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The purpose of this study is to show how strategic planning can play multiple roles in the context of conflict between two controlling shareholders in a new joint venture.

This study conducted a five-year qualitative case study of a large financial services joint venture co-owned by a Latin American state bank and a European financial company.

The authors found that over time, budgeting and strategic planning had intertwining use to guide strategic decisions, but unexpectedly, strategic planning eventually developed three distinct roles beyond the merely functional, as it also contributed to complex symbolic and political functions.

This study provides guidance on considering different roles taken by strategic planning, as a utilitarian practice, as a symbolic narrative and as a conflict-mediating routine.

This paper aims to map how the debate concerning the relevance of management research historically evolved to (a) determine if B-schools and management researchers have been uninterested bystanders, as critics posit, or if they have had a relevant role, and (b) discover if a pathway for management research becoming socially relevant has been established by such debate.

This study performed a citation network analysis of the scientific literature concerning the relevance of management research. The network had a total of 1,186 research papers published between 1876 and 2018.

The results show that from a minimal to peripheral role at the beginning and middle stages, management researchers have rather taken over this debate since the 1990s; the key components of the citation network reveal a strong convergence on what needs to be done, but no convergence on how to do it; and the debate has failed to generate actual change.

This study maps the debate concerning the relevance of management research since its historical inception using a method underused in management history research. It reveals the main path of the debate and the journals that echoed such debate.

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of popular management literature, proposing a reflection about its role in the managers’ subjectivity. Pop-management literature comprises books and magazines produced by the business media for fast consumption. Adopting the psychoanalytical approach to fairy tales as a perspective, we conducted a content analysis of two success stories published in the business media. We observed that the structure and key elements of fairy tales are present in these stories. We argue that the success stories help to reduce tensions and mitigate frustrations, supposedly offering answers for anxieties and professional problems. We also argue that continued access to these texts might keep individuals linked to their power fantasies and therefore might affect their development and maturing processes.

The concept of organizational identity became a subject of interest within the academic milieu in the mid‐1980s. In this paper, we propose the construct of legacy identities, those persistent identities that, first, endure over time at different levels of expression and, second, are comprised of resilient ideals from the past that represent the perceived persistent character of what the organization used to be. This construct is derived from a case study that portrays the radical transformation of a former state‐owned Brazilian company that became a subsidiary of a North American firm and survived the crisis that originated from its parent company’s debacle. Building on data from the case study, we develop a framework that shows the salience of different identities through time in the company and seek to explain the dynamics underlying these changes.

Considering that MBA programs have been the focus of many evaluations and much criticism in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the objective and subjective effects on careers experienced by part-time MBA students and graduates.

To achieve this purpose the authors conducted an empirical research, involving more than 700 students and graduates of three part-time MBA programs in Brazil.

The authors found that students and graduates experience more subjective than objective effects of such programs in their careers and that the subjective effects are primarily related to self-confidence, employability, expansion of business view, and ability to “play the game.”

The authors note two limitations of the study. First, the study focussed on Brazilian programs and cannot be generalized to other countries or contexts. Second, the study was based on the perceptions of students and graduates.

The authors believe that this study makes a contribution for program coordinators in business schools. By re-balancing attention among objective subjective effects, coordinators might improve their programs.

This study makes three contributions to the knowledge of the effects of MBAs. First, it provides insight into students’ perspectives. Second, it increases the knowledge of the subjective effects of MBAs on the careers of students. And third, it focusses on part-time programs in a developing nation rather than on full-time programs in a developed nation such as the USA, as is often the case.

In this paper, the authors contrast complex thinking and reductionism in organizational transformation processes, focusing on enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP has been promoted as a management panacea, and has resulted in immense investments by companies around the globe. Not surprisingly, many implementations fail to match expectations. For those dealing with organizational change, the ERP phenomenon may sound uncomfortably familiar: change theorists and practitioners have witnessed the coming and going of management panaceas for quite some time. This study presents an exploratory survey of 28 implementation experiences and discusses reductionism in the realm of ERP implementations. It is argued that by applying complex thinking we may open new avenues to explain these processes.

The use of metaphoric language has grown in prevalence in recent years. Frontline organizations have become “magical kingdoms”: ethereal places where image and substance rarely coincide, and where metaphors turn into powerful tools for consultants and change agents. At the same time, scholars explore the “wonderful world of metaphors”. Once simple figures of speech, metaphors have been transformed into a respectable approach for organizational analysis. Although millenarian, the theatre metaphor constitutes an attractive system of ideas for studying organizational phenomena. In this paper, the theatre metaphor is used as a point of departure for the development of another dramaturgical metaphor: the cinema metaphor. It is suggested that the latter might provide a better perspective for studying contemporary organizations in the age of spectacle.