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Theories of organizational learning and sustainability must be able to respond to contemporary social issues and accommodate, in some way, the multiplicity of perspectives that are present in society on these topics. One way of developing multi‐perspectival capacities in the scientific understandings is through the building of metatheory. Nowhere is this task more urgently needed than in the study of organisational sustainability. To be sustainable, organisations must not only meet economic, environmental, social and governance requirements but also learn to embody them in their practices and values even during times of turbulence and extraordinary upheaval. The purpose of this paper is to propose a metatheoretical approach to organizational sustainability that can accommodate this plurality.

Three important metatheoretical lenses – the developmental, internal‐external and learning lenses – are presented which have particular relevance to turbulent organizational environments and the transformational imperatives that arise from them. These lenses are then used individually and in combination to discuss several paradoxes related to learning and sustainability issues.

The growth, learning and sustainability paradoxes present a number of challenges to organisational learning capacities that can be usefully discussed within a metatheoretical context. The set of metatheoretical lenses identified here provide some new avenues for achieving authentic sustainability.

There are two important implications of metatheoretical discussion. The first is the opening up of new directions for middle‐range theory. The second is the capacity of metatheory to critically examine extant theories and research paradigms. Several issues are raised in this paper concerning the evaluation of current theories of organisational learning and sustainability.

The metatheoretical approach to learning and sustainability proposed here resolves some fundamental paradoxes facing organisations and it opens up new ways of conceptualising the radical transformations required to meet the sustainability challenges that are being faced in the twenty‐first century.

This paper aims to propose a multi-level integrative research framework anchored in an institutional theory that can successfully capture the multitude of factors affecting the expression of female entrepreneurship in context. Although female entrepreneurship is known to contribute to economic growth and vitality, and to enhance the diversity of employment in any economic system, there is very little research pertaining to female entrepreneurship in the Middle East. The authors use this framework to provide insights into multi-level factors enabling and constraining the experience of female entrepreneurship in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and advance knowledge of female entrepreneurship in a particular Middle Eastern context as well as cross-nationally.

Analytical framework and qualitative research methodology consisting of focus group meetings and interviews with 15 female entrepreneurs and five male partners in the UAE.

Our findings aptly highlight the salience of a complex set of entangled factors lying at multiple levels of analysis in shaping female entrepreneurship in the UAE. Our findings also accentuate the importance of the institutional and social contexts in shaping the situational opportunities and constraints that affect female entrepreneurship and its complex expressions in a particular society. Although our findings document a positive tide of change in favor of female entrepreneurship, they also reveal the persistence of various traces of stereotypes and patriarchy that continue to constrain the free expressions of female entrepreneurship in the UAE.

This study contributes empirically by conveying the lived experiences of a sample of women entrepreneurs in the UAE, but the results cannot be generalized given the limited size of the sample investigated. Conceptually, the analytical framework proposed in this paper represents a simplified heuristic tool rather than an explanatory model of the complex dynamics and interplays between different levels of analysis and institutional pressures when examining female entrepreneurship.

The value added of this research is to present original insights into female entrepreneurship from a vibrant Middle Eastern context, namely, the UAE, a country that has attracted and witnessed increasing attention in recent years in the context of globalization. In view of the Western-centric nature of academic publication on the topic, there is a real need for fresh theoretical and empirical insights stemming from an Arab-Middle Eastern context to advance knowledge and scholarship in this area.

A review of extant literatures shows that most mergers fail during the integration process. Little is known about how the realization of operating synergies and dissemination of available know-how in the merged firm are managed in the post-merger phase. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights on the process of integrating operating synergies by focusing on the critical success factors that facilitate integration of the skills of merged banks.

The authors draw on three research traditions in merger literature and reconcile them with three dimensions of integration. In-depth interviews were conducted with Nordea managers from four Nordic countries.

Having learned from the mistakes of previous mergers, Nordea’s “guiding star” for managing its post-merger integration process was expressed as focus, speed and performance from top management. A hands-on leadership style, vision-led thinking, a bias for action, involvement of the entire staff, continuous focus on customers, open and honest communication with employees are critical to success.

The motive for a merger has an important impact on the degree of interaction and degree of integration. The authors expand on previous findings by, among other things, synthesizing three theoretical lenses into an integrative model, and addresses post-merger issues with a sharp eye towards clear managerial relevance.

The authors respond to the call to expand inter-firm relationships study beyond the narrow dyadic relationship focus and not solely conceptualize mergers as one of companies’ entry modes to implement mechanistic growth strategy. The three dimensions of integration imbued with three research traditions in merger literature provides us with a conceptual lens to conceive mergers also as engines for change emerging from the merged firms to enhance a bespoke performance of their business process.

