In this introduction to the Point‐Counterpoint on the corporate objective, I briefly review and reflect on three views of the corporate objective presented in the exchange. I argue that each perspective – the shareholder value model, the stakeholder management perspective, and the strategic corporate governance framework – has merit in its own right, but that their relevance is contingent on the theoretical and practical contexts in which they are applied, assessed and evaluated. From a theoretical perspective, the choice of which model best fits depends upon whether one is looking through a normative, instrumental, or descriptive lens. From a practical vantage, the relevance and applicability of each of these corporate objectives is contingent on the national institutional context as well as the individual corporation’s relevant sector and industry, its strategy, and its leaders’ vision. In fact, there is no one corporate objective; rather the objective is variable based on a range of conceptual lenses and contextual factors and influences.
This study reports on the findings of a comparative historical analysis uncovering three inequality projects aimed at either deinstitutionalizing or reproducing inequalities in school organizations in Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee. My investigation covers a long period, from the mid‐1800s when the first public schools were created in Memphis, to 2014 when the suburban schools opted to permanently separate from the urban school district. The insights from this study make three key contributions. First, I develop a model of inequality work that uncovers the interactional mechanisms linking unequal impact to unequal treatment. Second, I explain why efforts at distributing resources equally can only temporarily resolve inequalities. Lastly, I identify valuation work as a central link between the material forms of institutional work to access resources and the symbolic form of institutional work to deinstitutionalize or reproduce the unequal treatment of actors.
Over the past months, we have been witnessing nothing less than a radical rupture in the globally shared “institutional fabric”: ‘discontinuities in the taken-for-granted features of global society that have developed over the past decades’ (Hwang and Höllerer, 2020, p. 294). And academia is no exception. While deeply institutionalized practices of academic life have not been radically altered for the most part, many of us have formed the view that the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascading effects of the corresponding global crisis are likely to lead to the end of academic life ‘as we know it’. And still, we have little idea as to exactly how such changing practices will pan out in the long-run, how profound the changes might be, and how long-lasting their effects. Our commentary offers a number of provocations. A key metaphor we wish to develop is ‘cultural leapfrogging’: a situation ‘in which a next-generation institutional infrastructure is imagined and created more or less de novo rather than merely imitating, adapting, or translating an institutional design observed elsewhere’ (Gehman and Höllerer, 2019, p. 233). With the technological aspects of leapfrogging all too familiar to those of us who have spent considerable time moving our lives online, the social aspects of such a shift have attracted less attention. Cultural leapfrogging, happening in often contested instances, is not without risk: the moment you ‘leap’, regularly with limited time for reflection, you are catapulted into uncharted territory – with little idea as to where exactly you will land. In this commentary, we wish to share anecdotes and insights on such a cultural leapfrogging experience drawn from organizing the 2020 EGOS Colloquium online: the first author as the then-President of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) and the second author in his role as Chair of the 2020 Local Organizing Committee. Overall, we intend to tell a cautionary tale, covering a number of issues such as community building, collegiality, critique and constructive feedback, cross-fertilization of ideas, socialization of newcomers, and networking among scholars. The current COVID-19 crisis has afforded a number of opportunities, but it has also led to more troublesome consequences – some of which, we argue, are potentially irreversible. The 2020 EGOS Colloquium was conceptualized as a sustainable conference – with the idea of minimizing the carbon footprint of an international conference of this size and format. Soon after the global COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, it became clear that there was no way the conference could run as envisaged on the campus of the University of Hamburg, Germany. When we decided, on 17 March 2020, to organize the Colloquium as a virtual conference, we knew that we wanted to do this instead of cancelling it altogether – but in all honesty we had little idea what the journey would entail. After all, we were among the first major associations and scholarly communities to make a move on this scale, involving a full conference with thousands of participants from across the globe. We were unsure how it would work out technology-wise: by early 2020, not many had experience with Zoom-based teaching, and there were no ready-made online conferencing platforms available either. So that was one ‘unknown’ for us – and finances were another. But there was a much greater concern: how could we possibly move 60+ EGOS sub-themes (i.e., conference streams) and 1,800 paper presentations into the virtual sphere; successfully run opening, keynote, and award ceremonies; host social events and networking receptions; and, in general, maintain the academic spirit of a lively conference? How could we hold the community together as one, across continents and time zones? We were worried whether our sub-theme convenors and participants would be prepared to follow us in this endeavour, or if instead we would receive a large number of cancellations and end up with a fragmented conference. With the backing of the EGOS leadership, we concluded that we had little to lose. Hoping that the community would come along and be somewhat forgiving of all kinds of potential glitches and hiccups, we felt that this prospect was still better than simply pulling the plug. The success of EGOS 2020 came as a surprise. We were amazed that almost all sub-themes ran as planned, with only a few cancellations from submitting authors, and a huge crowd cheering (virtually) that EGOS was brave enough to continue with the conference. With the support of many helping hands, we managed to get a full program together, much as we had planned it under ‘normal’ circumstances. Convenors worked closely with us to create innovative solutions for the sub-themes, adapted to challenges, and made sure the conference turned out to be a rewarding experience for almost all involved. In the end, we had no less than 2,100 participants over 5 days of conferencing, 470 live sessions, pre-conference workshops, sub-plenary sessions, a keynote (even with a live debate), and a worthy (pre-recorded) opening and award ceremony. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and by far exceeded our expectations. With this, and with technology working perfectly, many of our worries vanished. We had leapt, we were airborne – but where would we land? Witnessing a number of wonderful developments and positive outcomes, not all of them anticipated, it was overall a truly extraordinary experience. At the same time, though, we have observed a few more troublesome implications that we feel need to be reflected on. Cultural leapfrogging might come at a price, and there is a concern that we might be about to lose important aspects of academic life that we have grown quite fond of. ‘Being lonely together’: this emotional expression, to be heard in one form or another over the entire 2020 conference season, also captured some of our own feelings. Indeed, it was somewhat awkward sitting alone in front of our laptops in a deserted office wing at the original Colloquium venue at the University of Hamburg (Daniel), or in the middle of the night in a small beach-side apartment in quasi-locked down Sydney (Markus), whilst the EGOS Colloquium was getting into full swing. It was the impression of an impoverished experience that we shared with many of our peers. In contrast to previous years, we, as the organizers, were not able to float between rooms and sessions to get a feel of how the event was being received. We vividly remember a frantic call between the two of us immediately after the opening ceremony: EGOS 2020 is obviously on – but what is actually going on? Is everything working for all the sub-themes? Are people showing up? How is the spirit among participants? In fact, we had to rely