In Chapter 4, I discussed the nature of questionable research practices (QRPs) and fraud within academia generally. Now it is time to turn attention closer to home. To do so I look at retractions within management studies, analyse the reasons provided for them, and consider what they imply about the overall state of our research. I also draw on interview data from four editors who had retracted papers, and two co-authors of papers retracted because of fraud perpetrated by another author. To encourage candour, the confidentiality of the editors and co-authors has been maintained. This was important because if the editors’ identities were known, so would the retractions they discuss, and authors’ identities would then be revealed. This could raise legal issues, and would certainly have inhibited the interviewees. Co-authors had similar concerns. In addition, I interviewed a former academic guilty of research fraud. He is Diederik Stapel, mentioned briefly in Chapter 4. His fifty-eight retractions include three in management journals. Given the intense scrutiny of Stapel’s activities, and his authorship of a freely-available online book detailing his actions, issues of confidentiality do not arise.

Recent studies have raised participation as one of the key issues of Open Strategy (Luedicke et al., 2017; Mack & Szulanski, 2017). However, participation has a longer tradition in strategy research (Laine & Vaara, 2015; Mantere & Vaara, 2008) from which Open Strategy could learn from and contribute to. In this chapter, we review research on participation in strategy and discuss its implications for Open Strategy and vice versa. Participation is a dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon, the nature and effects of which are not easy to pin down in strategy making. Participation can generate engagement and create commitment to strategy and similarly improve the quality of decision making (Floyd & Wooldridge, 2000). In contrast, limiting participation through secrecy and exclusion may result in ineffective implementation (Mintzberg, 1994), and from a critical perspective, exacerbate organizational inequality (Knights & Morgan, 1991; McCabe, 2010). However, participation can also slow down decision making and constrain the strategy process (Collier et al., 2004; Anderson, 2004). Moreover, widespread participation can create expectations that are then not satisfied, particularly where the decision might be contrary to the advice given by participants (Kornberger & Clegg, 2011).

Many organizations – large and small – have begun to implement enterprise social media for use among employees and senior leadership. According to Leonardi, Huysman, and Steinfield (2013: 2), enterprise social media allow workers to: (1) communicate messages with specific coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular coworkers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited, and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing. The broad family of social media technologies used in organizations today includes social networking sites, blog platforms, microblogging tools, wikis, and social tagging tools (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017). Today’s popular examples include Slack, Yammer, Workplace, Chatter, and Jive – with new entrants sure to displace some of those in the future. What do these new tools, which have traditionally been thought of as platforms for employees’ social interaction, have to do with strategy?

Open Strategy is a process that engages internal and external stakeholders in various degrees of transparency and inclusion (Whittington et al., 2011). It presupposes at minimum episodic information transfer among the parties involved, and for more meaningful inclusion, continuing dialogue (Heracleous et al., 2018). Dialogue, as an ongoing process of communication among actors who pursue a particular goal or set of goals, is integral to Open Strategy processes. As a way of linking an organization with its stakeholders, an effective dialogic process can provide generative diversity to the ideas that inform strategy and contribute to a strategic direction that has stakeholder and market relevance. There are costs, however, as dialogue can also fuel the undesirable side of the dilemmas outlined by Hautz, Seidl, and Whittington (2017) and various types of tensions noted by other authors (e.g., Baptista et al., 2017; Heracleous et al., 2018). Ongoing dialogue with little hierarchical, ideational, or temporal constraints, for example, can lead to conflict, inefficient decision making, wasteful use of resources, and pursuit of personal agendas, as pointed out by the dilemma of process (Hautz et al., 2017) and illustrated by ethnographies of a dialogical organization par excellence, Wikimedia (Jemielniak, 2014, 2016).

The two main exogenous drivers that have been examined in the environmental strategy literature are institutional and stakeholder influences. Drawing upon the institutional theory, organizations and natural environment and the family business literature the chapter develops insights into institutional influences and logics driving strategy in family firms. Drawing upon our primary data from the winery industry, it examines whether or not institutional forces will have a different influence on environmental sustainability strategies of family-owned firms as compared to non-family firms. Next, beginning with the foundational arguments of stakeholder theory including classification of stakeholders and their influences on a firms’ environmental strategy, the chapter argues that noticeably absent from the environmental sustainability strategy literature is a key stakeholder for family firms- the family. Based on this literature review and insights from our primary data, the chapter developd arguments about the influence of different stakeholders on family versus non-family firms, and how these influences are likely to impact the environmental sustainability strategy of these firms.

In order to build theory on the role of family firms in investing patient capital for long-term sustainability strategies, we supplemented the literature review with empirical case studies to generate a thicker description of the phenomenon and to embed the arguments in practice. In subsequent chapters of this monograph, discussions and theory development is illustrated with examples drawn from these case studies. In order to generate an understanding of the core phenomenon, the cases were selected to allow comparison between family and non-family controlled firms operating in similar institutional, legal, political, and societal environments. To control for exogenous influences, the winery industry was chosen due to similararity in products, services, activities, supply chains, markets, industry standards, and similar institutional contexts across regions in Canada, France, and Chile represented in both New World and Old World wineries. The winery industry exhibits a range of governance structures from corporate wineries to multi-generational firms to first generation and lifestyle firms, allowing comparisons on the core concepts examined.

