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The rapid, yet low-profit, expansion of the production capacity of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) represents a remarkable phenomenon. However, the motivation behind this key operational decision remains underexplored, especially concerning the prioritization of sociopolitical and financial goals in operations management. Drawing on the multiple-goal model in the behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF), the authors' study aims to examine how SOE capacity expansion is driven by performance feedback regarding the sociopolitical goal of employment provision and how SOEs differently prioritize sociopolitical and financial goals based on negative versus positive feedback on the sociopolitical goal.

The authors' study uses panel data on 826 Chinese SOEs in manufacturing industries from 2011 to 2019. The authors employ the fixed-effects model with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, which are robust to heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence.

The authors find that SOEs increase capacity expansion as sociopolitical feedback becomes more negative, but they may not increase capacity expansion in response to positive sociopolitical feedback. Moreover, negative profitability feedback strengthens SOEs' capacity expansion in response to negative sociopolitical feedback. In contrast, negative profitability feedback weakens their response to positive sociopolitical feedback.

The authors' study offers a novel behavioral explanation of SOEs' operational decisions regarding capacity expansion. While the literature has traditionally assumed multiple goals as either hierarchical or compatible, the authors extend the BTOF's multiple-goal model to illuminate when firms pursue sociopolitical and financial goals as compatible (i.e. the activation rule) versus hierarchical (i.e. the sequential rule), thereby reconciling their tension in distinct performance situations. Practically, the authors provide fine-grained insights into how operations managers can prioritize multiple goals when making operational decisions. The authors' study also shows how policymakers can influence SOE operations to pursue sociopolitical goals for public benefit.

Prior research has examined the sociopolitical force as simply a part of all types of environmental pressures, yet we argue that this force calls for a unique examination of marketing's role in firm responses to sociopolitical pressures. Understanding the degree to which firms attempt to manage forces and pressures in the external business environment is key to understanding marketing's role in impeding vs aiding public policy initiatives, and is the problem this research investigates.

Using structural equation modeling, data from 71 firms demonstrate that managing the sociopolitical force is, in fact, distinct from managing the other four market-based forces – consumer demand, supplier power, competition and technological shifts. Managing the sociopolitical force is shown to require fundamentally different skills and resources.

Results suggest that firm sociopolitical receptivity drives attempts to influence this unique external business environmental force, in turn limiting marketplace sociopolitical receptivity. Furthermore, attempts to influence such a unique force relies on resource-light marketing resources, which limits resource-heavy marketing.

Managing a political force with marketplace ramifications involves strategy that utilizes marketing, but is driven by relationships with social and political agents. This is truly an environmental management concept distinct from the management of the other four market-based forces. The analysis in this study demonstrates that managing another environmental force (i.e. competition force) involves different receptivity influences and marketing tactic outcomes.

This paper aims to shed light on the emerging position of companies taking stances on sociopolitical issues and the impact this has on consumers.

The paper uses focus groups, interviews and consumer experiments in various countries, to provide insights as to why brands are taking sociopolitical stances.

Consumers expect brands to take a stance on sociopolitical issues. However, to be credible, a stance needs to be rooted in a long-term commitment that aligns with the brand’s strategy and values. Perceived authenticity is key.

Future studies should aim at broader generalizability and should address various industries.

Differentiating a brand through a sociopolitical stance requires a strategic approach. Brand managers need to identify which issues they should support, how to engage with them and the risks and opportunities involved.

While the impact of brands adopting a sociopolitical stance has been discussed in the mainstream media, there has been a lack of empirical evidence to support the arguments. The results of the four studies discussed in the paper provide insights and demonstrate the brand-related opportunities and risks of taking a sociopolitical stance.

This paper analyzes a multidimensional model of organizational legitimacy, competencies, and resources in order to develop the linkage between institutional and resource-based perspectives by systematically detailing relationships among these factors and organizational viability. The underlying mechanisms of isomorphism and market partitioning serve as a point of departure by which the effects on organizational persistence of two sociocultural processes, cultural (constitutive) legitimation and sociopolitical (regulative) legitimation, are distinguished. Using data on 589 national self-help/mutual-aid organizations, this chapter explores how isomorphism and market partitioning foster legitimacy and promote organizational viability. Results show that the more differentiated an organization’s core competencies and resources, the greater the sociopolitical legitimacy; the more isomorphic an organization’s competencies and resources, the greater the cultural legitimacy. The latter isomorphic processes, however, do not promote greater organizational viability. In fact, while isomorphism legitimates with respect to cultural recognition, it is heterogeneity, not homogeneity, that promotes organizational survival.

Following recent scholarship promoting the study of sports-related texts as a vehicle for examining sociopolitical issues, this study aims to identify methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and to establish how students describe their experiences taking up such activities.

This qualitative study stems from a greater investigation into the teaching of secondary sports literature classes. Data collection involved conducting interviews, observing instruction and gathering artifacts. Driven by guiding research questions, data analysis was conducted in an iterative and recursive manner and multiple validation strategies were used to enhance trustworthiness.

The methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues included a whole-class reading of Season of Life (Marx, 2003) and small-group research into “controversial topics” in sports culture. Student-participants described engaging with those methods and materials as relevant to their personal interests and experiences and revelatory in terms of learning about sociopolitical issues in sports and society.