heavily on social media to get direct feedback on, and from, the conference. We were checking for issues as well as for positive and uplifting comments on Twitter, and we monitored trending posts like addicts. It was, however, only a partial remedy for how odd we felt. As we later learned from various individual comments, such feeling of isolation was shared by others – albeit to varying degrees: some sub-themes experienced quite engaged and creative exchanges that left attendees pleasantly surprised by how well the online format actually worked. In particular, sub-themes in which a substantial number of participants already knew each other from previous instances, or where convenors truly went the extra mile, recorded a high level of interaction, and as a result created a very positive impression. Participants in sub-themes with less ‘social glue’ or creativity, as well as newcomers to EGOS, had a more mixed overall experience. What was striking, however, was that activities beyond the sub-theme level, those geared towards all Colloquium attendees (i.e., keynote, sub-plenaries, or various socials), did not generate similar levels of enthusiasm. All of a sudden, we were not one big community dividing into sub-theme sessions whenever scheduled, but a number of disconnected tribes, each with its own emerging internal norms of engagement and very little engagement across the tribes. Such tribalization leaves us pondering a pivotal question: what holds a scholarly community together in an increasingly virtual academic world? The EGOS community has been built on a distinct ‘EGOS spirit’, which emphasizes the development of a shared scholarly agenda over several days within one particular sub-theme and connects participants to the local academic setting. An exclusively virtual setting comes with the considerable risk of being reduced to an anonymous ‘service-providing platform’ whose role is limited to ensuring technical functionality for the gathering of multiple tribes. But it does not stop there. We will also have to deal with raised expectations in terms of the professionalism of the very service at offer: ‘we pay, so what do we get for it?’. Even though we charged only a symbolic conference fee, we still had to debate the benefits of EGOS membership with some participants. Such perceptions and expectations will impact future ‘business models’ for online and hybrid conferencing. In addition, these issues should be a reminder to all of us why we have committed ourselves to scholarly societies and associations in the first place. What is the ultimate benefit for the individual scholar moving forward? We have learned that running mini-conferences of like-minded scholars works quite well online – sometimes even better than face-to-face. And if such smaller-scale meetings are in fact easier to organize, and at almost zero cost, is there still any value-add in being part of a larger association that ties together these various sub-communities? One might start wondering whether the 50–70 tribes (in our case, the EGOS sub-themes) indeed any longer need and/or value the ‘umbrella’ of the overall conference/association. Overall, we note that identity and strong ‘sense of belonging’ have likely become even more double-edged swords in the virtual academic environment. And it is in this sense that cultural leapfrogging equally reveals a double-edged character. The ‘new normal’ demands creative solutions on the part of scholarly associations and event organizers for all forms of conferencing – face-to-face, online, and hybrid – while also retaining a distinct spirit and set of values within and across an academic community. From the anonymized log files of the Zoom-based conference platform we learned that – quite literally – ‘Zoom-ing’ in and out of virtual rooms was common practice over the 5 days of the conference. We admit that even we occasionally switched between parallel sub-plenaries, in fear of missing out on something important, or aiming to get a ‘best of’, and consequently were lacking adequate attention span and loyalty to the presenters. However, an important aspect of the EGOS spirit is that it is built around the firm notion of collegiality, which entails a commitment to a specific sub-theme’s program over the entire Colloquium. As a matter of fact, there are significantly lower transaction costs and fewer social controls in place during a virtual conference. Entry and exit barriers are fairly low; anonymity is arguably higher; and switching channels is easy and more accepted than physically changing rooms while sessions are running. We certainly noticed the increased tendency of participants to focus on delivering their own presentation and receiving feedback – and then, too often leave the room for more exciting options. Peer control seems rather difficult online for conference sizes above a certain threshold; and new social norms still need to emerge. Moving online certainly has fostered a more ‘transactional’ understanding of academic exchange, which seems aligned with the notion of conferences resembling platforms rather than the gathering of a community. Culturally, this may have important consequences for community spirit, collegiality, and scholarly engagement. These characteristics might become less important, less visible, and hence less practiced. Against this background, how can we contribute to preserving the unique spirit and values of collegiality even for those who become socialized in the ‘new normal’? It seems critical to hold on to some important rules of engagement – and practice them accordingly. We tend to the view that more senior scholars, in particular, have a huge responsibility to foster this academic culture and act as role models when attending and convening conferences, no matter the format. The instrumental importance of social media, and Twitter in particular, for the 2020 Colloquium – and also for our own wellbeing – caught us, we willingly admit, by surprise. Being very late to the party ourselves, Daniel started using Twitter last year to showcase his academic institute, and Markus, a long-time self-declared sceptic of social media, re-activated his dormant LinkedIn account just in time for EGOS 2020, and even signed up for Twitter on the very first day of the conference to be able to follow what was going on. Social media emerged as the principal arena in which impressions about the conference were exchanged. Posts ranged from praise of how well a particular session was run and organized, to how great a specific presentation was, to links to one’s own work that related to the ideas discussed. Featured imagery included Zoom screenshots, memes, or the location from which people were following the conference. Overall, we were thrilled about the overwhelmingly positive tone of comments and by the high number of people active on social media. But being active on Twitter was not just vanity: if we did not post, others would do so – and maybe not in the way we would like essential information to be spread in the context of the conference. Which brings us to an important issue: who speaks on behalf of a virtual event in which we are all participating, but only from afar? How do we talk about the event? How do we avoid voices on social media becoming tribal at times? And, more generally, who has legitimacy to speak on behalf of any constituency within a community such as EGOS? This all goes hand in hand with an irreversible trend in academia to use social media like Twitter or ResearchGate in order to be seen, to enhance the visibility of one’s work, and to develop one’s own ‘brand’ (Mehrpouya and Willmott, 2018). There are some notable consequences for academic exchange that we observed during EGOS 2020. With a few exceptions, on social media there was collective praise – and hardly any critique. The scholarly discourse during the conference became dominated by a handful of social media savvy scholars, seniors and juniors alike, who garnered a large amount of attention. While some might still regard this as an opportunity for ‘democratizing’ and overthrowing the traditional status hierarchy within academia, we are more sceptical: s/he who has more followers who echo a posted What also comes with this is a tendency towards a new academic has been but when and from a large number of become the ultimate this a new And it to the of some quite such as the of the work of scholars, or scholars to seniors to praise them for their of in order to get their attention. while the Twitter the two of us were by the of an ‘in of how to this new we have the way for a new and a set of Is it all about and visibility and not critique and being active online all the time – and for s/he who to lose the We as a scholarly we to of and an – and such on impact most likely goes way beyond the of our commentary As a scholarly we need to and for and