How digitalization reinvented entrepreneurial resilience during COVID-19

The emergence of new digital technologies has transformed entrepreneurship and, very likely, enabled many new and established ventures to avoid bankruptcy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital technologies are key to identifying, evaluating and exploiting opportunities, scaling a venture's competitiveness, improving efficiency and innovating, especially during uncertain times. We explore how digital technologies reinvented entrepreneurial resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic and distill the digital artifacts, platforms and infrastructures used by entrepreneurs to demonstrate entrepreneurial resilience. We analyzed 42 reflective interviews featuring successful entrepreneurs from How I Built This "Resilience Series" podcast that explore how entrepreneurs responded to the COVID-19 crisis. We adopted a systematic approach to identify and describe the behaviors, actions and strategies related to digitalization to reinvent the business in the uncertain and resource-constrained context of COVID-19. The data analysis yielded thirteen first-order codes categorized into five second-order themes: creative digital pivoting, digital infrastructures, social impact through digital technology, burdens to digital adoption, and growth through digitalization. These second-order themes reveal to function as both enablers and barriers to entrepreneurial resilience in this adverse context. Our exploratory analysis suggests how digitalization influences entrepreneurial resilience.

For whom does the bell toll: a political analysis of criticisms of the Hawthorne studies

Purpose

This paper aims to analyze the political background of the Hawthorne criticisms, positing that the political atmosphere of the 1940s, influenced by the decline of the new deal liberalism and the rise of the conservative coalition, stimulated scholars to challenge the Hawthorne studies.

Design/methodology/approach

Primary sources used in the guise of archival commentaries, journal articles and other published works (books and book chapters). Secondary sources are offered to provide additional insight and context.

Findings

The findings show that politics unnecessarily discredited Mayo. As a result, contemporary scholars failed to recognize Mayo’s work as an important part of the basis for modern management theory.

Research limitations/implications

The purpose of the research is to look into the political context of the Hawthorne studies to understand how management practice and research is impacted by ongoing political issues.

Originality/value

To date, no work has fully accounted for or understood the political climate of the time in considering the criticisms of the Hawthorne studies. By more fully understanding the political context, scholars can reevaluate the weight they place on the then criticisms of the Hawthorne studies.

Reassessing Elton Mayo: clarifying contradictions and context

Purpose

Elton Mayo was a professor at a prestigious university, but not a researcher; a scholar, but more concerned with executives; a capitalist, but someone who downplayed monetary incentives; an insider, but someone whose own background was more of an outsider. These contradictions have resulted in scholars questioning Mayo’s impact on the field of management. Thus, this paper aims to critically review Mayo and his contributions to management through a lens calibrated to the context of his time, providing a more contextually accurate view of Mayo and his work and offering a clearer view of his meaningful impact on the field.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, the authors connect otherwise disparate information to critically review Mayo’s work within the context of its era.

Findings

The authors’ critical review of Mayo identified nine topical areas where Mayo and/or his work have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. For each area, the authors offer a more contextualized and appropriate interpretation of Mayo and his viewpoints, and thus more accurately informing the management literature.

Originality/value

This paper is the first to thoroughly revisit Mayo and his work through a contextualized lens, offering a more informed view of why Mayo’s seemingly controversial behaviors were actually quite standard behaviors given his context.

Woodward’s aegis: a critical biography of Joan Woodward

Purpose

This paper aims to offer a critical biography of Joan Woodward, often considered the founder of contingency theory. This paper examines Woodward’s background to develop a more complete understanding of the factors that influenced her work.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper draws on insights gained from personal correspondence with two colleagues of Woodward, one who recruited her to the Imperial College where she conducted her most prominent work and one whom she recruited while at the college. In addition, Woodward’s original work, academic literature, published remembrances and a plethora of other secondary sources are reviewed.

Findings

By connecting these otherwise disparate sources of information, a more complete understanding of Woodward’s work and its context is provided. It is argued that Woodward’s education, training, brilliance, values, the relative weakness of British sociology and the need to improve the economy helped to make Woodward’s work both original and practical.

Originality/value

The originality of this work is to examine the work of Woodward through the lens of critical biography. Despite Woodward’s contributions, Woodward remains an underappreciated figure. The purpose is to provide her contribution against the backdrop of the British industrial and educational sphere.

Revisiting perspectives on George Homans: correcting misconceptions

Purpose

This paper aims to correct some misconceptions about George Homans. Specifically, it clarifies the relationship between Homans and Malinowski, explains why Homans is rightfully considered the father of social exchange, shows Homans’ perspective on altruism and self-interest and analyses Homans’ place in management’s complex history.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a conceptual paper which synthesizes both primary and secondary sources on Homans, social exchange theory (SET), Malinowski and other Homans’ contemporaries and theories, which, in aggregate, help dispel some common misconceptions in the literature today.

Findings

This paper disperses several common misconceptions about Homans and his work. First, the findings show that beliefs that Homans was unaware of Malinowski are not justified, as Homans was not only aware of Malinowski but also significantly influenced by Malinowski’s work. Second, this manuscript clarifies that while Homans, for specific reasons, focussed on self-interest, his work accounted for altruism. Lastly, this paper also further cements Homans’ place in history as the father of social exchange.