Scholarship promoting the potential for sports-related content to support literacy instruction has grown in recent years. This study covers new ground, for it documents classroom research to build understandings about the methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and the ways students describe their experiences engaging in such activities.

This paper aims to examine two teachers’ beliefs and practices on teaching writing at an urban, high-performing middle school to determine: What discourses of writing are being taught in an urban, high-performing US public middle school? What factors prevent or enable particular discourses?

Drawing on case study methods, this study uses a single-case design with two seventh-grade teachers at a high-performing urban school as embedded units of analysis. Data collection took place over one semester. Data sources included observations and interviews with the two teachers, an interview with an administrator and multiple instructional artifacts, including unit and lesson plans. Observational data were analyzed using a priori code for writing discourses (Ivanic, 2004) and interview data were analyzed for factors affecting instruction using open, axial and selective coding.

Both teachers enacted extended multi-discourse writing instruction integrating skills, creativity, process, genre and social practices discourses supported by their beliefs and experience; colleagues; students’ relatively high test scores; and relative curricular freedom. However, there was minimal evidence of a sociopolitical discourse aligned with critical literacy practices. Limits to the sociopolitical discourse included a lack of a social justice orientation, an influx of low-performing students, a focus on raising test scores, data-focused professional development and district pacing guides. Racism is also considered as an underlying structural factor undermining the sociopolitical discourse.

Although generalizability is limited because of the small sample size and the unique context of this study, two major implications are the need to layer discourses in writing instruction while centering critical pedagogy and develop teacher beliefs and knowledge. To support these two implications, this study suggests developing university-school partnerships and professional development opportunities that create a community of practice around comprehensive writing instruction. Future research will involve continuing to work with the participants in this study and documenting the effects of providing theory and tools for integrating the sociopolitical discourse into middle school curricula and instruction.

This study contributes to the field of literacy education’s understanding of internal and external factors limiting the sociopolitical discourse in a high-performing, urban middle school in the USA, an understudied context.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper concentrates on companies' use of political or marketing strategies in relation to sociopolitical pressures. Managing sociopolitical forces is a practice that's separate from managing other market-based forces, due to this needing a different skillset. Engaging with sociopolitical agents does make firms more likely to attempt to influence threatening government public policy. A relationship-based strategy to engage with social and political agents was reliably shown to elevate the capacity of a company to respond to and manage sociopolitical forces with marketplace consequences, for example, in the arena of health.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The practice of corporate chief executive officer (CEOs) engaging in sociopolitical activism on issues both related and unrelated to their companies is gaining attention in the popular press and among management scholars. The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and motivations of CEO sociopolitical activism in a typology of influences internal and external to the CEO and to the organization. This study’s typology highlights the need for greater understanding of CEOs’ sociopolitical activism for the CEO as an individual actor and for the company they represent.

This study’s approach is to conceptually review the literature on CEO activism and to create a theoretic framework for future analysis of the antecedents and motivations and ramifications of CEOs’ sociopolitical activism for the CEO as an individual actor and for the company they represent. The author highlights four theories and seeks future application of these theories to the phenomena in a typology.

The typology highlights the application of management theories to various ramifications of CEO activism to four influences on CEO activities. Upper echelons theory helps explain the motivation of a CEO internally, whereas agency theory applies to CEO activism internal to the CEO and external to the organizational operations. External to the CEO, organizational culture theory supports responses internal to the organization, and stakeholder theory provides insight into responses external to the CEO and the organization.

This study provides conceptual support for the study of CEO activism and encourages future research on the topic.

Purpose – I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and esthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afro-modernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put.

Design methodology/approach – I engage in an interdisciplinary study of jazz via analyses and commentary on selected texts from several scholarly disciplines.

Findings – To acknowledge the hybridity and social construction of jazz esthetics in no way nullifies the innovations and leadership of African American jazz musicians whose artistic contributions not only significantly shaped modern jazz in the mid-twentieth century but also whose musical voices continue to sound and set esthetical standards in contemporary expressions of jazz (and beyond).

Originality and value – My chapter is highly interdisciplinary, bringing philosophical explanations of race, discourse, and the ontology of music into conversation with numerous sociological and (ethno)musicological insights about jazz.

This study aims to examine the unique lived experiences of international graduate students in light of COVID-19 and the recent sociopolitical climate in the USA (e.g. Black Lives Matter movement, protests against anti-Asian hate crimes and gun violence).

The authors used an exploratory qualitative design embedded within a constructivist/interpretivist paradigm. A total of 31 international health service psychology graduate students completed an online survey, 17 of whom participated in a 60-min one-on-one semi-structured interview.

Participants reported facing a range of difficulties (e.g. travel ban/inability to spend time with family, visa-related concerns, racism, decreased support) during the global pandemic and the recent sociopolitical climate in the USA. A total of 48 themes were identified and organized into six domains: COVID-19-related stress and worry, experiences of racism/discrimination, coping mechanisms, support received, recommendations for programs and higher learning institutions and advice for other international graduate students.

The recent sociopolitical climate in the US exacerbated some of the preexisting inequities for international graduate students due to their international student status and the global pandemic. Although few in number, students also spoke about some positive changes as a result of these major historical and political events. Implications for graduate education, clinical practice and policymaking are discussed.