early scholars. was the tone of feedback during online paper The of around the paper being for and and for or one could focus on. or more substantial were lacking in the – and all the more so on social media. All this might be in with a more global trend towards the of scholarly feedback at However, the EGOS community not to a spirit of critique and rather than But there is more to We observed that in online tend to from critique for the that critique is and one has little of into context during the after the and to the emotional of the it often difficult to the online are often and/or the comments made in the potentially and for – and we know all too well what does to social In we call for innovative rules of engagement that are in and that work across conferencing and that in particular to online may but are by no limited the role of senior as to critical voices to and constructive the of sessions, and participants from presentation to feedback and debate rather than time on session the role of critique for the of our and time for this while ensuring that it is and not One of our was how we could run the Colloquium across time and be as as to our community. As a some sessions were to start at in the while others around at As it turned we were indeed able to scholars across the over the entire of EGOS 2020 – we that this format had From our we wish to those who that virtual conferencing will for We admit that at first it might too not to be less conference sense time and being to during a conference us to more of the many in our But it has a between the and less focus on the academic agenda the of a few days year to ourselves in less from being to the that during an academic conference. and issues As all of us who have a global or engaged in a across continents will organizing across very time a considerable and is and Zoom sessions have become a in our over the past for those not in or on the In such a on a new not one for many scholars who or and adequate events such as EGOS have been a in the academic and often the only opportunity to in with their scholarly and – – also with academic We that many of you who have academia as a distinct will that in 2020 quite a went missing – all the This is not to academic and other practices – but it in regard to which conferences can be online, and which should be face-to-face. We started this with the notion of cultural leapfrogging that has catapulted us into uncharted territory – and the of where exactly academia might end up in the from organizing EGOS 2020, we engaged with such as the need to foster a scholarly culture in an academic where technology the tribalization of like-minded how to maintain collegiality and when and exit barriers are low; how to successfully newcomers into our and how to the issues that come with new norms of engagement in social media that are more with a of visibility than with critical and how does all this impact our life as In academia might be even less a and traditional but more in with technology increasingly people to from their academic and And we are already witnessing a more global academic emerging under our – one with an even transaction service and the and the of an of workshops, and development around the the collective during the COVID-19 pandemic has also us that some of these work well can be and can be run by hence becoming much more – literally just a An could be to some conferences in to continue cross-fertilization of ideas, socialization of newcomers, and networking among scholars, other At the same time, we need to develop the institutional infrastructure and create innovative rules of engagement for online and hybrid that us to maintain the very spirit of collegiality, reflection, and critique that has been pivotal in the development of our scholarly together, this might a way in an academic where we continue to practice scholarly values while the of new in our conference practices more sustainable and The Daniel and for their The comments on an of this by and All as well as any are our
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world in early 2020, countries with strong healthcare systems, norms of communal behavior, and respect for law appeared to be coming out ahead. Institutions were holding strong. It was not long, however, before COVID-19 was revealing the failures of long-trusted institutions to care for citizens equitably, or to maintain public trust. Institutions were revealed to be inadequate or in decay. These included institutions such as government, public health, education, democracy, religion, and science. In some cases, these institutions appear fractured and weak and in other contexts we see them appear stronger as market logics retreat and state logics expand. Newly emergent celebrities such as Dr. Fauci flood the airwaves joined by a plethora of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists ready and willing to share their insights. In this commentary, we examine the cracks COVID-19 has exposed in institutions; specifically, the vulnerability, entropy, neglect, and decay of institutions long-thought to be powerful and stable. In the harsh light of the pandemic, this has meant witnessing growing income inequality, inequitable access to public services (water, electricity) and to basic necessities of life (healthcare, housing, education, food), as well as intersecting racial and gender injustices and the impacts of environmental destruction. We argue that the effects of COVID-19, have played out in two key ways. First, increased scrutiny on institutions has shown that many long-accepted as strong, are not. Years of neglect has weakened institutional structures, many with their very foundations built on ideas of broad and equitable access. Second, this unveiling has shown us that some institutions we took for granted may not be socially desirable and, worse, may be the very causes of these unsustainable and unjust systems. In light of these exposed fault lines, we posit that COVID-19 has shown us the necessity for research that goes well beyond understanding institutions and how they function, to instead look more deeply at their impacts and outcomes. As researchers and citizens, COVID-19 shows us that we must take this rare opportunity to look ‘under the hood’ or ‘behind the emerald curtain’ to scrutinize what was hidden from view, and to critically examine whether institutions are serving society. In doing so, researchers can unpack how to either renew and reenergize valued institutions, or to dismantle those that undergird systemic social and environmental injustices. We call for a renewed institutional research agenda focused on how to both build back institutions that matter to society, as well as build better institutions. Institutions have long been the foundation of society and, as such, the study of institutions has been the basis for much of our current understanding of management and organizations. As COVID-19 laid bare the underlying inequities and injustices of modern socioeconomic systems (Munir, 2021), so too did it lay bare the frailty of our theoretical assumptions about institutions themselves. While research had begun to question the assumption that institutions were stable long before COVID-19, the stresses of the pandemic have brought increased scrutiny to even the most apparently enduring of institutions. What COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated is that even many of those institutions thought to be based on equitable access, such as essential public services, have been heavily eroded after decades of institutional decay. As market forces (Davis and Kim, 2015) has chipped away at the foundations of healthcare, education, and utilities, as well as at community-based media and funding for science, these weakened institutions also now suffer from a lack of trust. This further limits the likelihood that they will obtain the ‘ongoing energy and resources’ (Scott, 2015, p. 470) required for institutional renewal (Montgomery and Dacin, 2020). As we begin to understand the fragility and decay of institutions exposed by COVID-19, we must also reflect deeply on how some institutions remained resilient. Here, extensive research is required to better understand the macro and micro-level factors that explain both survival and fragility. At the micro-level, for example, with healthcare workers fighting on the front lines around the world, grocery clerks holding up failing food systems, and Black poll workers defending the votes of vulnerable populations against anti-democratic mobs, COVID-19 has highlighted the underappreciated role of institutional custodians. These micro-level actors who undertake the ongoing work of institutional maintenance and renewal (Dacin and Dacin, 2008; Dacin et al., 2019) have been shown to be more essential than ever in light of COVID-19. The limited research on