A firm’s managers have the most intimate understanding of the firm’s business, customers, processes, and capabilities. The managers’ decisions are influenced not only by institutional forces, stakeholders, and organizational governance and leadership but also by their personal values toward sustainability, attitudes toward their roles in solving environmental sustainability challenges, cognitive frames, and interpretations of environmental issues as threats or opportunities. Managers remain locked into everyday routines, patterns of thinking, and cognitive biases that may stifle creativity.Firms that develop successful PES strategies create the opportunities for employees to apply fresh ideas and strategic thinking to address sustainability challenges by enabling them to overcome their biases and everyday routines. Family firms have some unique features that influence strategic decision-making by managers (which includes the family members) differently as compared to non-family firms. Managers in family firms that aim for trans-generational continuity of their enterprise will make decisions differently when addressing environmental issues.

Organizational, economic, and technology forces are encouraging organizations to experiment with new ways to develop their strategic priorities (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007). One such new approach is Open Strategy (OS), an approach that increasingly relies on the use of online digital platforms. OS refers to the process by which an organization’s strategy for the future is developed in a planned or inadvertent manner with more transparency for all stakeholders and/or inclusion of different stakeholders compared to conventional strategy-making processes (Hautz et al., 2017; Mack & Szulanski, 2017; Whittington et al., 2011). Rather than limiting strategy to an exclusive group of “elite” strategy planners, OS engages a broader set of stakeholders in the process (Dobusch & Kapeller, 2013; Palmisano, 2004; Steiger et al., 2012). Among those included in OS are external stakeholders, defined as individuals not currently employed by the organization, including current or future potential customers, investors, general public, suppliers, universities, or other as-yet unaffiliated institutions and individuals.

Concern about the quality and purpose of research in the social sciences in general and management studies in particular is now widespread. In an editorial in Organization Studies published in 2013, David Courpasson, the departing editor-in-chief, bemoaned ‘the lack of political and social relevance of much research conducted in the field’. He argued that a culture of productivity had become dominant in which publishing for its own sake was more important than what he called ‘passionate scholarship’.

This chapter answers the question of how the World Economic Fourm (WEF) constructs authority for itself in the global arena by studying the form of political action that the WEF draws upon. We argue that it constructs authority beyond itself through turning some participants from its many events into a form of members, thus partially organizing its environment. Participants at WEF activities, as well as WEF staff, would call this order a ‘network’. We acknowledge the network aspects of this order, but argue that it is foremost based on organization; it is a decided order, based on decisions taken within the WEF. Empirically, the chapter builds on interview data within Geneva staff and participants at WEF activities.

Throughout this book, I have documented growing problems with the quality of academic life, how academics do their jobs, and a habit of over-theorisation within management studies that is handcuffed to the fetish of prioritising where something is published rather than what is written. Some suggestions have been made about how we should address these problems. But we need more than formal measures by powerful agencies. I think we also need a shift in our own mind-sets. A certain fatalism has gripped academics about our working lives and publishing practices. We are, it is said, evaluated, harassed, exhausted and even bullied as never before. Universities and regulatory bodies are more concerned with monitoring where we publish than whether we have something meaningful to say. Careers thrive if we ‘play the game’ and languish if we don’t. (By the way, how high is your h-index today, and what is your total number of citations on Google Scholar?) There is, we often say, nothing that we can do about it. As I have noted before in this book, it is even increasingly common to hear people speak of ‘the publishing game’.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the potential of the partial-organization concept as applied to the analysis of inter-firm networks as a form of economic governance that is created, reproduced or transformed with the help of network management practices. Key insights that the partial-organization perspective can provide into the process and the outcome of organizing and managing inter-firm networks are discussed. Inter-firm networks are conceived as partial organization of more or less complete formal organizations. Under specific circumstances, inter-firm networks could even be considered, at least in some aspects, as being even more organized than organizations. With regard to insights into the dynamics of this organizational form the chapter argues that the concept of partial organization helps to understand the development of this form from initial market relationships as well as from hierarchical organizations

