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This chapter reports on the “CEO’s-eye-view” of the 1990 financial crisis at Citibank using unique data from CEO John Reed’s private archives. This qualitative analysis sheds light on questions that have perennially plagued executives and intrigued scholars: How do organizations change routines in order to overcome inertia in the face of radical change in the environment? And, specifically, what is the role of the CEO in this process? Inertial behavior in such circumstances has been attributed to ingrained routines that are based on cognitive and motivational truces. Routines are performed because organizational participants find them to cohere to a particular cognitive frame about what should be done (the cognitive dimension) and to resolve conflicts about what gets rewarded or sanctioned (the motivational dimension). The notion of a “truce” explains how routines are “routinely” activated. Routines are inertial because the dissolution of the truce would be inconsistent with frames held by organizational participants and fraught with the risk of unleashing unmanageable conflict among interests in the organization. Thus, the challenge for the CEO in making intended change is both to break the existing truce and to remake a new one. In this study, I uncover how the existing organizational truce led to the crisis at Citibank, why Reed’s initial attempts to respond failed, and how he ultimately found ways to break out of the old truce and establish new routines that helped the bank survive. These findings offer insight into the cognitive and motivational microfoundations of macro theories about organizational response to radical change.

An increasingly large group of scholars in Europe have begun to take a practice lens to understanding problems of strategy making in organizations. Strategy-as-practice research is premised on the notion that all social life is constituted within practices, and that practices and practitioners are essential subjects of study. Applying this lens to strategy foregrounds the mundane, everyday work involved in doing strategy. In doing so, it expands our definition of the salient outcomes to be studied in strategic management and provides new perspectives on the mechanisms for producing such outcomes. As strategy-as-practice scholars, we have been puzzled about how much more slowly the ideas in this burgeoning field have traveled from their home in Europe to the United States than have other ideas in strategic management traveled from the United States to Europe. In this chapter, we contribute some thoughts about the development of the strategy-as-practice field and its travels in academia.

By taking conventionalist view of the evolution of biotechnology, we suggest that the process by which entrepreneurs determined what made biotechnology valuable and figured out how to organize around such an economic logic was contested. The shape that biotechnology has ultimately taken emerged from the resolution of these contests. Convention theory – as elaborated in Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) On Justification ¹ – argues that our economy is shaped by participants affecting the rules of economic action. Whereas most economists would argue that the assignment of value underpins any system of exchange, conventionalists suggest that this value is not only given by the principles of optimization but instead can be derived from many possible spheres such as civic duty, attainment of fame, proof of technologic performance, and demonstration of creativity. More specifically, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006, p. 43) claim that the establishment of a particular logic “comes about as a part of a coordinated process that relies on two supports: a common identification of market goods, whose exchange defines the course of action, and a common evaluation of these objects in terms of prices that make it possible to adjust various actions.” Simply put, economic logics embody principles of economic coordination or conventions that guide interpretation of the technology and its value.

While a commonly-held mental image suggests that big corporations live very long lives, the reverse is actually true quite often, and the lifespan of companies is decreasing as the rate of change increases. The situation of accelerating change places ever greater challenges before each and every company, and while innovation is obviously a response to this dilemma, it turns out that not all types of innovation are equally valuable. Business model innovation, the subject of this paper, has proven to a tremendous source of competitive advantage. This paper examines many dimensions of business model innovation, focusing particularly on the relationship between a company and its customers, and the methods that companies use to grasp the bigger picture, or whole system perspective, that enables them to understand how their enterprise relates to the larger industry and broader economy in which it operates.

This paper examines actors and discourses shaping new Canadian legislation designed to advance diversity in corporate governance.

This paper performs a stakeholder and discourse analysis drawing on texts of parliamentary debates.

The paper illuminates tensions regarding definitions of diversity, its importance for boards of directors and the mechanisms favoured for implementation. Official discourses examined show that, unlike for other political issues, opposition was largely muted, and most stakeholders engaged in the process supported legislation advancing diversity. Nonetheless areas of debate and positioning by actors and suggest important differences, with outcomes linked to non-traditional power bases.

This study provides insights into the discursive environments of organizations and processes relating to promoting diversity and equality in the political decision-making domain, a critical venue for understanding advancement of equity, often neglected in organizational studies.

By understanding the complex and competing discourses surrounding diversity and inclusion at the macro level this paper provides a context for understanding organizational (meso) and individual (micro) beliefs and behaviours.

This study shows how advocacy shapes how policy and legislation are framed and the ways mainstream organizations, including women's groups, may advance gender equality without regard to other dimensions of diversity or intersectionality.

This study maps the political discourse around recent Canadian legislation designed to improve diversity on boards that must, in the Canadian context, address more than gender.

We study the decision-making process behind business model change, focusing specifically on the tactics managers employ to gain support for such changes. We first argue for the prominent role of middle management in business model change, and second, we revisit the literature on issue selling and championing as they may apply to business model change decision-making. We subsequently analyze the case of a business model change initiative in the Dutch water authority sector, revealing two specific tactics that middle management employed to obtain top management’s agreement to business model change: leveraging external agreements and continuously informing top management. We discuss how these findings extend and in some ways suggest a rethink of the literature on organizational change. Finally, we describe the specificities of business model change that distinguish it from other types of change. In sum, this paper demonstrates the interest of research at the nexus of business models and organizational change.

This paper aims to offer scholars and practitioners critical arguments on the strengths and weaknesses of the shared value concept and of the mental model of economics that lies at its heart. On the basis of these arguments, it proposes the paradigm of ethicological value-added creation as a new economic framework extending the shared value concept into a concept of lastingly viable business strategy.

Conceptual and philosophical analysis of the mental model of economics and of basic concepts and premises regarding scarcity, competition, growth and raising value. Application of this analysis to the re-design of the shared value approach and to the development of practical guidelines for sustainably viable business models.

This paper highlights how the shared value approach can be transformed into an even stronger strategic tool for the design of viable business models.

Scholars, entrepreneurs and managers receive a new conceptual framework to design lastingly viable business models on the basis of re-defined tools and concepts.

Leading texts on strategy and business development as well as CSR-driven texts on designing sustainable business models do not bridge the paradox of destructive wealth creation, i.e. the fact that individually rational and, in itself, highly successful economic behaviors lead, on the group level and the level of the whole system, to an outcome that by and large is highly destructive, as it places the social, ecological and economic sources of this wealth creation process in existential jeopardy. The paper proposes a new framework of economic reasoning for solving the paradoxes that shape current economic models and the shared value approach. It offers a first set of indicators, the parameters by which the shared value approach can be transformed into a living model for generating resource growth and added value creation cycles that stop the present downward spiral of acceleration, disruption, concentration and resource depletion. The paper thus presents forms of shared value creation that are more holistic and sustainable.