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Liberal arts colleges (LACs) have played a crucial role in the foundation and development of the US higher education system. Today, these schools face numerous organizational and environmental challenges that threaten their performance and even survival. This paper aims to examine whether Senge’s (1990) vision of the learning organization can serve a useful function in responding to these challenges.

A conceptual analysis was conducted based on research relating to learning organizations, LACs and the liberal arts tradition.

The paper identifies significant congruence between learning organization and liberal arts/liberal learning principles. LACs may benefit from applying and modifying Senge’s (1990) framework to their own unique situations.

While The Fifth Discipline has certainly contributed to the lexicon of higher education, the role that Senge’s (1990) framework plays in LACs has received scant research attention. This paper investigates the applicability of Senge’s approach to an underexplored context.

The purpose of this study is to explain how factors relating to resource availability affect managerial risk-taking with regard to the geographic and institutional proximity of cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) targets. The paper further considers the impact of organizational learning by testing the moderating effect of the acquiring firms’ prior international M&A experience.

This study uses linear regression with robust standard errors to account for dependence among clustered observations at the firm level. The authors used country and industry fixed-effects specifications to account for unobserved heterogeneity.

The results suggest that when internal and external resources are more abundant, firms pursue cross-border M&As that are more geographically and institutionally distant. The findings further indicate that a firm’s prior international M&A experience positively moderates the aforementioned relationships..

Extending the behavioral theory of the firm beyond organizational slack resources, the results highlight the importance of taking a multi-level, open-systems perspective of the strategic impact of resource availability. The authors’ theory and findings also provide a more nuanced view of the critical role organizational learning plays in the relationship between resource availability and organizational outcomes.

This is the first study to the authors’ knowledge that develops and tests a theoretical model exploring the impact of both internal (organizational slack) and external (environmental munificence at both the industry and home-country levels) resource availability, as well as prior organizational experience on an important multinational business practice.

Organizational learning has long been recognized as an important determinant of organizational performance and sustainability. Existing research, however, has commonly viewed organizational learning as a single-level, top-down and organized organizational event initiated by the leader. This particular perspective may fall short of explaining the effect of employee spontaneous workplace behaviors on organizational learning. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop a multilevel theoretical model exploring how an employee’s upward helping and voice behavior foster organizational learning through developing leadership capital.

A conceptual analysis was conducted by incorporating relevant research.

This paper proposes the following. First, an employee’s upward helping increases a leader’s human capital and social capital. Second, the leader’s human capital and social capital enhance the employee’s psychological empowerment and knowledge leadership. Third, the employee’s psychological empowerment leads to employee voice behavior. Fourth, employee voice behavior strengthens knowledge leadership. Finally, knowledge leadership promotes organizational learning.

This paper provides a theoretical framework for future research attempting to understand organizational learning from a multilevel, bottom-up perspective. Practically, this paper offers several implications that help promote organizational learning through encouraging employee upward helping and voice behavior.

In the recent literature on financialization and the rise of investor capitalism, the successor of managerial capitalism, which dominated until the 1970s, suggests that the firm is today enacted as a bundle of financial assets managed to create value for the shareholders. This paper aims to demonstrate how such views are established relatively recently by examining leadership literature published in the 1970s, representing an entirely different view of leadership work, the role of the firm and capital–labour relations.

Two books and one Harvard Business Review article published by the Volvo CEO Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, one of the most prominent Swedish industry leaders of the past century and one of the architects behind Volvo’s internationally renowned Kalmar and Uddevalla plants in Sweden, are examined. Based on a critical discourse analysis framework, these two volumes are treated as representatives of what Alfred Chandler speaks of as the regime managerial capitalism, today largely displaced by the regime of investor capitalism.

Gyllenhammar’s discourses stresses the role of the corporations as serving a wider social community than merely the shareholders, and regard the manufacturing industry as the legitimate site for the development of new production systems better suited to a more educated workforce demanding more qualified work assignments and greater autonomy. This argument, in favour of a view of the corporation as being socially embedded and responsive to wider social needs, can be contrasted against the contemporary view of leadership and corporate governance practice.

The paper addresses the shift from managerial capitalist regime of the post-Second World War period to the investor capitalism of the financialized economy and the financialized firm by contrasting leadership writing of the 1970s against today’s strong focus on shareholder enrichment and the enactment of CEOs and directors as the servants of the capital owners. A long-term perspective on the changes occurring over the past four decades may enable a better understanding how leadership, governance and industry are subject to ongoing re-interpretations and understanding in the face of novel economic, social and political conditions.

This paper aims to challenge singular definitions, measurements and applications of corporate reputation which tend to be reductionist. The authors rebuff such narrow representations of reputation by showing the multiplicity of reputation in the case of a global management consulting firm and demonstrate how it has sustained such reputations.

Using a large cross-country qualitative case study based on interviews, focus groups, non-participant observations, workshops and a fieldwork diary, dimensions of reputation are highlighted by drawing on perceptions from multiple stakeholder groups in different geographies.

The authors find significant differences in perceptions of reputation between and within stakeholder groups, with perceptions changing across dimensions and geographies.

The theoretical implications of the research indicate a plurality of extant reputations, suggesting that a prism is more suited to representing corporate reputation than a singular, lens-like focus which is too narrow to constitute reputation. This paper offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how global firms can build and sustain multiple and competing corporate reputations.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on corporate reputation and internationalization to identify key research theories, contexts, characteristics, methodologies, applications, limitations and opportunities for future research on the interlinks between these two complex constructs.

Elements of systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis were used to analyze theories, contexts, characteristics, methodologies and opportunities for future research based on 90 articles published in 50 journals over 27 years.

The findings suggest that this is a contemporary yet expanding research field explored from a variety of theoretical, methodological and empirical standpoints, which hinders broad conclusions and warrants further research. More specifically, this paper identifies three broad research streams that link international expansion and corporate reputation and suggests avenues for future studies: cross-national institutions, strategic decisions and corporate reputation; international marketing, consumers and brand credibility; and corporate image, international trade and investment flows.

Reputation and internationalization are constructs with multiple applications and interpretations. The way companies build, maintain and extend their reputation and legitimacy, and the drivers, motives and difficulties faced by them when expanding operations internationally have been widely studied separately. This manuscript reviews the nascent and promising linkage between these two elements that have recently drawn the attention of business practitioners and scholars alike.