The servitization of manufacturing is a diverse and complex field of research interest. The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative and organising lens for viewing the various contributions to knowledge production from those research communities addressing servitization. To achieve this, the paper aims to set out to address two principal questions, namely where are the knowledge stocks and flows amongst the research communities? And what are generic research concerns being addressed by these communities?

Using an evidenced-based approach, the authors have performed a systematic review of the research literature associated with the servitization of manufacturing. This investigation incorporates a descriptive and thematic analysis of 148 academic and scholarly papers from 103 different lead authors in 68 international peer-reviewed journals.

The work proposes support for the existence of distinct researcher communities, namely services marketing, service management, operations management, product-service systems and service science management and engineering, which are contributing to knowledge production in the servitization of manufacturing. Knowledge stocks within all communities associated with research in the servitization of manufacturing have dramatically increased since the mid-1990s. The trends clearly reveal that the operations community is in receipt of the majority of citations relating to the servitization of manufacturing. In terms of knowledge flows, it is apparent that the more mature communities are drawing on more locally produced knowledge stocks, whereas the emergent communities are drawing on a knowledge base more evenly distributed across all the communities. The results are indicative of varying degrees of interdependency amongst the communities. The generic research concerns being addressed within the communities are associated with the concepts of product-service differentiation, competitive strategy, customer value, customer relationships and product-service configuration.

This research has further developed and articulated the identities of distinct researcher communities actively contributing to knowledge production in the servitization of manufacturing, and to what extent they are pursuing common research agendas. This study provides an improved descriptive and thematic awareness of the resulting body of knowledge, allowing the field of servitization to progress in a more informed and multidisciplinary fashion.

The importance of contextualizing theory development in entrepreneurship education has recently been raised. Nevertheless, efforts often lead to rather decontextualized concepts and generic theories that are unable to bring together the complexities of applying entrepreneurship education to particular institutional logics and local pedagogical understandings. Based on a narrow and selective literature review, this study aims to identify and reconstruct how entrepreneurship education can adjust to the disciplines in which it unfolds. To contribute to transcending this dilemma, this article raises the following question: How can entrepreneurship education be understood in a differentiated manner and contextually reconstructed to the many disciplines and professions in which it unfolds?

The study follows the general idea of an integrative literature review, meaning that a few references, in particular Jones' work on a signature pedagogy for entrepreneurship education, led to a deeper search of the older background literature from Shulman on the idea of a signature pedagogy for professions.

The authors identify three existing notions (MK-0, MK-1 and MK-2) of signature pedagogy within entrepreneurship education and propose a fourth notion that combines the established understandings into a signature pedagogy, MK-3, in which entrepreneurship education should be adjusted to the disciplines in which it unfolds, by integrating and balancing general, disciplinary/professional and entrepreneurial purposes of education.

Accepting that context matters to entrepreneurship education creates a need for understanding the contextual influence on pedagogies. The paper contributes by establishing a theory-based framework that can help educators formulate and balance general, professional and entrepreneurial purposes of education, depending on the particular context of their educational activities. Furthermore, the paper is a call to action for additional scholarship that identifies avenues for future research.

Smart cities and their internationalization process and efforts in order to gain the competitive advantage in the international arena have received a great deal of attention by marketing scholars and practitioners alike. Yet, the growing number of studies focused on this topic has led to considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion.

To move the domain forward, this study applies the systematic review methodology and reviews 41 peer-reviewed articles published in highly esteemed publication outlets.

Building on the antecedents–phenomenon–consequences framework, the authors discuss the antecedents and consequences of the various innovative marketing strategies that smart cities adopt for their internationalization and development of an international competitive advantage. In the process of doing so, the authors synthesize the findings of the studies as well as literature gaps that provide fruitful avenues for future research.

This article offers a systematic review of extant marketing research on smart cities and their efforts to internationalize. In particular, this study advances the conceptual development of smart city internationalization and innovation by a marketing lens, provides an integrative, international-oriented framework that maps the extant literature across disciplines and countries, expands the boundaries of this research domain into new research paths and offers implications for policy and practice.

Strategic positioning of foreign firms in a host market is vital for their success. By integrating the resource partitioning theory and the resource-based view, this study aims to investigate foreign firms’ strategic positioning (i.e. their choice of generalist or specialist positioning strategy) and its performance implications in the US market.