custodians to date has tended to focus on institutionally embedded actors (e.g., Lok and De Rond, 2013). Only recently has the lens shifted to a diverse set of heterogenous insiders and outsiders, both elites and marginalized populations, that may be required for institutional survival (Montgomery and Dacin, 2020). COVID-19 highlights our need to understand much more deeply how and when collaboration across diverse actors and communities occurs (Hampel et al., 2017), as well as how ‘intersections across custodians, including the vulnerable, can be a source of institutional renewal and power’ (Montgomery and Dacin, 2020, p. 1480). To do so it is imperative that we expand our understanding of who is doing institutional work to shine a light on the oft overlooked communities who are a driving force behind custodianship. For example, studies show that BIPOC communities are more aware of and likely to vote on societal issues such as climate change (Ballew et al., 2020). This, combined with the exposure of vulnerable communities to the decay of institutions that promised equitable access – or, conversely, to the revival of unjust institutions – underlines that marginalized communities are essential custodians to explore more deeply in future research. Such research could attend to issues of power and agency in these communities as they mobilize to address fractures in existing ‘institutions that matter’ (Hampel et al., 2017). In answering these questions, we can build back the institutions that help create a more just and equitable society. It is well recognized that institutions may have a dark side, and be a cause of inequality (e.g., Amis et al., 2017). COVID-19 has further revealed and underlined the myriad of potential negative impacts of taken-for-granted beliefs and long-standing norms, and of the ways in which intuitional work and custodians can act in ways that may harm rather than help society. For example, as rioters at the USA’s Capitol Hill paraded notorious symbols of white supremacy through the halls, any student of institutions could not help but note how well they had taken on the lessons of institutional scholars. With micro-level community support and shared narratives, artifacts, and symbols, leaders of the Proud Boys and QAnon have renewed and reenergized an institution that once appeared to be in decline: white supremacy. Similarly, COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases are in no small part the product of an economic system that has ravaged ecosystems in the name of growth (Vidal, 2020). The inability of neo-liberal systems to tackle public goods failures has led to increasing calls for a rethinking of the institution of capitalism. From the ‘corporate purpose’ bandwagon, to attempts to ‘reimagine’ capitalism in a kinder and gentler form (Henderson, 2020), to outright calls to ‘burn down’ systems of oppression, there is no doubt that capitalism is no longer as taken-for-granted as it once was. With this institution, like white supremacy, we can expect custodians with vested interests in capitalism’s survival in its current state (e.g., fossil fuel companies, unregulated tech companies) to fight to maintain its current norms and legitimacy. In doing so, they will clash with movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the environmental movement seeking to challenge, change, expose the limits of, or deinstitutionalize institutions seen as causing harm. Research that understands that institutions are not inert and certainly not always benign, will engender research questions that critically examine both the impacts and outcomes of institutions. Such research will allow us to better understand how institutions and their custodians work to inculcate and maintain systems of injustice such as racial, class, and gender biases. At the same time, we can ask how institutional custodians might work at micro-levels to dismantle institutions that no longer benefit society. Such research might ask what are the intersections between movements and institutions? Where are the leverage points for change? And what happens when institutions collide or reach their limits? In doing so, future research must consider a way back to the tenets of the ‘old’ institutionalism and deeply consider how values play a crucial role in highlighting and shaping the moral foundation of institutions (Kraatz et al., 2020). Research on the weaknesses and leverage points of institutions will help us both in the efforts to support institutions society deems necessary, and to better break down and remove the legitimacy, deeply held norms, and taken-for-grantedness of those that are not seen as desirable. As management and organizations scholars, we might also turn this lens on ourselves, questioning how institutions impact the norms that undergird our research approaches and questions, including such ingrained notions as the necessity for growth, the benefits of competition, and the focus on financial measures of success. We might also ask if some of these institutionalized ideas have also outlived their usefulness? In conclusion, we see COVID-19 and the events it has engendered as a siren call for researchers to seek to fully understand the institutions around us, the frailty of some we took for granted, and the deleterious consequences of others. First, it is imperative that we better understand how we can inclusively renew and rebuild the institutions we as a society value and wish to maintain: equitable and accessible healthcare, education, and democracy likely among them. Second, and equally as important, we must take a deep look at how day-to-day actions and inactions – including our own as academics and as individuals – are maintaining and renewing the very institutions that perpetuate inequality, injustice, and environmental devastation. In doing so, let us not simply ‘take for granted’ the norms and structures around us as we return to accepted norms, but build back better, more just, and more sustainable institutions. And, perhaps, ‘burn down’ a few.
Divergent but complementary perspectives have been articulated regarding how management practices and their implementation influence firm performance. Integrating such perspectives in the human resource (HR) management literature, we examine how HR management practices formulated at firm level interact with HR decisions at lower levels, and how this affects firm performance. HR implementation models have proposed that consistency in HR practices across organizational levels and units is key; conversely, idiosyncratic deals (i‐deals) theory advances individualization as a central principle, suggesting that lower‐level initiative in making decisions that reflect local circumstances should have beneficial effects. Addressing the interplay between the consistency and individualization perspectives in a sample of 870 employees nested in 36 firms, we present evidence suggesting that individualized HR decisions positively affect firm performance only in the presence of strong firm‐level HR practices. This interplay occurs through two mediating social exchange processes: perceived organizational support and perceived distributive justice.
Past literature has documented the liability of foreignness (LOF) that foreign MNEs face when they introduce organizational practices abroad that work well in their home countries, particularly practices that conflict with local cultural norms. However, when foreign MNEs adopt practices that resemble those of their local counterparts, whether and why foreign MNEs still face a LOF is unclear. This study explores why foreign MNEs that implement a compensation practice used by local counterparts – collective bonuses – may not experience the same performance benefits. Our data consists of interviews and longitudinal survey data of the organizational practices of MNEs in France, a country where commitment to egalitarian resource distribution is culturally strong. We find that foreign MNEs, especially those from countries where egalitarian commitment is relatively low, benefit significantly less in terms of productivity when implementing collective bonuses than do their French counterparts. We show how even when foreign MNEs adopt local practices, they can subtly transfer the cultures of their home countries. In other words, they transfer informal, elusive norms (e.g., non‐egalitarian attitudes of top management) that can be problematic. Tension persists between the informal requirements to facilitate the practice in the host country and the MNE’s home‐country culture, a core part of their tacit knowledge. It is one of the first pieces to show that imitating local practices may not suffice to reduce LOF because cultural conflicts make such imitation ineffective. Our findings shed light on how MNEs’ cultural heritage can shape the effectiveness of their practices abroad.
