The tensions and challenges facing business education frame this paper, which takes a critical look at the historical evolution of business school education in the context of the present conjecture, with a particular emphasis on the role social theory can play in the analysis of strategy and...

Summary Serendipity means the accidental discovery of something valuable. While it is sometimes presented as an element of organizational learning, it has rarely been addressed per se by organizational scholars. We discuss and elaborate the processes associated with serendipity in the...

Most contemporary total quality management (TQM) practice is influenced, directly or indirectly, by structured, acontextual and standardized quality models. The present paper focuses on the strategic introduction of one such model, namely the Swedish Institute for Quality (SIQ) model for...

Literary approaches problematize the practice of knowing in relation to managing. Drawing on Kafka, Lyotard, Rorty and others, our overarching objective here is to widen and deepen linguistic approaches to management and organization studies. We elaborate the concept of the polyphonic...

The history of the present is assessed in terms of forecasts that proved to be spectacularly incorrect. Debate about power in the past was largely state-centred but the realisation that the opposite of the state is not a free market but a political anarchy seems to have been forgotten. The...

The long march of modernization of the Western societies tends to be presented as following a regular sequence: societies and institutions were pre-modern, and then they were modernized, eventually becoming post-modern. Such teleology may provide an incomplete or distorted narrative of societal...

We discuss why surprises, defined as events that happen unexpectedly or expected events that take unexpected shapes, are important to organizations and should be considered in the organizational literature. The concept of organizational surprises is unpacked on the basis of a typology built...

Globalization and localization seem to be opposite concepts – a thesis and its antithesis. Nonetheless, managers seem to be able to handle the paradox posed by these two contradicting tensions by enacting, via action, a synthesis that allows for the co-presence of a high level of global...

Increasingly, managers live in a world of paradox. For instance, they are told that they must manage by surrendering control and that they must stay on top by continuing to learn, thus admitting that they do not fully know what they do. Paradox is becoming increasingly pervasive in and around...