The final sample includes 212 foreign companies from 28 countries operating in the US market. Multiple data sources were used to collect data of these foreign companies’ subsidiaries in the USA This study used logistic regression to test its major hypotheses.

The results of this study suggest that a generalist positioning strategy is positively related to performance in a host market. It is also found that market concentration and local market knowledge moderate this strategic positioning – performance relationship.

For a foreign firm that enters a host market, market concentration (an industry-level factor) in the host market and the firm’s local market knowledge (a firm-specific factor) play prominent roles in the strategic positioning – performance relationship.

This study offers a novel perspective of international business strategy by applying the lens of resource partitioning theory to study the relationships between multinational enterprises’ strategic positioning and performance. This study contributes to the strategy literature in that it examines the performance implications of firms’ strategic positioning (i.e. generalist or specialist positioning).

What makes family influence so influential in the family firm? Time and again, research studies point to family influence as a factor that significantly impacts decision-making in the family business, thus highlighting the need to investigate the variables which cause family influence to be so powerful. The purpose of this study is to explore the construct of family influence in the family firm, under an integrative lens that combines insights from Institutional Theory and the Resource-Based View.

The quantitative approach was used using a 35-item survey measuring 6 constructs, where data collection yielded a total of 206 completed surveys included in the data analysis. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS (3.0) and results were appropriately reported.

The findings of this study propose that the two theoretical perspectives can be useful in explaining how various factors are able to intensify family influence on strategic family firm decisions like internationalization. Specifically, the lack of resources, government support, managerial knowledge and capability in foreign markets represent serious barriers that render the family firm more reliant on and subjected to family influence. Similarly, informal institutions like the fear of failure in foreign markets and uncertainty avoidance often make the family firm more dependent on, and accepting of, family influence.

The path analysis undertaken in this study has empirically depicted how resource-related and institution-based forces can together augment the effects of “family influence,” making it a more powerful and prohibitive factor in the internationalization decision, thus offering an insightful interpretation of these results and valuable practical and theoretical implications.

Health service organizations and professionals are under increasing pressure to work together to deliver integrated patient care. A common understanding of integration strategies may facilitate the delivery of integrated care across inter‐organizational and inter‐professional boundaries. This paper aims to build a framework for exploring and potentially aligning multiple stakeholder perspectives of systems integration.

The authors draw from the literature on shared mental models, strategic management and change, framing, stakeholder management, and systems theory to develop a new construct, Mental Models of Integrated Care (MMIC), which consists of three types of mental models, i.e. integration‐task, system‐role, and integration‐belief.

The MMIC construct encompasses many of the known barriers and enablers to integrating care while also providing a comprehensive, theory‐based framework of psychological factors that may influence inter‐organizational and inter‐professional relations. While the existing literature on integration focuses on optimizing structures and processes, the MMIC construct emphasizes the convergence and divergence of stakeholders' knowledge and beliefs, and how these underlying cognitions influence interactions (or lack thereof) across the continuum of care.

MMIC may help to: explain what differentiates effective from ineffective integration initiatives; determine system readiness to integrate; diagnose integration problems; and develop interventions for enhancing integrative processes and ultimately the delivery of integrated care.

Global interest and ongoing challenges in integrating care underline the need for research on the mental models that characterize the behaviors of actors within health systems; the proposed framework offers a starting point for applying a cognitive perspective to health systems integration.

This paper aims to develop an integrated model to analyse the corporate social responsibility (CSR) perception of organizations in a regulated environment. The developed model is used as a basis to analyse practice and perception of CSR using the obligation-opportunity concepts.

The paper critically reviews the seminal literature and identifies inherent shortcomings in CSR’s existing conceptualizations. The concepts of implicit and explicit CSR are used to build a case for the integrated obligation-opportunity conceptual model. To analyse the CSR perception of select Indian organizations, a set of propositions are developed. The propositions are evaluated using the interpretive qualitative approach to analyse interviews from 12 CSR heads across 10 organizations.

The paper develops an obligation-opportunity conceptual model as an analytical tool to visually map existing CSR models and analyse organizations’ CSR perceptions. The results of the analysis of interviews suggest: the organizations in India are contributing towards CSR to abide by the law that is as an obligation; organizations can contribute towards strategic CSR by incorporating economic, social and environmental responsibilities simultaneously with the help of the developed model; CSR environment in India is implicitly-explicit in nature.

The proposed obligation-opportunity model enables mapping different theories along the dimensions of obligation-opportunity conceptualizations. It can be a powerful tool for researchers and practitioners to understand, research and strategically implement CSR in the given institutional environment.