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Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations’ ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This paper investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance meta-organizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the “decidability” of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level. We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective’s mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges’ governance success while the emergence of “non-decidability” of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.

Sustainability has long been known to present an epistemic challenge. In the corporate setting, this challenge translates into the difficulties experienced by managers not only in devising solutions to corporate sustainability problems, but even in developing the awareness of the latter. The paper explores how these difficulties may be overcome by corporate stakeholder management policies.

The paper develops a conceptual framework that reconstructs the Hayekian theory of market process in the context of Williamson's (1996) distinction between autonomous and cooperative adaptation.

Applying the Hayekian theory of market process to the process of engagement and collaboration of corporate stakeholders, the paper shows how the latter process may address the epistemic challenge of corporate sustainability and derives implications for the design of business models for sustainability.

The paper informs stakeholder theory in two ways: first, stakeholder theory is given a novel justification in terms of reflecting the growing prominence of cooperative adaptation and second, corporate stakeholder management is shown to be crucial for maximizing not only economic but also sustainability performance.

The purpose of this study is to deepen understanding of the effects of using social media technologies to acquire technological knowledge and organizational learning competences, of technological knowledge competences on organizational learning and finally of organizational learning on organizational performance.

The study was performed by analyzing data from a sample of 197 technology firms located in Spain. The hypotheses were tested using a structural equations model with the program LISREL 8.80.

This study’s conceptual framework is grounded in complexity theory – along with dynamic capabilities theory, which complements the resource-based view. The study contributes to the literature by proposing a model that reflects empirically how business ecosystems that use social media technologies enable the development of interorganizational and social collaboration networks that encourage learning and development of technological knowledge competences.

It would be interesting for future studies to consider other elements to conceptualize and measure social media technologies, including (among others) significance of the various tools used and strategic integration. The model might also analyze other sectors and another combination of variables.

The results of this study have several managerial implications: developing social media technologies and interorganizational social collaboration networks not only enables the organizational learning process but also encourages technological knowledge competences. Through innovation processes, use of social media technologies also contributes to strengthening companies’ strategic positioning, which ultimately helps to improve firms’ organizational performance.

Since social media technologies drive information systems in contemporary society (because they enable interaction with numerous agents), the authors highlight the use of complexity theory to develop a conceptual framework.

The study also deepens understanding of the connections by which new experiential learning contributes to the generation of coevolutionary adaptive business ecosystems and digital strategies that enable development of interorganizational and social collaborative networks through technological knowledge competences. Only after examining the impact of social media technologies on organizational performance in prior literature, did the authors underscore that both quantity and frequency of social media technology use are positively related to improvement in knowledge processes that lead to employees’ creation and acquisition of new metaknowledge.

The authors’ goal is to provide an overview and historical context for the various alternatives to the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) that have emerged over time. The authors found eight current alternatives that have emerged to address the EMH's flaws. Each of the proposed alternatives improves some of the assumptions made by the EMH, such as investor homogeneity, the immediate incorporation of information into asset values and the inadequacy of rationality to explain asset prices.

To come up with the list of studies relevant to this review article, the authors used three databases, namely Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. The first two were mostly used to get peer-reviewed articles while Google Scholar was used to extract articles that are still work in progress. The following words were used as the search queries; “efficient market hypothesis” and “alternatives to the efficient market hypothesis”.

The alternatives to the EMH presented in this article demonstrate that market efficiency is a dynamic concept that can be best understood with a multidisciplinary approach. To better comprehend how financial markets work, it is crucial to draw on concepts, theories and ideas from a variety of disciplines, including physics, economics, anthropology, sociology and others.

The authors comprehensively summarise the current state of the behavioural finance literature on alternatives to the EMH.

Expanding and developing the theoretical implications of socialist market economy with China’s experience.

In the course of exploring the development of a market economy, China has given full play to the advantages of the socialist system, which has distinguished itself from the Western countries and some of its developing peers. China's market economy is not directly transplanted and copied from the West. China not only insists on growing its market economy but also unswervingly sticks to the socialist orientation of its market economy.

So far, the socialist market economy has proved to be more effective than the conventional one-sided, planned economy and also outperforms the capitalist market economy.

The socialist market economy has surpassed the conventional planned economy and the capitalist market economy – it is a reconstructed and reshaped mechanism and system as well as a successful and new path of market economy explored by China through reform and opening up, rather than a counterpart of Western market economy or the simple combination of socialism and market economy.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how illusion of control (IOC) can affect the implementation of formal processes of environmental scanning in organizations.

Based on the proposed research question, an exploratory study was chosen, which could collaborate with future studies. There were conducted three semi-structured interviews with CEOs working in medium/large technology companies.

