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International business (IB) as a discipline has given limited attention to contemporary grand challenges of inequality, global warming, aging populations, endemic health crises, and de-globalization, in all of which multinationals are either central to the problem or may offer some solutions. A historical perspective makes clear the reason for this neglect. IB theory and implicit assumptions were shaped during the discipline’s formative period during the 1960s and the 1970s. This has left it excessively focused on the growth of manufacturing multinationals, and with naïve assumptions about the linear and benevolent progress of globalization. This mental toolkit is ill-equipped to understand the present. Engaging deeply with history can also enhance the contextual intelligence of IB. Academy of International Business’s founders barely questioned the positive impact of multinationals, yet historical evidence points to many negative outcomes, and to globalization driving inequality. Understanding how implicit assumptions and biases arose is the first step to re-set IB with research questions and methodologies relevant to a turbulent and de-globalized age.

This paper proposes to rethink the concepts of relevance and usefulness and their relation to the theory–practice gap in management research.

On the basis of the cognitive-linguistic relevance theory or inferential pragmatics, supplemented by insights from information science, we define relevance as a general conceptual category, while reserving usefulness for the instrumental application in a particular case.

There is no reason to hold onto the difference between theoretical and practical relevance, nor to distinguish between instrumental and conceptual relevance.

This novel approach will help to clarify the confusion in the field and contribute to a better understanding of the added value of management research.

Performance management can play an important role in the implementation of strategic change, by aligning employees’ mindsets and behavior with organizational goals. However, the ways in which employees react to change efforts aided by performance management practices are far from straight-forward. In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding employees’ reactions to strategic change as a consequence of their occupational identities and their performance management outcome. We further apply the framework to an empirical study of a strategic change initiative in a school organization that was supported by a new performance management practice. We show how variations in perceived identity threat translate into four distinct patterns of emotional and behavioral reactions, where only one represents whole-hearted change acceptance. The study contributes to our understanding of individual- and group-level heterogeneity in reactions to strategic change, and also to a more nuanced conception of identity threat.

This chapter examines the tensions inherent in conceptions of social justice as they relate to educational administrator preparation programs. In order to determine how social justice is conceptualized in K-12 administrator preparation in Ontario, Canada, we conduct a document analysis of publicly available information related to provincial leadership preparation programs. We identify an ideological bias toward managerial and transformational leadership paradigms which favor externally mandated outcomes that unintentionally reinstate hierarchical management paradigms and democratic forms of racism (Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, 2000). Drawing on critical democratic and antiracist literature and our own research and practice, we propose an approach to leadership preparation that can support diversity and transformative praxis while working within a mandated transformational paradigm.

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory paper, the authors put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation – values, ownership, management, and social relations – and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, the authors situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

All teachers are leaders by the nature of their work. They lead within their schools, whether implicitly or explicitly, for good or for bad, proactively or reactively. In this chapter, we present a framework of teacher leadership that is an assemblage of our previously published works. We use this chapter to provide a consolidated view of how to help all teachers to acknowledge, understand, and use their “awesome” power as leaders to transform their classrooms, schools, and communities. Schools are sites of social, political, and economic influence and teachers play key roles in either maintaining the status quo or creating environments that are transformative and equitable for all members. We argue that a teacher's power is essential both within and beyond the walls of the classroom. Teachers have the capacity and power to participate in change decisions and efforts that traditionally either have been tacitly assumed by them or deliberately defined by others. By having an understanding of critical leadership or leadership for social justice, teachers will be more prepared to identify and resist the variety of contexts which threaten their professional expertise and contexts that deliberately question their professional knowledge.

This chapter examines the possibilities of economic growth in Russia from the perspective of the development of organizational capability, namely through the study of best managerial practices of multinational companies (MNCs) doing business in Russia, and their use by Russian companies. With tightening competition, companies are forced to focus on the development of organizational capabilities. Our large-scale empirical research into the managerial capabilities and management practices of MNCs and Russian companies employs a comprehensive sample of 1,530 companies and 1,245 companies in 2016 and 2017, respectively, covering the 10 main sectors of economic activity in Moscow and the Moscow region. The analysis was performed across five managerial capabilities: communication, leadership, problem-solving and decision-making, conflict resolution, and motivation, each subdivided into five management practices. Using statistical methods, we identified the major statistically significant differences in and between the managerial practices of MNCs and Russian companies operating in the Russian market, and their dynamics from 2016 to 2017. Taking MNCs operating in the Russian market as a benchmark, we discover that Russian companies need to close the gap in 17 out of the 25 managerial practices in order to maintain competitiveness in the Russian market and be able to influence their economic growth in Russia.

This chapter asks how we can understand the managerial practices in open innovation, a recently popularized way of organizing innovative work. Open innovation implies opening up the borders of the organization, creating a context where conventional steering and managerial tools no longer apply. Utilizing a collaborative research approach, following an open innovation collaboration over 8 years, this chapter outlines the managerial practices that direct the collaboration. These practices are important for meaning making and identity creation in the collaboration and can be understood as a form of authorship, a continuous intervention strategy to manage, develop and change the organizational context.

In this chapter, the authors describe and explain how executive management enacts strategizing routines to strengthen their entrepreneurial agility, as a precondition to make new strategic moves possible. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics research program, by showing how the dynamics of routines, in a strategy context, shape strategic outcomes: the authors describe four strategizing routines – distancing, evaluating, experimenting, and re-assembling – as a particular promising focus for routine and strategy research. The authors discuss executive management’s enactment of such routines as part of their strategy work. The authors show how routine enactment makes entrepreneurial agility and new strategic moves possible. By exploring the dynamics of strategizing routines and their impact on strategic outcomes, the authors at the same time benefit from and contribute to the strategy-as-practice research program. Empirically, the authors study how the executive management of Hoechst AG successfully made unthinkable new strategic moves possible, discussable, and realizable in the context of the corporation’s strategic transformation between 1994 and 1996.