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.