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Leadership has been an active area of research and practice in China over the past 30 years of economic reform and organizational change. The main purpose of this chapter is to summarize recent progress from leadership research in China and to propose a growth model for Chinese change leadership. There have been three key trends emerging from the recent research and applications under organizational change in China: (1) problem-driven trend emphasizing global leadership context and business practices; (2) high-performance human resources configuration trend integrating key competencies to build up the new work systems for global leadership; and (3) theory-building trend focusing upon the conceptual development for global leadership areas for future research and applications in China. These trends are discussed in connection with organizational change and global entrepreneurship. The recent progresses in leadership research and practice in China indicated that leadership development has become more and more strategic and embedded with the cultural and industrial contexts. A theory of “adaptation-selection-development” (ASD) is proposed for more systematic research and theory development in global leadership research and applications in China. This chapter demonstrates frontier approaches and implications of the ASD framework for global leadership development are highlighted.

The closing plenary of the 2015 Alberta Institutions Conference offered an opportunity to reflect on the current status of the institutional perspective and the direction it may take in the future. Our four panelists, Mary Ann Glynn, Tom Lawrence, Renate Meyer, and William Ocasio, reflected on how institutionalists can matter. In a first conversation, Renate and William discussed how institutionalists can matter to different audiences, and whether or not the desire to matter should drive research. In a second conversation, Tom proposed problem-driven research as a means of developing relevant theoretical insights. In a third and final conversation, Mary Ann encouraged us to reconsider the role of institutions and culture in shaping the collective rationality of actors and to reveal what matters in everyday occurrences.

Societal grand challenges have moved from a marginal concern to a mainstream issue within organization and management theory. How diverse forms of organizing help tackle – or reinforce – grand challenges has become centrally important. In this introductory paper, we take stock of the contributions to the volume on Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges and identify three characteristics of grand challenges that require further scholarly attention: their interconnectedness, fluidity, and paradoxical nature. We also emphasize the need to expand our methodological repertoire and reflect upon our practices as a scholarly community.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) has gained prominence as an organizational development approach. For over 15 years, it has had varied use in higher education research as a methodology and as a collection of methods. Perhaps the most consistently used, yet most criticized, aspect of AI is the positive stance that its adherents adopt. In this chapter, we survey the prevalence and use of AI, both in the wider literature and in higher education research. We offer our own case study to illustrate the practicalities of employing it and discuss our findings. We suggest that educational researchers are overlooking relevant AI research published within other disciplines; that our own and other case stories can provide guidance for the use of AI in academic contexts; and that AI’s collaborative and positive standpoint has potential as a research methodology influencing policy.

Social entrepreneurs create novel approaches to social problems such as poverty. But scaling these approaches to the dimension of the problem can be a difficult task. In the social enterprise sector, the subject of scaling has become a key dimension of organizational performance. This chapter advances the scholarly literature on the scaling of social enterprises, a literature which is currently in an embryonic stage and characterized by conceptual ambiguity and fragmented perspectives.

We engage realist philosophy of science to develop mechanism-based causal explanations of the scaling performance of social enterprises. We also develop a coding scheme to guide systematic empirical analysis and highlight the explanatory power of counterfactuals. Counterfactuals have been largely neglected in empirical research as they represent mechanisms that are enabled but remain unobservable – in a state of suppression or neutralization of their effects.

We question the ability of organizations to “socially engineer” desired outcomes and introduce a new construct – organizational closure competence. Anchored in realism, this construct provides a basis for productive approaches to social engineering. We elaborate on the importance of organizational closure competencies for scaling, derive a series of propositions, and develop ideas for future research and for practice.

Applying a realist lens allows us to add empirical rigor to research on social enterprises and scaling. Our approach constitutes a move from rich narratives to causal models and informs the way we design and evaluate efforts to address important societal challenges.

This chapter demonstrates how to operationalize realist philosophy of science for causal explanations of complex social phenomena and better utilize its theoretical and practical value.

This paper reflects on the evolution of implicit and explicit behavioral ideas in the field of strategic management using Herbert Simon’s scholarship as a starting point, that is, his emphasis on empirically driven; interdisciplinary theorizing allowing and enabling two-way street learning. We argue that historically, there were plenty of behavioral ideas embedded in the field and, together with the recent movement towards explicit “behavioral strategy,” these provide several possible paths for future developments in strategic management research. In the spirit of broadening the tent for behavioral strategy in the future (Hambrick & Crossland, 2018), we suggest some topics and approaches for behavioral strategy in empirically driven, interdisciplinary directions which allows also for two-way street learning between concepts and real-world strategic phenomena.

Baron et al. briefly summarized the history of human performance modeling¹ (HPM) in their 1990 review. The application of control theory to aircraft simulations and the development of task network models stimulated the development of methods to represent the human contribution to system dynamics. These groundbreaking efforts first identified the manifold difficulties associated with the simulation of human performance in military settings, and many of these difficulties remain matters of contemporary concern. The technical challenges associated with the representation of human performance have endured, and military applications continue to be a major driver of interest in HBR. The expense and various difficulties associated with laboratory research, field studies, and operational tests have pushed modeling and simulation to center stage as an affordable alternative to empirical studies. Simulation is now an essential component of military force development, operational planning, engineering development and acquisition, and training.

Purpose: This purpose of this chapter is to present several theories of financial inclusion. Financial inclusion is the ease of access to, and the availability of, basic financial services to all members of the population. Financial inclusion means that individuals and businesses have access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs in a responsible and sustainable way. Financial inclusion practices vary from country to country, and there is need to identify the underlying principles or propositions that can explain the observed variation in financial inclusion practices. These set of principles or propositions are called theories.

Methods: The chapter uses conceptual discussions to formulate alternative theories of financial inclusion.

Findings: The study shows that financial inclusion theories are explanations for observed financial inclusion practices. It also shows that the ideas and perspectives on financial inclusion can be grouped into theories to facilitate meaningful discussions in the literature.

Originality/value: Currently, there are no observed or elaborate theories of financial inclusion in the policy or academic literature. This chapter is the first attempt to develop theories of financial inclusion. The theories are intended to be useful to researchers, academics and practitioners. The resulting contributions to theory development are useful to the problem-solving process in the global financial inclusion agenda.