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Enterprising individuals are frequently portrayed as rational agents who maximize their own interests. At the same time, an increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use social responsibility strategies, incorporating collective interests into their business agenda. This study aims to analyze the interplay between the rational and emotional aspects of the entrepreneurial personal identity and address its implications for the socially responsible behavior of businesses by drawing on the literature on entrepreneurial identity, the objectivism (rational egoism) philosophical perspective and the concept of entrepreneurial passion.

A sample of 333 Russian SMEs is used to test the research hypotheses. The study follows the quantitative research strategy, wherein the main assumptions are examined based on mediation testing techniques.

The results suggest that entrepreneurs whose personal identities are rooted in objectivism values are less likely to foster culture of social responsibility within their firms. At the same time, their entrepreneurial passion mitigates the negative effect of objectivism on social responsiveness of the venture.

This research enhances the understanding of entrepreneurial personality and can help policymakers promote social responsibility in small and medium businesses, showing that they need to communicate effectively with SMEs’ leaders and align their policies with entrepreneurial values and beliefs.

Capitalism is under siege (Porter & Kramer, 2011), and business schools are under fire (Amann et al., 2013). So, management and leadership education in higher education institutions should be reinvented under the more challenging era of capitalism. How then can business schools cope with these challenges and contribute to global endeavor for making sustainable capitalism? In this context, there is thus reason for the following three core concerns that new understanding of management and leadership education is required. First, shortcomings of contemporary capitalism lead to failures of responsible management. Second, ethical failure of management leadership is a pressing issue. Third, academic responsibility under the new capitalism remains unexamined. Based on these three core concerns, we seek to generate inclusive insights into the educational embeddedness of management and leadership members and the consequences of such embeddedness on managerial processes, structures, and outcomes under contemporary capitalism.

The contemporary dialog surrounding social and environmental crises has strengthened the call for a reconsideration of the capitalist economic system, prompting a reimagining of businesses’ societal roles. This chapter explores the shifting terrain of corporate purpose as a driving force for positive societal change, challenging the traditional shareholder primacy doctrine.

After examining influential theoretical frameworks shaping the discourse on corporate purpose, this research unveils the results of an empirical investigation inspired by the 2019 American Business Roundtable’s (BRT) statement on corporate purpose, where numerous prominent American CEOs advocated for a shift toward a stakeholder-oriented approach. In our exercise, the authors employ semantic and cognitive linguistic analyses to measure the coherence between the language in the BRT statement and the content of sustainability reports. This approach aims to offer insights into the alignment or divergence between corporate declarations and actual practices concerning corporate purpose.

Empirical findings reveal that corporations emphasizing their purpose in sustainability reports using language resembling that of the BRT statement tend to demonstrate lower implementation scores. Conversely, implementors lean toward using language in sustainability reports that diverges from the BRT statement. These findings suggest a potential disconnection between stated purpose and actual implementation in companies emphasizing corporate purpose in their reports.

The study research contributes theoretical insights by exploring how corporations can incorporate purpose-driven practices to promote sustainable growth and societal well-being. It underscores the potential for businesses to play a pivotal role in reshaping the economic landscape and advocates for ongoing research in humanistic management models.

Postdoctoral fellowships are an important career phase for early career researchers. This part of one's career is often characterised by stress, loneliness and anxiety about the future. Moreover, postdoctoral fellowships are, by definition, individualistic and career oriented. We ask: how do postdoctoral fellowships provide the means for an academic sense of belonging – if they do? In this chapter, we explore this complex question by introducing two personal narratives of navigating the spaces of belonging (and not belonging) during postdoctoral fellowships. First, the first author (Juuso) explores his experiences as a fellow in two postdoctoral programmes. Next, the second author (Robyn) provides a supervisor's reflection. We analyse these narratives with the theoretical lens of a sense of belonging, understood as an affective, physical, social and political phenomenon. Our narratives shed light on how belonging is built within postdoctoral fellowships' often cold and lonely structures. We particularly discuss the spaces of non-belonging that might simultaneously empower and disempower postdoctoral fellows (as well as their supervisors).

This paper is intended as an original contribution to researching ESG from a PR perspective, as well as offering a case study of the use of letters as a mode of corporate communication.

The methodology is interdisciplinary but is centred on a critical discourse analysis of the organizational rhetoric on ESG in the annual letters of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink from 2018 to 2023. The article also considers the content of the BlackRock letters alongside the campaign rhetoric deployed by opponents to ESG over the same period.

The analysis of the letters showed up a difference in tempo and tone between the courteous, collaborative and somewhat “corporate” style of text in the Fink letters and the more urgent and confrontational tone of opponents that adopted a populist line of argumentation against ESG in general and Larry Fink and BlackRock in particular.

While advantages can accrue to CEOs and corporations for speaking out on issues, there are also perils awaiting in the contemporary environment for opinion. The findings suggest it is also important to gauge the intensity of cultural and political division in society when speaking out on contentious issues and make a judgement on whether to proceed based on that analysis. Moreover, in countries where the middle ground of public opinion has eroded, ideology and cultural affiliations can prevail instead of openness to argument and counter-argument on topics such as climate change.

The paper presents a fresh case study of a CEO who has been prominent in shaping the discourse on ESG, which has itself become is a matter of contemporary relevance to public relations. The findings offer original insights that are additive to existing guidance and criteria for CEOs deciding to speak out on issues on behalf of their organizations.