Research on corporate communications – the strategic use of public language to influence stakeholders – has flourished in recent years, but the COVID-19 pandemic highlights some shortcomings in corporate communication research. Three salient features differentiate pandemic communications from the typical communication setting studied by management scholars. First, the pandemic generated an extreme level of uncertainty, shared by both communicators and listeners. Second, the pandemic created information disorder, disrupting the normal manner of information processing and decision making. Third, the pandemic is characterized by a flood of information that overwhelms listeners. Our study explores these challenges and offers important insights that suggest the reevaluation of some existing assumptions and recommendations is in order. Prior research has explored how firms can strategically choose the content of their communications to manage the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. Some studies have noted the benefits of withholding information, while others have demonstrated the advantages of obfuscation (e.g., Elsbach, 1994). An implicit assumption in these studies is that uncertainty is primarily a problem for listeners. Communicators are assumed to have superior knowledge, as well as an awareness of what listeners will interpret as good or bad. Thus, information asymmetry is beneficial to communicators. The pandemic, however, is characterized by an extreme level of uncertainty, shared by both communicators and listeners. What is believed accurate today may well be discredited tomorrow. Furthermore, when information becomes discredited, it tends to in turn discredit the source. In this environment, the assumption that communicators can strategically manage their messages to gain advantage from information asymmetry becomes questionable. Thus, the pandemic highlights the need to shift our view of corporate communications as a process of sensegiving by communicators and sensemaking by listeners to a process of joint sensemaking. When uncertainty is shared, selectively sharing information may engender mistrust and harm communicators’ credibility. In contrast, using communication as an opportunity to openly and honestly share information with listeners to jointly make sense of an uncertain situation may be a more viable approach. Messages with nearly identical content can have substantially different effects depending on the type of language used to construct them. Considering that firm communication is accessible to multiple stakeholders, scholars have studied how firms can craft their messages to manage the divergent interests of stakeholders (e.g., König et al., 2018). For instance, several studies have demonstrated the strategic value of complex and ambiguous language in helping communicators preserve flexibility in organizational settings (e.g., Sillince and Mueller, 2007). The extraordinary scale and unusual nature of the COVID-19 pandemic creates new communication challenges by disrupting the existing, taken-for-granted order in listeners’ information environments. During the pandemic, disinformation (i.e., intentional sharing of false or misleading content), misinformation (i.e., unintentional sharing of false or misleading content), and malinformation (i.e., intentional reframing of information in misleading ways) are ubiquitous (Wardle and Derakhshan, 2017). Moreover, such information disorder is created when both official and unofficial sources release information that turns out to be erroneous, misleading, or contradictory. Established, implicit rules that govern the credibility of information and sources collapse. At the same time, people demand nonstop information from a variety of sources to keep abreast of a rapidly evolving situation. The natural result is complexity and confusion. Furthermore, humans tend to react to complexity with oversimplification. In situations of information disorder, listeners gravitate toward simple and clear communication that is easy to process. In addition to content (i.e., the message) and composition (i.e., the language used), scholars have studied the delivery aspects of corporate communications (i.e., the presentation of the message) (e.g., Guo et al., 2020). The conventional wisdom in this literature cautions against the use of repeated delivery in corporate settings, because repetition does not provide any novel information and often leads to negative reactions. However, during the pandemic, when people are motivated to seek information from a wide variety of sources to maintain the sense that they have some control, the flow of information can easily exceed the cognitive capacity to process it. Combining information overload with the information disorder we noted above, a key challenge for communicators is ensuring their messages are heard and retained by listeners – essentially, breaking through all of the noise. Since repetition leads to familiarity and preference, delivering the same message repeatedly is perhaps the best way for communicators to influence their listeners in a chaotic environment. Thus, the pandemic calls for greater attention to the importance of repetition in communication. Amid all of the hardships created by the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci stands out for his exceptional communication skills. Despite his initial mistake of telling the public facemasks were of marginal benefit in preventing the spread of COVID-19, Dr. Fauci managed to maintain and enhance his credibility, becoming one of the most trusted and influential communicators about coronavirus. In fact, he was recently awarded the prestigious Dan David Prize in recognition of his communication skills and efforts. We analyzed 338 speeches by Dr. Fauci between February 2020 and January 2021, including the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings and his interviews on various TV shows and livestreamed events. Our analysis uncovered three distinguishing features of his communications: precision, clarity, and repetition. First, Dr. Fauci communicates precisely. He is transparent about what he knows and what he doesn’t know. In matters he knows, he gives exact and definite answers. In matters where he is uncertain, he admits his lack of knowledge. ‘We don’t have enough information now’ and ‘I can’t quantitate it for you accurately now’ are some example statements. He often refuses to comment or draw conclusions on issues for which rigorous evidence is lacking. For instance, when asked about the promise of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylaxis against COVID-19, he said, ‘The evidence that you’re talking about is anecdotal. It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it’. Hence, we noted that Dr. Fauci used a relatively large number of negative words. In fact, about 1.2 per cent of the words he used are negative, which is an average of 14 negative words per talk. That number is three standard deviations above the mean number of negative words used by other speakers at the same briefings (0.7 per cent). We believe this is attributable to his precise acknowledgment and qualification of what is not known. Second, Dr. Fauci communicates clearly, using direct language and breaking complex topics into understandable components. Our analysis revealed that Dr. Fauci used language that requires only 9 years of formal education to understand (equivalent to high school students). In contrast, others on the Coronavirus Task Force used language that requires 12 years of education to understand. For example, when talking about ‘aerosol transmission’, he transformed this technical term into a sentence of short and easy-to-understand words: ‘Aerosol means that it can stay in the air for a period of time because it’s in a droplet that’s very small and doesn’t go down’. Thus, the amount of cognitive effort required to understand Dr. Fauci’s speeches is low relative to his task force colleagues. Last but not least, Dr. Fauci frequently repeats his messages. Phrases such as ‘I’ve said many times, and I’ll repeat it’ and ‘I think it’s worth reiterating’ occur over and over in his speeches. In fact, the word ‘repeat’ occurred a total of 21 times in his speeches in the White House briefings alone. For instance, on 16 March 2020 he introduced a two-pillar approach to containing the pandemic. He then repeated the two pillars of containment on 21 March, 31 March, 4 April, and so on. Additionally, to emphasize the importance of mitigation, he stated: ‘So if we really want to make sure that we don’t have these kinds of rebounds that we’re worried about, it’s mitigation, mitigation, and mitigation. That’s the answer’. Additionally, his answer to the immediate next question was as follows: ‘It’s the same thing. It’s mitigation, mitigation, mitigation’. In two sentences, using a total of 36 words, he mentioned mitigation six times. Although the COVID-19 outbreak represents a rare and extreme event, executives do encounter situations characterized by widespread uncertainty and information disorder and overload, such as global slowdowns and industry downturns. Lessons learned from COVID-19 suggest four future directions for corporate communication research. First, the pandemic highlights the need to revisit the implicit assumption in the corporate communication literature that only listeners face uncertainty. In fact, many corporate communication settings involve significant uncertainty on the part of the organization (the speaker). Specifically, future research might consider exploring the following questions: When uncertainty is shared, what factors influence communicators’ choice of communication content (i.e., what to say and not to say)? How do listeners evaluate the credibility of communicated messages? What are the benefits and costs of being forthcoming in communication? Can communicators regain credibility after a miscommunication, and if so, how? How do communicators manage their own credibility in dynamic and uncertain contexts? Second, the pandemic underscores the importance of studying the competition between different messages and communicators. Prior research has largely taken the perspective of communicators by focusing on how to convey the right message to audiences. In uncertain times, stakeholders may take advantage of a wide variety of information sources. We encourage scholars to shift their perspectives from communicators to listeners by exploring the conditions that shape listeners’ choices between different information sources (e.g., corporate press releases, media reports, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other blogs and podcasts) and opinion leaders (e.g., executives, analysts, journalists, activist investors), and why they put faith in some messages (and some messengers) but not others. In particular, when the narratives offered by alternative sources diverge, future research could explore how listeners choose which messages to believe. Third, the pandemic has highlighted an advantage of repetition in corporate communications that has often been neglected in prior research. As an increasing number of executives use social media (e.g., Twitter, Clubhouse) to communicate, future research could explore the extent to which executives use these alternative communication channels to repeat their message delivered through more traditional communication channels (e.g., earnings conference calls), or whether they send different messages through different channels. Accordingly, a promising avenue for future research would be to examine how different stakeholder groups react to consistency or inconsistency in corporate communications across different channels. Last but not least, we believe the pandemic has revealed the importance of viewing corporate communications from a contingency perspective. Many of the findings from our study are contingent upon the settings we used to analyze the speakers. For example, some researchers have documented the value of vague language when firms are experiencing uncertain periods, such as strategic change. Still others have documented the danger of vague language because it signals a firm’s vulnerability to its rivals (e.g., Guo et al., 2020). We encourage ongoing research to systematically study the specific conditions under which corporate communications influence stakeholders. The authors thank Jonathan Doh, Daniel Muzio, and Tieying Yu for their helpful comments.