In this chapter, we analyse prizes as forms of partial organization, particularly focusing on prizes as one way to organize approval procedures. A basis for this view is that prizes are based on decisions and thus constitute a sanctioning mechanism to actors. Our aim is to explore the characteristics and potential effects of prizes as partial organization. We use prizes in the fields of science and sports as empirical examples to answer these questions. Based on our definition of prizes as publicly communicated decisions of approval, we explore three ways in which prizes vary: the uses of rules; membership; and communication of prizes and prize decisions. From this, two main strategies for prize giving are identified: one more organized and the other more ‘mystical’. The first uses elements of formal organization to formulate rules or membership criteria, and to communicate them to both the potential prize recipients and the audience. The second lacks these elements, which engulf prizes in an aura of mystery. From this finding, we explore some potential and observed effects of prizes on actors’ behaviours, on status and status positions in fields in which the actors operate, and on prize givers themselves.

This chapter uses new institutional theory to shed light on the recent trend toward openness and inclusiveness in strategy making. New institutional theory depicts an extraordinary vivid strand in management and organizational research. This vitality is foremost reflected in the large amount of different theoretical substrands that populate new institutional theory (for an overview, see Greenwood et al., 2017). While some of these substrands such as institutional work or institutional entrepreneurship tend to highlight micro-processes, we, in this chapter, focus on Open Strategy as a world societal phenomenon. Therefore, we draw on world society theory (Meyer, 2010) as this stream in new institutional theory sheds light on macro-processes.

In this chapter, I outline two main arguments. Delving into our history, and particularly the work of Frederick Taylor that led to scientific management and the famous Hawthorne Studies that laid the foundations for the human relations school, I argue that many of the problems now confounding management research were present from the origins of the discipline. These include poorly designed studies, an extravagant tendency to generalise from small samples to a population consisting of everyone who has a job (everywhere in the world), and a blatantly political agenda that obscures issues of power and so serves dominant interests. This is not a purely historical exercise. Rather, it illuminates the weak foundations on which much of our scholarship rests and reveals the extent of the challenges we face if we really wish to do better.

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 explore the usefulness of applying the idea of partial organization as one way of mitigating the confusion surrounding the notion of organized crime. We examine three types of collectivities that are usually seen as examples of organized crime: outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCs), street gangs, and mafias. When we examine the occurrence of organizational elements, we find substantial differences among these three cases not only in the amount of their organization, but also in the ways in which they are organized. A few multinational outlaw motorcycle gangs have gradually been able to form strong formal organizations containing all organizational elements. For a mafia, the situation is quite the opposite. Because its embeddedness in kinship relationships provides cohesion and protection, it needs little organization. Through its strong kinship ties, a mafia has access to several functional equivalents to the organizational elements one can find in OMCs. In street gangs the appearance of organizational elements varies among the gangs, and they rarely have more than a few elements at any one time. One obstacle for the organization of street gangs is their local embeddedness and limited duration, which loosen the boundaries of the gang.

I have already noted how poor much management research is, and how little of it is of interest to anyone, including often the people who write it. Those who advocate ‘evidence-based-management’ (EBM) address this problem head-on. They argue that researchers should identify those research findings that will help managers to improve decision making. It is time to get rid of folklore, fiction and fantasy and to base management action on hard empirical evidence. In one sense, these issues have been around for many years – see, for example, my discussion of ‘rigour’ and ‘relevance’ in Chapter 1. However, advocates of EBM aspire to take these debates to a higher level, and their cause has been helped by the status of those who have championed it. For example, its key moment in capturing widespread attention was undoubtedly an address by the then president of the Academy of Management, Denise Rousseau, to the AOM’s 2005 conference. Her talk was published in the Academy of Management Review the following year. Many saw it as an attractive proposition, and it is not hard to see why. Clearly, the idea of EBM deserves to be taken seriously. But that does not mean it should be accepted uncritically. There is little point in escaping from one trap only to become ensnared in another. My intention in this chapter is to explore what EBM promises and look at the criticisms of it that have emerged. In my view, both the advocacy of EBM and some of the criticisms levelled at it are overblown. Is there is a third way which can preserve EBM’s welcome focus on addressing real world problems without having to adhere so closely to the managerialist agenda that accompanies it at present?

This chapter pulls together the discussions in the monograph and summarizes and categorizes all the research propositions developed in the previous chapters. It then demarcates the charateristics that are unique to family firms and those that are more likely in family firms in making such firms have a greater propensity to undertake patient long-term investments in developing proactive environmental strategies. It then deveops a framework showing how appying the family business lens changes what we know about drivers and influences of proactive environmental strategy and how non-family firms can learn from family firms to undertake patient capital investments in addressing sustainability challenges. The chapter concludes with avenues for future research and measure development, for business education, and for public policy.

Look at the guidelines for authors provided by any of our top journals, and the odds are that you will see an explicit call for ‘theory development’ in the papers that it publishes. There is no equivalent demand that authors should develop guidelines for practice, describe an interesting phenomenon for which no theory is yet available or address important issues.

This chapter is concerned with further advancing a process perspective on partial organization. More specifically, we address the question of how the different organizational elements of partial organization (i.e. membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctions) interrelate dynamically. Based on the emerging ‘communication as constitutive of organization’ (CCO) perspective in organization studies, we argue that social collectives can alternate between states of organizational ‘partialness’ and ‘completeness’ over time. The temporary and situational completion of partial organization can occur in and through communicative events that demonstrate and ‘celebrate’ a social collective’s ability to mobilize all five elements simultaneously. We illustrate our theoretical considerations by drawing on selected findings from an earlier empirical case study of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.