This chapter focuses on ecofeminism that primarily refers to feminist theory and activism informed by ecology. Ecofeminism is concerned with real connections between humans and Nature, as also by the domination of Nature by man and, specifically, by women's subservience to men. The foundational ecofeminist assumption is that environmental issues are basically feminist issues, and vice versa. It believes that ecofeminism, best understood and operationalized, can restore Mother Nature (endangered by industrial extraction and exploitation) and reassure rights to animals (deanimalized and threatened by factory farming). Although ecofeminism is a diverse movement, ecofeminist theorists share the presupposition that social transformation is necessary for ecological survival, that intellectual transformation of dominant modes of thought must accompany social transformation, that Nature teaches and reveals nondualistic, nonhierarchical systems of relations that are models for social transformation of values, and that human and cultural diversity are values in social transformation; some of these values and movements even influenced the world via the UN. Accordingly, this chapter highlights major positive contributions of ecofeminism.

The purpose of this multi-voiced paper is to propose a prosocial paradigm for the field of performance management and management control systems. This new paradigm suggests cultivating prosocial behaviour and prosocial groups in organizations to simultaneously achieve the objectives of economic performance and sustainability.

The authors share a common concern about the future of humanity and nature. The authors challenge the influential assumption of economic man from neoclassical economic theory and build on evolutionary science and the core design principles of prosocial groups to develop a prosocial paradigm.

Findings are based on the premise of the prosocial paradigm that self-interested behaviour may outperform prosocial behaviour within a group but that prosocial groups outperform groups dominated by self-interest. The authors explore various dimensions of performance management from the prosocial perspective in the private and public sectors.

The authors call for theoretical, conceptual and empirical research that explores the prosocial paradigm. They invite any approach, including positivist, interpretive and critical research, as well as those using qualitative, quantitative and interventionist methods.

This paper offers implications from the prosocial paradigm for practitioners, particularly for executives and managers, policymakers and educators.

Adoption of the prosocial paradigm in research and practice shapes what the authors call the prosocial market economy. This is an aspired cultural evolution that functions with market competition yet systematically strengthens prosociality as a cultural norm in organizations, markets and society at large.

The spread of conspiracy theories and associated vaccine rejection within the wellness industry and spiritual communities during the COVID-19 pandemic attracted significant media and scholarly attention. Informed by the ‘(Con)spirituality, Science and COVID-19 in Australia’ project (2020–2021) (Halafoff, Marriott, et al., 2022; Halafoff, Weng, et al., 2022; Roginski & Rocha, 2022), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and awarded via the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), this chapter reports on findings pertaining to holistic spirituality, purity doctrines and wellness, arising from a parallel pilot study on ‘Spirituality and Wellness (SWell) in Australia’ (2021). Both studies have revealed a ‘spiritual complexity’ in Australia and internationally, and the authors report on this here, focussed particularly on spirituality’s quest for pristine bodies, and on spiritual ‘moral communities’ (Ganga Kieffer, 2023) exceptionalism and relationality.

The purpose of this study was to examine consumer data acquired by branded prescription drug websites and the ethics of privacy related to the interconnected web of personal information accessed, packaged and resold by tracker technologies.

The research used the DMI Tracker Tool to collect data on the top 17 branded prescription drug websites, with a specific interest in the tracker technologies embedded in those websites. That data was analyzed using Gephi, an open-source data visualization tool, to map the network of trackers embedded in those branded prescription drug websites.

Findings visualize the interconnections between tracker technologies and prescription drug websites that undergird a system of personal data acquisition and programmatic advertising vehicles that serve the interests of prescription drug marketers and Big Tech. Based on the theory of platform ethics, the study demonstrated the presence of a technostructural ecosystem dominated by Big Tech, a system that goes unseen by consumers and serves the interests of advertisers and resellers of consumer data.

The 17 websites used in this study were limited to the top-selling prescription drugs or those with the highest ad expenditures. As such this study is not based on a random sampling of branded prescription drug websites. The popularity of these prescription drugs or the expanse of advertising associated with the drugs makes them appropriate to study the presence of tracking devices that collect data from consumers and serve advertising to them. It is also noted that websites are dynamic spaces, and some trackers within their infrastructures are apt to change over time.

Branded prescription drug information has over the past three decades become part of consumers’ routine search for information regarding what ails them. As drug promotion moved from print to TV and the Web, searching for drug information has become a part of everyday life. The implications of embedded trackers on branded prescription drug websites are the subject of this research.

This study has significant social implications as consumers who are searching for information regarding prescription medications may not want drug companies tracking them in a way that many perceive to be an invasion of privacy. Yet, as the Web is dominated by Big Tech, web developers have little choice but to remain a part of this technostructural ecosystem.

This study sheds light on branded prescription drug websites, exploring the imbalance between the websites under study, Big Tech and consumers who lack awareness of the system that operates backstage.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the life and work, both fiction and nonfiction, of the American author Upton Sinclair, for the purposes of better understanding his impact on management theory and practice.

Critical biography is a historiographical approach that analyzes aspects of an individual’s life events and the context that surrounds those events to better understand the contributions of an individual. In this case, this paper analyzes Sinclair’s biography, his work-related fiction and nonfiction and his interactions with business leaders and management thinkers of the day, including scientific management founder Frederick Winslow Taylor, auto industry leader Henry Ford and safety razor magnate King Gillette.

This paper identified four themes which are related to management and workplace history that pervade his fiction and nonfiction writing and link these events to the events of his life as well as the context of the times.

Although others have cited certain aspects of Sinclair’s work for specific purposes, this paper presents a systematic review of Sinclair’s broad oeuvre and its relevance to management and workplace history using a critical biography approach.