‘What determines the scope of the firm?’ is one of the four most fundamental questions in strategic management (Peng et al., 2005; Peng and Su, 2014). As COVID-19 raises a series of new concerns about how firms strategically navigate the turbulent waters (Hitt et al., 2021), this article extends the fundamental question by asking: How does COVID-19 impact the scope of the firm? We argue that COVID-19 has expanded the scope of research on the scope of the firm (Peng et al., 2021). Since a majority of the firms in the world focus on a small number of related industries – known as industry-focused firms – research on the scope of the firm needs to embrace their challenges. Specifically, for industry-focused firms, COVID-19 has highlighted two basic dimensions that are rarely considered in previous research: supply and demand. In essence, some firms rely primarily on international suppliers, and some on domestic suppliers. At the same time, some firms rely primarily on international demand, and some on domestic demand. Given widespread economic lockdowns and border closures, how does the scope of industry-focused firms change and adapt? This is an interesting, important, yet, previously underexplored question, which we endeavour to address. Traditionally, scope of the firm has been viewed through the lenses of product diversification and geographic diversification (Peng et al., 2005, 2021; Peng and Su, 2014). Known as conglomerates in developed economies and business groups in emerging economies, a small number of firms have extensive product diversification and wide-ranging geographic scope (Peng et al., 2018; Verbeke and Yuan, 2021). They have attracted a lion’s share of research attention on the scope of the firm – typically in the domain of corporate strategy research. However, a majority of the firms in the world are non-diversified industry-focused firms, which are often investigated in business strategy research (but not in corporate strategy research). Integrating corporate and business strategy research, our article focuses on the scope of industry-focused firms, but not that of conglomerates and business groups. COVID-19 has sensitized firms to pay attention to the twin basic dimensions: supply and demand. Border closures and supply chain disruptions have heightened concerns about the vulnerability of global supply chains (Gereffi, 2019; Kano and Oh, 2020). Economic lockdowns have depressed demand both at home and abroad. Focusing on surviving and coping with the unprecedented pandemic, managing the two basic dimensions – fixing the constraints of supply chains and ensuring the fulfilment of market demand – may become overarching aspirations. These actions have major implications for the scope of the firm, to which we turn next. At a most basic level, industry-focused firms may source most of their supplies from home or abroad. At the same time, they may serve only one market (most likely their home country) or may serve product demand in multiple countries. Shown in Figure 1, such differences create a 2 × 2 typology that can classify industry-focused firms into four types based upon their various supply and demand locations. During COVID-19, closing of international borders led to stock-outs for firms in Cells 1 and 2 that relied heavily on international suppliers. As a result, firms in Cell 1, which we call ‘import assemblers’, could not sell their products even when the domestic economy started re-opening. Such firms risk their survival mainly because of (1) loss of revenues due to failure of inbound logistics from abroad, and (2) loss of market share at home to rivals that are able to continue to meet domestic demand. Therefore, it is likely that import assemblers (Cell 1) will seek alternate suppliers in the domestic market to meet domestic demand. There are two options that mitigate the current supply issues for these firms: partnering with – including establishing alliances with and acquiring – firms in Cell 3 or Cell 4. In short, import assemblers in Cell 1 may expand the geographic scope of the sources of their supplies by tapping into domestic suppliers. For import assemblers, both alternatives have their own merits and demerits. On the one hand, firms in Cell 3 – ‘local producers’ with both supplies and demand primarily at home – may view the pandemic as an opportunity to increase their own market share. On the other hand, firms in Cell 3, if they partner with firms in Cell 1, have an opportunity to gain access to international supplies and hence increase the scope of the products that they offer. Inclusion in an already established international supply network may be especially appealing to some firms in Cell 3 that aspire to hedge their bets by accessing international suppliers should disruptions for domestic suppliers occur in the future. The other option for import assemblers in Cell 1 is partnering with firms in Cell 4, which are ‘indigenous exporters’ that primarily source domestically and meet demand internationally. This option may be mutually interesting to both groups. This is because while indigenous exporters in Cell 4 have access to domestic suppliers, they may lack capabilities to sell their products in the domestic market, which can be shared by import assemblers in Cell 1. Because of curtailed access to international markets and drastic increase in costs of shipment to international locations, import assemblers in Cell 1 need access to domestic suppliers, which indigenous exporters in Cell 4 can provide. Overall, partnering between import assemblers in Cell 1 and indigenous exporters in Cell 4 can help both groups to meet their aspirations of growing their scope – growing the supply scope for firms in Cell 1, and growing the demand scope for firms in Cell 4. Although such partnering opportunities exist during normal times, firms may pay particular attention to collaboration during tumultuous times such as COVID-19, therefore expanding their scope. Both sourcing and meeting demand internationally, firms in Cell 2, which we label ‘export assemblers’, may be the ones that are hardest hit by the pandemic owing to their business model of reliance upon international supplies and demand. Such assemblers receive most raw inputs from overseas and sell most of their processed outputs back to foreign countries. During COVID, export assemblers in Cell 2, in order to stay afloat, may be interested in partnering with local producers in Cell 3, which have access to domestic supplies and sell products in the domestic market. Again, this presents to local producers in Cell 3 an opportunity to tap into international markets. Specifically, export assemblers in Cell 2 may