economy, widely accepted in the literature. Moreover, he sees the relationship between the Polish free-market changes and the processes of “cognitivization” of western capitalism.

In the recent literature on financialization and the rise of investor capitalism, the successor of managerial capitalism, which dominated until the 1970s, suggests that the firm is today enacted as a bundle of financial assets managed to create value for the shareholders. This paper aims to demonstrate how such views are established relatively recently by examining leadership literature published in the 1970s, representing an entirely different view of leadership work, the role of the firm and capital–labour relations.

Two books and one Harvard Business Review article published by the Volvo CEO Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, one of the most prominent Swedish industry leaders of the past century and one of the architects behind Volvo’s internationally renowned Kalmar and Uddevalla plants in Sweden, are examined. Based on a critical discourse analysis framework, these two volumes are treated as representatives of what Alfred Chandler speaks of as the regime managerial capitalism, today largely displaced by the regime of investor capitalism.

Gyllenhammar’s discourses stresses the role of the corporations as serving a wider social community than merely the shareholders, and regard the manufacturing industry as the legitimate site for the development of new production systems better suited to a more educated workforce demanding more qualified work assignments and greater autonomy. This argument, in favour of a view of the corporation as being socially embedded and responsive to wider social needs, can be contrasted against the contemporary view of leadership and corporate governance practice.

The paper addresses the shift from managerial capitalist regime of the post-Second World War period to the investor capitalism of the financialized economy and the financialized firm by contrasting leadership writing of the 1970s against today’s strong focus on shareholder enrichment and the enactment of CEOs and directors as the servants of the capital owners. A long-term perspective on the changes occurring over the past four decades may enable a better understanding how leadership, governance and industry are subject to ongoing re-interpretations and understanding in the face of novel economic, social and political conditions.

Changes in financial reporting information were an important part of the British transition from feudalism to capitalism, with statements showing cash surpluses or deficits being gradually superseded by income statements and balance sheets. The existing literature does not satisfactorily explain the (considerable) variations in the pattern of change in the early part of the transition, when information provision was largely determined by Parliamentary processes, and this paper aims to look to new evidence to strengthen and modify the existing theorisations.

The research design is to discuss and relate existing theories regarding the emergence of financial reporting information to newly discovered evidence on a substantial set of corporate formations between 1766 and 1840, during the early stages of financial (or managerial) capitalism.

Requirements to present accounts to shareholders were almost unknown before 1800 and became common only from the 1820s, usually in the form of (cash‐based) receipts and payments accounts, which enabled investors to determine the legitimacy of the dividend payments and would have enabled them to calculate a cash‐based version of the rate of return.

The paper provides new evidence on the patterns of company development and of corporate financial reporting across the formative years of financial capitalism.