Knowledge that Transforms

Support systems for early venturing efforts need to be harmonious with the emergent nature of those efforts. With current literature treating the conceptions of new ventures as exogenous, there has been limited focus on the transition of venturing efforts from nebulous, open-ended, and accidental toward becoming scalable, focused, and deliberate. We develop a dynamic model for organizing support systems for the early phases of new-venture creation, where scattered ideas evolve into venture concepts as tokens, frames, and premises for further action. By viewing venturing efforts and opportunities as emergent and drawing on the literature on complexity and organizational space, we propose openness, self-selection, visibility, and connectivity as the defining characteristics for organizing support systems. In contrast to literature's predominant focus on a predictive, linear approach, we expand the theoretical scope of support systems to include organizing that is more attuned to the uncertain and nonlinear nature of new venture creation that they support. Our work has broader implications for organizing uncertain early-phase development processes.

Evidence suggests that firms often do not respond to competitive attacks even when they are aware of an attack and have the capability to counter it. We believe that this is because they engage in a form of nonresponse that we designate as strategic forbearance, a phenomenon that has been mostly neglected by scholars of competitive dynamics. We view such forbearance as a critical component of competitive strategy – an attempt to situate responses to attacks within a more complex and nuanced strategic, organizational and environmental context. Forbearance, we argue, represents managers’ mindful attempts to transcend reflexive responses by expanding the range of considerations a) beyond an attacker to other stakeholders and rivals, b) beyond the immediate attack to its historical setting and long-term relational implications, and c) beyond unitary tactics to those concerning global strategic coherence and adaptation. We define formally and tentatively operationalize strategic forbearance, before deriving propositions concerning its five general transcending drivers. Ultimately, we believe, the study of forbearance can bring scholars of competitive dynamics closer to the heart of the reflective competitive strategy.

As the lead officer on the Academy of Management?s board of governors, which is accountable for conducting the organization?s activities in a manner that ensures accomplishment of its mission and objectives, the president has a range of duties and responsibilities. Because one of the most daunting of these responsibilities is to deliver a presidential address to the membership at the annual meeting, many in this role often begin ruminating over and preparing for their address well before it is necessary to do so. While I was no different in this regard, increasing disruption to key aspects of our profession, including the ways in which we engage in knowledge creation, dissemination, and application, suggested to me that a unique approach might be warranted. Accordingly, this address describes a qualitative analysis of Academy of Management presidential addresses over the past 25 years and directions for our future work as a community of scholars to engage our collective potential and leverage the disruption in order to advance management and organization science, improve work organizations, and inspire a better world.

Voyeurism violates dominant moral codes in many societies. Yet, for a number of businesses, including erotic webcam, reality television, slum tourism, and mixed martial arts, voyeurism is an important part of value creation. The success of such businesses that violate dominant moral codes raises questions about value creation that existing theory in management cannot adequately answer. To help advance our understanding, we theorize how businesses commercializing voyeurism create value for audiences. Conceptualizing voyeurism as a social practice, we identify two dimensions of voyeurism—authenticity and transgression—that help create value by generating desirable emotional responses that facilitate a distinctive experience for audiences. However, we further argue that these same dimensions can also hinder value creation by generating undesirable emotional responses that may lead audiences to disengage from the practice. Accordingly, we contend that businesses’ ability to deliver value to audiences hinges on effective emotional optimization—efforts to reduce undesirable emotional responses by dampening the authenticity or transgression in the voyeuristic practice, while reinforcing the associated desirable emotional responses. We contribute to the literature by advancing a novel theory of the commercialization of voyeuristic practice. In doing so, we also enrich our understanding of both authenticity and transgression.

Value in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) derives from the synergistic combination of an acquirer and a target. We advance the existing conceptualization of synergies in three ways. First, we develop...

For better or for worse, one stakeholder’s utility derives in part from their perceptions of how other stakeholders are being treated by the business. Yet, to date, the stakeholder literature has not explained well what stakeholders are actually looking for in a business’s treatment of other stakeholders. We allow for and help explain an emerging view in the literature whereby stakeholders might be looking out for each other’s interests, but we round out that view by also allowing for and explaining a different kind of possibility, whereby stakeholders disapprove of the favorable treatment of others or approve of their unfavorable treatment. Our model details how the other stakeholder serves three different roles with respect to the focal stakeholder’s utility: (a) as a symbolic representation of the values the business prioritizes—especially compared to the focal stakeholder’s own worldview, (b) as a referent for interpersonal equity comparisons, and (c) as either a perceived competitor for or facilitator of resources. We describe these three roles and then show how they interrelate in a process model. In doing so, we provide a more detailed and complete understanding of stakeholder utility than currently exists in the literature. Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved.

Capitalism works when actors are motivated to engage in joint value creation. Stakeholder theorists have long argued that this is most likely when firms “manage for stakeholders,” but have only recently explicitly recognized that stakeholders engaged in joint value creation face collective action problems: situations in which stakeholders may be tempted to pursue their own interest at the expense of maximizing joint value creation. We build on the work of Elinor Ostrom on solving collective action problems to develop theory about how to govern joint value creation when managing for stakeholders. Specifically, we use Ostrom’s design principles to contrast the hub-and-spoke form of governance central to much of the stakeholder literature with two alternative governance forms (lead role governance and shared governance) that we derive from Ostrom’s work, and we discuss the comparative effectiveness of these three governance forms as depending on the nature of the joint value creation activities. Our work contributes to stakeholder theory as an integrative perspective on the role of management and governance in fostering cooperation in modern capitalist systems, where joint value creation increasingly involves stakeholders outside the boundaries of the firm as traditionally understood.

An important conversation in entrepreneurship focuses on the question of whether entrepreneurial opportunities are objective or subjective. The discovery view suggests that they are objective. The ...

status: Published