use their resources to form alliances with or acquire local producers in Cell 3. In summary, COVID-19 (1) may motivate export assemblers in Cell 2 to expand their scope of their suppliers (by adding domestic suppliers to their sourcing portfolio), and (2) may motivate local producers in Cell 3 to increase the scope of their demand (by tapping into international markets to which export assemblers in Cell 2 have been selling for a long time). Local producers in Cell 3 are the least affected by COVID-19 in terms of the impact on their supply and demand. During the post-COVID era, local producers may make financial comeback sooner than the other three types of firms due to proximity to suppliers and customers (Mahajan and Tomar, 2020). Our previous arguments indicate that local producers may be on the top list of other firms for alliances and acquisitions during COVID-19. Therefore, these primarily domestic firms – in terms of both supplies and demand – have an opportunity to internationalize and grow their own geographic scope. Cell 4 comprises of firms that have access to domestic suppliers and have buyers in international markets. We label such firms ‘indigenous exporters’. As discussed earlier, indigenous exporters in Cell 4 may find partnering with the firms in Cell 1 especially attractive as such partnering offers to the indigenous exporters (1) immediate (although partial) relief from supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19, thereby improving the revenue stream in the domestic market; and (2) an opportunity to diversify both supply and demand sides of trade and hence increasing product and geographic scope. While the scope of extensively diversified conglomerates and business groups certainly deserves continued research attention (Peng et al., 2005, 2018, 2021), we have argued that the devastation by COVID-19 has necessitated our attention on the scope of industry-focused firms, which would be labelled ‘non-diversified firms’ in traditional research. By focusing on how the four types of industry-focused firms manage their supply and demand – with a basic 2 × 2 typology – we have highlighted how the scope of the firm can be adjusted and adapted to meet the challenges during the pandemic and its aftermath. This article contributes an alternate perspective to the prediction that COVID-19 will be followed by a wave of deglobalization – specifically, significant reduction of firms’ geographic scope. Instead, we propose that some firms may expand their geographic scope depending on their supply and demand locations. One insight is that instead of uniformly withdrawing from international supply and demand, essentially reducing geographic scope – advocated by some gurus of deglobalization – some firms, such as local producers in Cell 3, may take advantage of COVID-19 by expanding their geographic scope. To the same extent that extensively relying on international supply and demand may cause severe performance downturns when border crossing becomes arduous and costly (as during COVID), extensively relying on domestic supply and demand runs the risk of ‘keeping all eggs in one basket’ (what if the domestic economy suffers a recession or unrest?). Part of the goals for any international business is to reduce such risk by going after ‘different baskets’ (Verbeke and Yuan, 2021). Therefore, searching for the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of the ideal scope of the firm where supply and demand can properly meet will remain one of the leading management challenges in the post-COVID era. At least two directions await future research. First, the traditional distinction between corporate strategy research and business strategy research appears less meaningful. While COVID-19 has energized traditional business strategy research topics such as rapid prototyping and corporate resilience (Ahlstrom and Wang, 2021), it has made us aware that managing the scope of the firm is a strategic challenge not just for conglomerates and business groups that are typically studied in corporate strategy research (Peng et al., 2021). Managing scope is clearly relevant for industry-focused firms, which are typically investigated in business strategy research (but are outside the radar screen of corporate strategy research). Therefore, a deep dive into the scope of industry-focused firms can help integrate corporate strategy and business strategy research. Second, our 2 × 2 framework has used a coarse-grained notion of ‘international.’ International locations range from distant foreign countries to near abroad. Managing supply and demand involving distant countries requires a global strategy, and dealing with neighbouring countries necessitates a regional strategy (Kano and Oh, 2020). These strategies call for different capabilities that future research will need to identify (Verbeke and Yuan, 2021). Overall, new strategic phenomena have always injected new insights into research (Hitt et al., 2021; Peng and Su, 2014). Likewise, COVID-19 has provoked new thinking about one of the four most fundamental questions in strategic management: ‘What determines the scope of the firm?’. In conclusion, the scope of research on the scope of the firm needs to be expanded to take into account the very basic but previously overlooked dimensions of supply and demand that industry-focused firms must confront during COVID-19 and beyond. This research was supported in part by the Jindal Chair at UT Dallas. We thank Jonathan Doh and Daniel Muzio (editors) for their guidance.
We develop and test predictions about how differences in people’s social class backgrounds, as well as interpersonal perceptions of social class, influence leadership emergence as teams change tasks and group membership. Drawing on adaptive leadership theory, we test distinct pathways for how team members’ social class backgrounds contribute to their likelihood of emerging as a leader. Using data from two samples consisting of 90 teams and over 500 individuals, we find consistent support for a person’s objective class background informing subjective perceptions of social class, which in turn predict leadership emergence. Our findings extend recent research examining the relevance of social class in leadership research by demonstrating how interpersonal judgments of one’s class position contribute to leader emergence even as the group’s membership or task changes and irrespective of an individual’s performance. By examining the role of social class in these informal, yet important, attributions of leadership, our study identifies potential avenues by which class‐based inequalities can be reproduced within contemporary organizations.
