Business management education is increasingly making use of artificial intelligence as an emerging technology that will lead to major societal changes in learning and knowledge endeavours. This editorial article focuses on the link between business management and artificial intelligence as an enabler of social policy changes. This means considering the history of artificial intelligence and how business management education has evolved in recent years. By doing so, it encourages more focus on creative uses of social policy in terms of discussion about educational initiatives. This is helpful in gaining more insight into the novel and entrepreneurial ways business management education can embed artificial intelligence and improve overall learning outcomes.

In pursuit of innovation, firms increasingly rely on technological acquisitions to access diverse, non-redundant knowledge. However, the effectiveness of such acquisitions, especially those involving geographically distant targets, remains uncertain. Existing research typically treats the acquiring firm as a unitary actor, overlooking the internal geographic structure of corporate groups. Drawing on economic geography and network theory, this study examines how the geographic distance of both headquarters and R&D subsidiaries from the target affects post-acquisition innovation. Based on 346 domestic technological acquisitions by Chinese corporate groups, we find that the headquarters-target distance impedes innovation due to integration challenges, while the subsidiary-target distance promotes it by providing heterogeneous knowledge. Headquarters-target proximity further strengthens the positive effect of subsidiary-target distance, highlighting their complementary roles in the recombination of diverse knowledge. However, geographic dispersion within the corporate group negatively moderates both distance effects by increasing coordination burden and diminishing the marginal returns to knowledge diversity. These findings provide valuable insights into how corporate groups reconfigure their geographic R&D networks by technological acquisitions to leverage geographic distance.

Many mergers and acquisitions (M&As) fail, and an emerging body of literature highlights the role of prejudice in derailing the M&A process. While prejudice is frequently observed in M&As, strategies to mitigate these biases remain underexplored. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study focuses on Chinese acquisitions in the UK and examines how managers from both the acquired and acquiring organizations navigate prejudice through emotional sensemaking. The findings demonstrate that emotional sensemaking plays a critical role in shaping the post-acquisition integration (PAI) process and its outcomes. Specifically, sensemaking supported by emotional intelligence facilitates the accommodation or reduction of prejudice, while emotionally unintelligent sensemaking tends to reinforce it. By focusing on the dynamic, interactive emotional exchanges between managers at the micro level, this study offers a fresh lens on the integration process beyond traditional strategic or structural explanations. The study contributes to the literature by advancing the understanding of micro-level emotional sensemaking in the PAI, emphasizing the dynamic, interactive nature of emotional sensemaking between acquirer and acquiree managers, and its impact on the integration process and outcomes.

Phenomenon-based research involves uncovering context-specific mechanisms underlying complex organizational realities and, when applied to Chinese contexts, offers valuable potential to extend and refine global management theories. Drawing on three illustrative studies on person–environment fit (Chuang, Hsu, Wang, & Judge, 2015), CEO humility (Ou, Waldman, & Peterson, 2014), and authoritarian leadership (Huang, Chiu, Lam, & Farh, 2015) respectively, this editorial highlights how each exemplifies different stages in the evolution of theories, from indigenous, middle-range insights to universal, general frameworks. In doing so, it addresses challenges and potential solutions for publishing phenomenon-based Chinese management research in premier journals. Across these cases, several recurring challenges emerge, including difficulties in positioning context-specific findings within existing theoretical frameworks, translating culturally embedded constructs for international audiences, and balancing cultural authenticity with global understanding. The authors also reflect on practical challenges such as building research partnerships and gaining organizational support within Chinese contexts. By comparing experiences across these studies, this editorial offers guidance on how phenomenon-based research can deepen theoretical innovation while maintaining methodological rigor and practical relevance. Lastly, it argues that Chinese management research plays a vital role in advancing universal management knowledge and offers opportunities for future research.

Work on the relationship between regulation and bribery suggests that bribes are a joint function of the demands of bureaucrats and the supply of business managers willing to pay them. However, due to biases in measurement, empirical work has concentrated on country-level, demand-side drivers, while research on factors that lead businesses to bribe remains theoretically rich but empirically underdeveloped. We contribute to the burgeoning work on the supply of bribery with a formal model that predicts poorly managed firms may strategically initiate bribes because resource constraints and/or poor service quality necessitate shortcuts in regulatory compliance. To test these theories, we present two connected studies. The first demonstrates that the predictions are consistent with cross-national business survey data. The second, a field experiment, randomly assigned firms to management training courses in Vietnam. Using detailed accounting books, we find that firms in the management course paid monthly bribes less than one-fifth the size ($227 less) of the placebo group, and, consistent with our predictions, had higher levels of regulatory compliance.

