infonet-economy

A prominent way for firms to manage their moral legitimacy is to invest in sustainability certifications. However, a significant subset of firms remain reluctant to invest in sustainability certifications even decades after the establishment of such certifications. Our paper seeks to elucidate this variance by exploring how firms in the coffee, tea, and chocolate industries…

The work of strategy departments and all who are responsible for the strategy planning process has not got any easier in recent years. The context in which strategic plans must be formulated has grown less stable. Volatility and uncertainty make business decisions more difficult. Given this situation, it is not a bad idea
to critically review what have traditionally been the…

The Viable System Model by Stafford Beer embodies a theory about the preconditions of organizational viability. This theory has been discussed extensively by the academics and professionals of organizational cybernetics. The theoretical claim of the Viable System Model (VSM) is bold. It asserts to specify the necessary and sufficient preconditions for the viability of any…

Family business philanthropy operates at the intersection of family, business and society and is of crucial importance to social goods such as education, health and humanitarian aid around the world. For instance, corporations and foundations in the US, many which
are family-owned, donate over US$ 67 billion per year. In the UK, the top 100 family businesses and foundations…

Working at the intersection of narrative and psychoanalytic theory, we present in this article an affective conceptualization of identity dynamics during times of career change, incorporating the notion of unconscious desires. We propose that frictions in career change narratives, such as the paradoxical co-existence of coherence and ambiguity, allude to unconscious subtexts that can…

Family firms often evolve into ownership constellations with multiple family owners. Building on agency theory, we argue that the growing complexity within a group of family blockholders gives rise to what we label family blockholder conflicts, defined as conflicts within a group of family owners. To curb family blockholder conflicts, families often separate the family from its…

The overemphasis on individualism in much normative entrepreneurship discourse belies the powerful role played by local level and communal forms of barter, culturally based collectivist models of organization, social enterprise, and other forms of co-investment. Following Rindova et al., we argue innovation in entrepreneurship can be an emancipatory process with broad change…

During the last years there has been an increasing discussion on the role of business in human rights violations and an increase in human rights litigation against companies. The result of human rights litigation has been rather disillusioning because no corporation has been found guilty and most cases have been dismissed. We argue that it may nevertheless be a useful instrument for…