Scientific experts have traditionally enjoyed high public trust, but their stock of social capital is eroding (Jacobs, 2020). This is particularly the case for management researchers, who are already viewed as elites disconnected from practice and the public. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated lingering concerns about using public resources for university education and social sciences that yield questionable social returns with obfuscated outputs, lack of timeliness and accessibility, and fragmentation, but it has also 'changed science forever' (Yong, 2020): The post-COVID-19 scientific enterprise demands responsible use of societal resources through fast-paced research, social embeddedness, and coordination. Management research is everything but. For management scholars, this means recalibrating how research is conducted, evaluated, and disseminated to society. This commentary briefly outlines some tangible pathways toward that end. The notion that management research seldom reaches a broad audience or lacks pivotal societal impact is not new (Buckley et al., 2017), but stakeholder patience for using resources for management research has rapidly depleted due to COVID-19-driven resource constraints. The endless calls for individual researchers to do more 'impactful' or 'responsible' work have had little impact. A major reason is strong incentives focusing researchers' activities on intellectual aesthetics, ultra-differentiation, and storytelling. The slew of papers on how COVID-19 will change management research and phenomena is in itself a sign that management researchers tend to be behind and often lack the standing to inform practitioners and the public on such matters. Exploratory, pluralistic, and debate-driven inquiry into Grand Challenges is helpful (Howard-Grenville, 2021), but it is not enough. The Grand Challenges and big questions that management researchers should study are hard to answer satisfactorily and often do not yield the intellectually stimulating findings that top journals expect.[1] Another structural problem is dispersion. Other than journals and loose associations, there is not much coordination and purposeful collective effort taking place. One of the reasons the biomedical scientific community was able to tackle COVID-19 quickly and with resolve is organizational efficiency and common purpose (Yong, 2020). In contrast, the management field nurtures niche and often trivial divisions rather than promoting a more coordinated approach to studying Grand Challenges and big questions. Yet, there are many management scientists nowadays, so it is possible to allocate a lot of effort to select problems. These structural problems further interact with the field's processes in problematic ways. It takes years to publish a study in leading management journals, and it comes at the estimated average cost of $400,000 per article (Byrne, 2014). Meanwhile, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated the pace of scientific inquiry and exposition of findings. Many scientific fields have demonstrated agility, rapid dissemination, and openness, but not much has changed about management research. COVID-19 is increasing the rift between management research and society to the point of no return. The management field can no longer afford to exacerbate its questionable output and exuberant costs with processes that make its science less timely and broadly inaccessible. Although management research provides insights into some pressing issues practitioners face today, it needs 'fundamental, sometimes counter-intuitive changes' (Pielke and Lane, 2020) to build expert capital in society and among practitioners. While Wickert et al. (2021) detail how management researchers can make their research more impactful, including through dissemination activity, it is not clear why said researchers would be motivated to do so given the current structures and processes in the management field. In munificent times of equilibrium, this was less acute of an issue. But the post-COVID-19 resource constraints on the educational system and the rapidly changing scientific enterprise demand that management journal editors, deans, and senior scholars drive incentive changes from the top. The field's senior gatekeepers ought to incentivize more research on big questions and Grand Challenges, even with less precision, than on small questions with superior precision, to increase the social value of management research. In this way, Wickert et al. (2021) perhaps miss critical structural and processual aspects of the field that require profound changes, as we discuss next. First, the scientific process must instil trust by being much more visible and rapidly self-correcting. COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that society is no longer willing to expend significant resources and then, wait years for obfuscated research. We are encouraged by the recent surge in short-format articles, special issues on pressing topics with accelerated review processes, and the emergence of journals that empower phenomenon-driven research. Even so, this is incremental, and management research continues to be longwinded and written in a language alien to all but insiders – sometimes, even to insiders. We argue that more open, crowd-sourced designs are warranted. The technological tools available today, some significantly better as a result of COVID-19 (De et al., 2020), enable the creation of collaborative virtual platforms that can combine the need for scientific rigor with the need to share, review, correct, and accumulate scientific output. Management research would be a living entity broadly accessible from the early stages of projects, and the platform can use artificial intelligence and algorithmic approaches to categorize, aggregate, and synthesize scientific findings, particularly into concrete insights that directly inform pressing issues such as Grand Challenges. This should help to improve timeliness, accessibility, and rapid self-correction. The concept of doing a multi-year study that undergoes hidden, multi-year blind review and that does not change after publication (barring unusual occurrences) is a model of the past. A more open (including to the public) platform should replace the existing publisher-journal-driven model, rather than being a mere pre-publication supplement or a communication forum (e.g., Research Gate, SSRN). The upshot is that management research should be seen as an ongoing contribution to the scientific community and society rather than corporation-owned intellectual property cemented in history once published. Second, as a field, management must be known for mastering a limited, well-defined set of big questions to have real standing as scientific experts and a seat at the table for addressing Grand Challenges. Management schools cannot be experts in everything but should at least have brand capital of strong expertise in some things. This requires coordination at the highest levels: A portfolio of big questions and research based on present and nascent issues. This portfolio must be built with practitioners' and other stakeholders' participation and relate to issues that the field is uniquely positioned to address. Like consulting firms reflecting on the year that was and is to come, management researchers can work with stakeholders to drive topics and user-friendly reports that can be broadly circulated in society and business circles. Management researchers have the science as a basis to drive actionable insights in key areas; hence, there is no need to worry about differentiating such reports from the many buzzword-driven, rigor-lacking reports out there. Individual researchers vying to make an impact (Wickert et al., 2021) will not take the field sufficiently forward. Management research needs a collective effort coordinated by senior management scholars and promulgated via a technological platform that can yield usable output, as we discuss above. Furthermore, intermediaries embedded in diverse networks of practice and society, especially where management research does not reach or resonate, must be part of the dissemination processes. Recent initiatives, such as the Management Studies Insights Blog, help translate research to outsiders. However, this is not enough. Disseminating research must be an integral, coordinated part of the profession because social showcasing of scientific work is a staple of post-COVID-19 science. Deans and promotion committees should put more value in such activities. Third, rather than only producing scientific articles based on data either compiled for other reasons or collected by the researcher for the purpose of publishing an article, management researchers should make it an integral part of their work to generate, compile, and circulate high-quality data that non-academics can use, namely support decisions by practitioners and policymakers and actively inform the public as a means to establish the field's expert capital in society (Sharma and Bansal, 2020). Now more than ever, organizations can benefit from the scientific prowess of management researchers to drive speedy decisions and cope with major challenges (Ahlstrom and Wang, 2021). But management research is often lagging and assesses challenges ex-post. The steps we suggest here will help make the management field more anticipatory, relevant, and instrumental, thus making it a point of reference for outsiders rather than a backward-looking conversation among insiders. Despite its many adverse outcomes, COVID-19 has given management researchers the opportunity to become a leading force of experts in the new scientific enterprise. Several aspects of work and organization in the post-COVID-19 world are ripe for inquiry along the lines proposed above. For example, an area that can benefit from a concerted effort by management scholars is the future of work, the topic of an in-process Journal of Management Studies special issue. The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing forth disparities based on factors such as race, socioeconomic status, and nationality. These disparities pose problems for talent management, workplace diversity and inclusion, and employee mental health, thus requiring new sets of management skills. The management field is well-equipped to address these issues, but it must be done in a coordinated, timely, and open manner; in collaboration with stakeholders; in a way that prioritizes a focus on big questions over intellectual aesthetics; and by way of producing not only research but also user-friendly reports and data that are forward-looking for broad use. More generally, management research is well equipped to address issues with systems that will be the focus of post-COVID-19 scientific inquiry, such as food and crop management, energy organization management, robot and artificial intelligence management, disaster management and systemic resilience, education system management, and innovation management for global diseases (Bansal et al., 2021). These are not typical topics in management research, but they should be because management scholars have the expertise to break new ground in these topics tied to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. If management researchers make such issues part of a coordinated portfolio of big questions, study them rapidly and openly using intelligent technological platforms, and produce accessible reports and data, the management field will have been well on its way toward regaining expert brand capital in society and being calibrated for the post-COVID-19 scientific enterprise. To make this a reality, we call on the senior leaders of the management field to make the needed structural and processual changes.