Adolescent cyberbullying has evolved into a significant public health and governance challenge in digital environments. This study provides a systematic bibliometric mapping of 1,202 peer-reviewed articles published between 2001 and 2025, examining the intellectual structure and thematic development of the field. By using Scopus for data retrieval and VOSviewer for co-occurrence analysis, the study identifies publication trends, influential contributors, institutional patterns, and six dominant thematic clusters. Findings indicate a sustained growth in research output, particularly after 2015, with a strong concentration on mental health outcomes, victimisation, and psychosocial risks. Emerging themes include minority vulnerability, cyber dating violence, artificial intelligence-based detection systems, and digital prevention strategies. However, governance constructs such as platform accountability, regulatory oversight, and algorithmic transparency remain comparatively peripheral. The study highlights the need for stronger integration of organisational, institutional, and socio-technical perspectives to complement individual-level research and inform coordinated policy, educational, and platform-based interventions.

We examine how banks reallocate employees following mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and the resulting effects on productivity. Using matched employee–branch data combined with branch-level financial information, we show that M&As expand internal labor markets and trigger substantial worker redeployment. Newly consolidated banks reassign high-ability loan officers to acquirer branches, increasing productivity. Target branches also experience productivity improvements, primarily driven by restructuring and cost reductions. These effects are strongest in municipalities where the combined pre-merger internal labor markets of the target and acquirer were larger, highlighting the central role of internal labor markets in generating efficiency gains from consolidation.

In January 2025, CRSP discontinued the existing stock tape used in many published papers. This transition rewrites 9.62% of monthly returns by more than 1 basis point (bp), primarily due to a change in the dividend reinvestment assumption. Analyzing the impact for a comprehensive set of premia in several thousand sorting specifications reveals that, on average, 11.43% of all monthly long-short returns differ by more than 10 bp—especially in early periods, NBER recessions, and return-based sorts. Reassuringly, average premia and their significance remain largely unaffected, suggesting CRSP changes mainly introduce unsystematic variation without altering key asset pricing conclusions.

We study whether information design influences consumer behavior in a randomized field experiment with users of an online account aggregation app. Participants received a personalized index representing their net worth as a lifetime monthly cash flow. The presentation of this index varied across treatments in its framing and the salience of its display. Consumers exposed to a consumption-oriented frame and a salient comparison of the index with their past spending reduced discretionary spending. These findings show that minor variations in information presentation can significantly affect financial behavior, highlighting the power of design in promoting saving and informing policy and regulation.

This article examines the postwar Franco-Italian struggle over Sudameris (Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amérique du Sud), a multinational bank operating across South America. After 1945, Paribas sought to transform Sudameris into a French institution, backed by government pressure and asset sequestration. Italy’s Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI) resisted, regaining majority control in 1948 through strategic share acquisitions. The ensuing conflict (1948–1955) centered on executive power. Paribas relied on French corporate law to maintain managerial dominance, while the BCI finally succeeded in appointing an Italian managing director in 1955. Under Italian leadership, Sudameris shifted from transactional to relationship banking in South America, reversing stagnation and achieving renewed growth by 1960. Sudameris’s early postwar history reveals how postwar European economic rivalries extended into South America and how multinational banks adapted to nationalist environments amid the contradictory forces of regional integration and global competition.

Using the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006, we examine the effect of the credibility of mandatory disclosure by credit rating agencies (CRAs) on market feedback. We find an increase in investment-price sensitivity for firms affected by the act, and the increase is enhanced when managers have greater incentives to glean information from prices—when firms are exposed to multiple dimensions of uncertainty, have higher growth options, face more competition, have less informed managers, or have higher accounting fraud risk. Our findings suggest that the greater credibility of CRA mandatory disclosure improves managerial learning from stock prices.

This article examines the political backlash to “woke capitalism” in the USA in the context of the introduction of anti-ESG legislation across 18 US states. This article asks what this backlash reveals about the evolving power dynamic between business and the state through analysing the problematisation of responsible investment in Florida Governor Ronald DeSantis’ “war on woke.” This article finds that the state frames socially and environmentally responsible investment as the imposition of an ideological agenda by “martini millionaires” at the expense of the democratic will and economic liberty of “everyday Americans.” This article makes a novel contribution to understandings of the power dynamic between business and the state, through a focus on discursive power, and identification of investment as an underexamined arena of political contestation, demonstrating that the trigger for state pushback on “woke capitalism” is when business goes beyond virtue-signalling to embrace systemic change.