Behavioral traits were identified—such as overconfidence and underestimation of risks—which are directly related to the IOC’s theory. The belief that there is no added value to the company in adopting organizational strategic processes—such as environmental scanning—answers the research question and contributes to the development of new studies.

This study has as limitation the fact that it proposed the interviews to an inexpressive number of respondents, exclusively with the intention to explore better the relation between the IOC and the formal processes of environmental scanning.

This research advances the understanding of the difficulty in adopting formal environmental scanning practices in organizations. It can also help understand the motivations of executives for adopting (or not adopting) such practices. Finally, it is possible to know and understand the individual approach to environmental scanning, as well as its limitations.

This research discusses the themes of IOC and environmental scanning, demonstrating how cognitive factors can affect strategic decision making in an organization. Although the IOC is well-developed in the field of psychology, it can be very helpful in understanding business management and executive behavior.

Although service research typically asserts that institutions coordinate actors’ value creation processes, institutions and resources are not necessarily transparent, aligned, or pre-existing. This paper aims to develop a more granular perspective on how actors coordinate for value.

Drawing on the established concepts of signaling and screening theory, this paper adopts a service marketing perspective to explore how independent heterogeneous actors coordinate for value creation at the individual level. Illustrative cases of corporate startup collaborations are presented in support of the proposed conceptual framework.

Actors share and acquire information through signaling and screening activities in a coordinative dialogue with other actors. These resource integration activities (for resource creation and matching) affect actors’ valuations and future actions.

The one-sided explanations of coordination in the existing literature reflect the dominance of the institutional theory. By contrast, the proposed agency-oriented perspective based on the integration of signaling and screening functions offers a more granular conceptualization of the resource integration process. As well as capturing how actors use coordinating dialogue to match resources and institutions, this account also shows that matching is a core element of resource integration rather than an antecedent. The findings indicate paths for future research that focus on the actor.

This paper aims to provide an overall review and assessment of the virtues and flaws of decentralized self-regulated markets, discussing in particular the extent to which deceiving attitudes by some market participants might be potentially diluted and contradicted.

To approach deception and morality in markets, the paper follows two paths. First, the relevant recent literature on the theme is reviewed, examined and debated, and second, one constructs a simulation model equipped with the required elements to discuss the immediate and long-term impacts of deceiving behaviour over market outcomes.

The discussion and the model allow for highlighting the main drivers of the purchasing decisions of consumers and for evaluating how they react to manipulating behaviour by firms in the market. Agents pursuing short-run gains through unfair market practices are likely to be punished as fooled agents spread the word about the malpractices they were allegedly subject to.

Markets are complex entities, where large numbers of individual agents typically establish local and direct contact with one another. These agents differ in many respects and interact in unpredictable ways. Assembling a concise model capable of addressing such complexity is a difficult task. The framework proposed in this paper points in the intended direction.

The debate in this paper contributes to a stronger perception on the mechanisms that attribute robustness and vitality to markets.

The term “agent-based modelling” (ABM) is a buzzword which is widely used in the scientific literature even though it refers to a variety of methodologies implemented in different disciplinary contexts. The numerous works dealing with ABM require a clarification to better understand the lines of thinking paved by this approach in economics. All modelling tasks are a means and a source of knowledge, and this epistemic function can vary depending on the methodology. this paper is to present four major ways (deductive, abductive, metaphorical and phenomenological) of implementing an agent-based framework to describe economic systems. ABM generates numerous debates in economics and opens the room for epistemological questions about the micro-foundations of macroeconomics; before dealing with this issue, the purpose of this paper is to identify the kind of ABM the author can find in economics.

The profusion of works dealing with ABM requires a clarification to understand better the lines of thinking paved by this approach in economics. This paper offers a conceptual classification outlining the major trends of ABM in economics.

There are four categories of ABM in economics.

This paper suggests a methodological categorization of ABM works in economics.

The purpose of the study is to explore, with anchorage in theories about the normalization of corruption, under what conditions blockchain technology can mitigate corruptive practices of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in emerging markets (EMs).

By synthesizing a technological perspective and theory on corruption, the authors examine the feasibility of blockchain for fighting corruption in MNEs’ business operations in EMs.

Blockchain technology is theorized to have varying mitigating effects on the rationalization, socialization and institutionalization of corruption. The authors provide propositions describing the effects and the limitations of blockchain for mitigating corruption in EMs.

This paper offers a perspective for how to tackle acute business problems and social problems pronounced in international business but also prevailing elsewhere.

The study contributes to literature in international management by systematically exploring how and under what conditions blockchain can mitigate the normalization of corruption.