Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explain thought leadership and show how it compares with its positional counterpart.

The objective is achieved through a conceptual comparison of thought leadership with conventional positional leadership to show that the latter contains managerial elements or overtones that are lacking in thought leadership which is simply the championing of new directions.

Thought leadership is the championing of new ideas rather than anything to do with managing people or helping a group achieve a goal. It can be directed upwards and ends once senior managers accept the proposed ideas. Such leadership cannot be defined in terms of enabling or managing a team to achieve a task, because those who show upwards leadership normally do not manage their superiors.

Regardless of how important it is for knowledge workers to be self‐managing, my claim is that thought leadership must be cultivated as the key form of distributed leadership in any organization that depends on continuous improvement and constant innovation to prosper. The practical implication is that managers need to move beyond simply empowering employees to manage themselves and start fostering bottom up leadership conceived as championing new ideas.

Highlights a type of leadership that is widely distributed throughout all organizations that compete on the basis of innovation or wherever all employees need to be initiating process improvements. Thought leadership is very different from what is commonly conceived as distributed leadership, such as “shared leadership” or “leaderful” behavior both of which are based on the usual mixture of management and leadership ideas whereby the person in charge of a group, formally or otherwise, both initiates new directions and manages their implementation.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

In this chapter, the authors introduce Ludwik Fleck and his ideas of “thought style” and “thought collective” to suggest a re-thinking of the divide between “micro” and “macro” that has perhaps more inhibited than inspired organization studies in general, and institutional theory in particular. With Fleck, the authors argue that there is no such thing as thought style-neutral cognition or undirected perception: meaning, constituted through a specific thought style shared by a thought collective, permeates cognition, judgment, perception, and thought. The authors illustrate our argument with the longitudinal case study of Sydney 2030 (i.e., the strategy-making process of the City of Sydney, Australia). The case suggests that – regardless of its actual implementation – a strategy is successful to the extent to which it shapes the socio-cognitive infrastructure of a collective and enables those engaged in city-making to think and act collectively.

The purpose of this paper is to show the benefits of bridging the gap between supply chain management (SCM) and political philosophy to challenge the underlying assumptions about SCM concepts and open doors to novel theory building.

A thought experiment is conducted to illustrate how the two philosophers Niccolò Machiavelli and Jürgen Habermas would tackle sustainability issues in coffee supply chains from a research perspective. The thought experiment is carried out using data from 30 semi-structured interviews with actors from the coffee industry. Supplementing the thought experiment with empirical insights allows for a deeper understanding of supply chain dynamics and how these are impacted by the application of the philosophical viewpoints.

The research stresses the importance of SCM scholars being aware of the underlying assumptions of their research, as these have a remarkable impact on theory building. A combination of empirical insights and philosophical understandings makes it possible to reflect on the underlying concepts of SCM, providing suggestions for reimagining SCM.

The contribution of the research is twofold. First, the paper presents an original view on SCM, as the thought experiment is introduced as an approach to better understand SCM concepts. By challenging the underlying assumptions with political philosophy, researchers will be better equipped to address grand challenges in the twenty-first century. Second, this is exemplified by the case study of the coffee supply chain, which provides the reader with insight into the dynamics of supply chains with prevalent power differences.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate historical thinking in dealing with problems of marketing thought, by explaining the advantages of studying the history of a discipline's ideas; examining what has been included in prior histories; and evaluating the completeness of coverage in Tadajewski and Jones' (2008) The History of Marketing Thought.

This paper presents a comparative analysis based upon prior histories of marketing thought.

For teaching, with modest supplementation, The History of Marketing Thought provides a full appreciation of the intellectual heritage of marketing. For research purposes, The History of Marketing Thought does reasonably well in organizing concepts and theories into schools of marketing thought but less well in showing how these ideas can be organized across the readings to produce new knowledge.

There were some important omissions in the collection. Marketing's leading thinker was largely neglected and many significant problems for marketing thought are overlooked. There was no discussion of methodological issues and minimal editorial commentary connected the parts and sections to provide a research thrust to the work. Consequently, it is recommended that another volume or two be added to this set.

The educational value of this work is in transmitting the knowledge base of the discipline from one generation of marketing scholars to the next. It is only after the ideas developed by earlier marketing thinkers are fully understood that innovative theories can be constructed and new knowledge created.

A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

The purpose of this article is to study how the German historical schools are treated in the histories of economic thought as the background for an exploration of some historiographical issues in the history of economic thought.

The study describes the contributions of the members of the German historical schools from a variety of different viewpoints and attitudes toward the history of economic thought.

One conclusion is that several of the things most of the economists of the German historical schools desired are now part of mainstream economics. These include an enlarged scope of economics, changes in the role of the state in economic life, attention to the relationships of law and economics and recognition of the importance of history. Another conclusion is that several historiographical and methodological problems important for the history of economic thought need further study.

The study helps to explain and understand some historiographical aspects of the history of economic thought. It examines practices, principles, theories, methodology and forms of presentation of scholarly historical research on one subject in the history of economic thought.

Establishing thought leadership by disseminating relevant digital content through social media has become one of the main priorities for marketers in business-to-business (B2B) settings. However, academic research has only recently started to address this phenomenon. In particular, researchers have not yet examined whether and how thought leadership positively influences a firm’s relationship with its customers. This paper aims to propose and test a model to explain how a firm’s thought leadership improves its customer relationship performance.

A cross-sectional research design was applied using covariance-based structural equation modeling to estimate the suggested model. Data were collected from a sample of 160 firms in different industries that create and share content on social media.

Thought leadership on social media positively influences brand performance and, in turn, customer relationship performance in B2B settings. Moreover, establishing thought leadership on social media results from specific thought leadership capabilities and is supported by social media capabilities.

This study advances knowledge on social media thought leadership in B2B settings by proposing and testing a model that combines available insights from three distinct but interrelated B2B streams of studies: branding, social media marketing and thought leadership. Moreover, this study conceptualizes the effects of thought leadership, which is consistent with the relational nature of B2B settings. In fact, it explores thought leadership as a means to maintain and strengthen business relationships. However, further studies are needed to explore detailed strategies that affect the effectiveness of thought leadership.

The results provide managers with evidence on the effectiveness of a thought leadership strategy. Establishing thought leadership on social media can help to nurture customer relationships over time. By sharing valuable content, suppliers can continuously demonstrate their cutting-edge competences and expertise, thus keeping their brand relevant to customers.

This is the first study to provide evidence of the benefits of social media thought leadership on customer relationships in B2B settings.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and position the work by Tadajewski and Jones on The History of Marketing Thought as it relates to complexity sciences and the future of marketing thought.

A conceptual discussion is provided based upon a series of identified subject trends in the history of marketing thought.

There appears to be a common denominator across the addressed subject trends in The History of Marketing Thought, namely the movement from simplicity towards complexity. Marketing thought is mostly descriptive, and to some extent explanatory, but it has not yet reached the level of providing predictability.

The future of marketing thought may benefit from the inclusion and inspiration of approaches derived from the complexity sciences.

The author poses some concerns regarding the future of marketing thought.

The author contends that there is a need for attention to be paid to the evident movement from simplicity towards complexity in marketing thought.