Strategy is a complex field and discipline undergoing a change process that leaves it precarious in structure (Whittington et al., 2011) but wealthy in purpose. Purpose refers to how thought, artifacts, and action are being perceived as strategic (Gond et al., 2018; Laasch, 2018) and to the alignment of the values at the core of the organization with the wider community (Moore, 2012: 309). It is this wider community that shares values, knowledge, and direction with the organization that is embedded and integrated not only in a market but also in multiple networks of practice, expertise, and preferences. Orientations are the strategic intentions manifest in choices of business model, technology, and regulation. With this chapter, I attempt to achieve the following: first, I derive orientations within Open Strategy that are not only transparent to but also inclusive of outsiders by building upon works in innovation studies that theorize about participation and Open Strategy avant la lettre.

Recently, openness has become a new approach in strategizing as ownership and control of internal assets are no longer vital to achieving competitive advantage (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007). Nowadays, knowledge is widespread and open systems are generally regarded as beneficial in terms of organizational design and work culture. However, openness also comes with politics and it is not a practice that will necessarily be welcomed by all. Openness changes the power dynamics within an organization; there are critics as well as friends, as we shall explore. Openness is a process that can change over time, becoming more or less open as events occur and contingencies or actors change. We are interested in how dominant organizational actors can seemingly manipulate “open systems” strategically. Openness is problematic per se for social systems. Systems endogenously construct their differentiation from other systems through closure achieved through specific cognitive rules. In this chapter, we use Clegg’s (1989) “circuits” approach to a theory of power to grasp the politics of openness in terms of three circuits of power. Some of the recent problems posed in the wider world of social media will be analyzed in terms of the three circuits to illustrate some potential problems.

Open Strategy has drawn increasing attention in recent years. A growing number of studies have captured greater transparency and heightened inclusion in the strategic practices of contemporary organizations (e.g., Whittington et al., 2011; Hautz et al., 2017). It is often Information Technology (IT) that can facilitate involvement of a wider range of stakeholders in the generation of strategic content and knowledge (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Wulf & Butel, 2016), and in the practice of strategy (Whittington et al., 2011; Whittington, 2014). However, despite the widely recognized role of such technology as online platforms (Malhotra et al., 2017) and social media (Huang et al., 2013; Baptista et al., 2017) in enabling openness in strategy, literature with an explicit focus on IT has been surprisingly sparse to date (Tavakoli et al., 2015; 2017). Thus far, most papers have been published in Management and Strategic Management outlets (e.g., Whittington et al., 2011; Stieger et al., 2012; Seidl & Werle, 2017), including a special issue on Open Strategy in Long Range Planning (e.g., Hautz et al., 2017).

The idea of partial organization has not been fully explored. Relatively little attention has been paid to organization within organizations or to the possibility of partial de-organization. We explore this possibility in the context of business firms for which innovation and strategic renewal are imperatives. The firm’s top management created conditions for autonomous action in the form of a dedicated internal development program for strategic renewal. Thus, it attempted to partially deconstruct its organizational hierarchy and other elements of its decided order. Employees from all over the organization were invited to participate in the program and to present proposals for new strategic initiatives. The contribution of the paper is in the introduction of the concept of partial de-organizing and in the argument that partial organization is also observable within, and not just without, the boundaries of formal organizations.

In this chapter we investigate how certification and accreditation organizations put much effort in constructing an image of independence for the outside world to see and endorse. It is difficult for an organization to proclaim its own independence; rather, a fundamental way of convincing others of its independence is through entering dependency relationships with other formal organizations that grant the organization independence, like the dubbing of knights. We analyse the character of organizational dependencies with respect to rules, sanctions, hierarchy, monitoring, and membership and conclude that the search for independence result in the addition of elements to elements, driving more and more organization. We discuss how the adding of elements form a complex system of interdependent organizations, which resembles a rational, authoritative Weberian bureaucracy. Although this bureaucratic system may be understood as organization – a decided and systematized order – it is not a discernible entity. It is partial and as such it lacks a central authority to govern and to which an overall responsibility could be ascribed. Paradoxically, the efforts aiming at ensuring independence resulted in the organizations becoming dependent not only on each other, but also on the decided order surrounding them.