'Business as usual' has come under heavy scrutiny. Current business organizations are facing a predicament that Jackson and Nelson compare to a 'perfect storm.' They argue that 'despite the ongoing pressures of relentless competition, and the need to deliver short-term financial performance, no...

The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as...

Prior research on organizational trust has not rigorously examined the context specificity of trust, nor distinguished between the potentially varying dimensions along which different stakeholder groups (e.g., employees, customers, investors, etc.) base their trust. As a result, dominant...

This case highlights ABN AMRO Banco Real, a Brazilian bank, whose top management embarked on a humanistic transformation process when faced with a post-merger situation. As the CEO of a very typical bank, Fabio Barbosa examined the possibilities of creating a culture of shared values to better...

This article explores how both corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be improved by using insights from complexity theory. Complexity theory reveals that decentralized governance architecture is required for firms to absorb competently the increased intricacies,...

Management theory and practice are facing unprecedented challenges. The lack of sustainability, the increasing inequity and the continuous decline in societal trust pose a threat to ‘business as usual’ (Jackson and Nelson, 2004). Capitalism is at a crossroad and scholars, practitioners and...

Utilitarianism arguably provides the philosophical justification for suboptimal management theory. We provide a historical perspective on the development of management theory from its utilitarian basis, and highlight the missing conceptual link between management theory and human dignity. We...

The financial crisis of 2007/08 has caused many to question the basic premises of the current business system. ‘Business as usual' has come under heavy scrutiny. Achieving environmental and social sustainability stand out as some of the major challenges that current business leaders have to...

This study explores how contingency misfit can possibly be compensated. The paper particularly focuses on stakeholder enactment as a dynamic adaptation mechanism to overcome configurational misfit. By analyzing data from 238 firms located in eight countries, our study shows that stakeholder...

We sketch out two basic paradigms informing banking practice: the economistic paradigm focusing on profit maximization and the humanistic one, serving the common good. We then highlight paradigmatic cases to explore how each of these business models fared during the quasi-natural experiment of...