Social Science Space

Ethics, goes one line of reasoning, are great for those who can afford them. It’s a cynical view, to be sure, but what effect does the economic terrain affect ethical orientation?

Figuring out how to do service research with a very special population – but one we will all be part of eventually — was a challenge met by the creators of Trajectory Touchpoint Technique.

While fundraising is time-consuming and entails costs, entrepreneurs might be tempted to “test the water” by simply soliciting investors’ interest before going through the lengthy process. Digitalization of finance has made it possible for small business to run equity crowdfunding campaigns, but also to initiate a TTW process online and quite easily.

Establishing management techniques for an age diverse workforce according to their distinct generational characteristics which differentiate their orientations to work is an idea worth examining, argue Cara Reed and Robyn Thomas.

For all the talk of social consciousness at academic conferences, personal wealth remains the imprimatur of business success par excellence. How then, we asked ourselves, can business schools expect their students to take ethics and social responsibility truly seriously?

‘Do well by doing good’ is a mantra for management that sounds promising, but is it realistic? In today’s post, Clément Feger, an assistant professor at AgroParisTech and a researcher at Montpellier Recherche en Management at the Université de Montpellier, offers work he did that looks at one company’s efforts to foster sustainability in the environment and the balance sheet, and offers models for others to follow.

Joe Raelin argues that democratic organization can exist and be developed without hierarchical control. There is ample evidence across civilization and time that humans can self-organize without hierarchical structure.

Chris Worley, professor of organizational theory and management at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, and Claudy Jules, the head Google’s Center of Expertise on Organizational Health and Change, offer context behind their commentary, “COVID-19’s Uncomfortable Revelations About Agile and Sustainable Organizations in a VUCA World,” in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

Quite often discussions about skilled migrants center on the receiving country’s reaction to the migrants, rather than the experiences of the migrants themselves. In this article from the Journal of Management, Phyllis Tharenou, vice president and executive dean of the College of Business, Government and Law of Flinders University, and Carol T. Kulik, a research professor of human resource management at the University of South Australia Business School, address this absence specifically in the academic management literature.

The terms “collaboration,” “coordination” and “cooperation,” write Xavier Castañer and Nuno Oliveira in a recent paper published by the Journal of Management, underpin both the organizations they describe and the study of those organizations, and yet the terms themselves are inconsistently defined and therefore their use can be imprecise or even downright confusing.

Innovation systems that focus solely on exiting and generating investor profits are not designed to help nurture the best innovations for society.

Today we welcome two scholars from Texas’s Baylor University whose research into how pathogens affect innovation has taken on new prominence in the wake of the current pandemic.