Originality/value

Recent misconceptions have emerged in the literature calling to question not only Homans’ legitimacy as the father of social exchange but also some of his views on the theory itself. By clarifying these misconceptions, this paper enables scholars from a variety of management fields to better understand historical foundations of SET and its impact on current research.

The role of job dedication in organizational citizenship behavior performance

Purpose

This paper aims to attempt to clarify differences between organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and attitudes as well as explore job dedication’s role regarding OCBs. Using social exchange theory, job dedication is hypothesized to mediate the relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX) and OCBs.

Design/methodology/approach

Hierarchical regression analysis was performed on data obtained from 190 supervisor/subordinate dyads from a number of firms to test the study hypotheses.

Findings

Results indicate that job dedication fully mediates the relationship between LMX and OCBs directed toward individuals and the organization, thus playing a role in the production of OCBs.

Research limitations/implications

Due to non-employment of an experimental design, causality cannot be determined. If managers use signals to determine performance, then scholars need to conduct further research to determine what the cues are.

Practical implications

Managers need to spend time in determining and care whether what they are actually measuring is accurate in terms of spontaneous behaviors performance.

Originality/value

First, this study has developed an explanation as to how managers can use job dedication as a means to track the behaviors of multiple subordinates based on social exchange theory. Second, this study provides empirical evidence of the mediating role job dedication plays on mediating the LMX/OCBs relationship.

Agency theory: background and epistemology

Purpose

By revisiting the agency theory literature, this paper aims to both incrementally advance historical viewpoints and reveal four prominent influences on agency theory: Weber and Simon, The Great Depression, Cooperation and the Chicago School. This is critical given that understanding the history behind the authors’ major theoretical lenses is fundamental to using these theories to explain various phenomena.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on a plethora of archival sources and following the influence-mapping approach used by other management history scholars, this manuscript synthesizes historical accounts and archival information to provide a clearer picture of the major historical influences in the formation of agency theory.

Findings

We shed light on four areas related to management history that helped propel agency theory. Whereas past scholarship has not recognised them as influencers, we find and show how the industrial revolution, unionization, the stock exchange and other management approaches all played a role in the development of agency theory’s core tenants.

Originality/value

We extend upon the influential people and events that shaped agency theory, thus providing a fuller understanding of the theory’s usefulness. Moreover, we fill in gaps enabling scholars to better understand the context in which the core tenants of agency theory were developed.

Technology brokering in action: revolutionizing the skiing and tennis industries

Purpose

– This paper aims to explore the true sources of innovation that revolutionized two sports industries – skiing and tennis, tracking the flow of ideas and power of technology brokering through the eyes of the innovator, Howard Head.

Design/methodology/approach

– Using a focal innovation action-set framework, the authors unite heretofore-disparate pieces of information to paint a more complete picture of the innovation and technology brokering process. Primary source material from Head’s patents, personal memoirs and journals and documented correspondence between him, his brother and his colleagues are augmented with secondary source material from periodicals, media excerpts and the academic literature.

Findings

– Head stands as an exemplar example of a technology broker, both through his serial practice of recombinant innovation and his savvy exploitation of resources. Results discredit the Great Man Theory of Innovation, while emphasizing the importance of exploiting social capital to realize opportunities.

Originality/value

– This paper is the first to offer detailed insight into the technology brokering and innovation processes that revolutionized the tennis and skiing industries. It is novel in that it is one of very few papers to challenge the Great Man Theory of Innovation propagated by many textbooks and mass media, explores the process of technology brokering from the broker’s perspective rather than organizationally and uses focal innovation action-set methodology to complement a historical biographical sketch of innovativeness relative to sports equipment and machines.

Keeping the peace

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interaction between self-reported proactive personality, competence, and interpersonal conflict in the prediction of supervisor ratings of organizational citizenship behaviors directed at individuals (OCBI) and organizations (OCBO).

Design/methodology/approach

– Data were obtained from 165 full-time subordinate-supervisor dyads. Employees self-reported personality and control variable information in wave 1 and competence and interpersonal conflict information in wave 2. Data regarding employee OCB performance were collected from supervisors in wave 3.

Findings

– Results suggest that OCBs are performed less frequently in stressful circumstances but that proactive personality appears to assuage the effects of stress. Significant two- and three-way interactions suggest the interplay of personal and situational characteristics are more complex in predicting OCBO than OCBI, likely due to its more distal nature.

Practical implications

– Results of the current study suggest steps managers may want to take to increase employee performance of OCBs, specifically, selecting proactive individuals, creating training programs to bolster employees’ competence, and minimizing interpersonal conflict at work.

Originality/value

– The current study confirms and extends extant research. The current study goes beyond previous work to consider a more complex interaction of factors that are related to employee engagement in OCBs.

Sailing away: the influences on and motivations of George Caspar Homans

Purpose

How do social factors motivate and influence scholars when they theorize? By exploring the life of George Homans, this paper aims to illustrate that theories are the products of the theorist, and as such are influenced by individual life experiences.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on a plethora of archival sources including many personal and autobiographical accounts, this manuscript synthesizes these sources thus providing clear insight into how personal factors and experiences impacted Homans's social exchange theory.

Findings

This research concludes that Homans's journey into theorizing was an act of providence; that his early career, personal background, and social capital interacted with several factors beyond his control thus leading to his interest in social exchange processes.

Originality/value

This is the first research endeavor exploring the context, sentiments and motivations of George Homans as he began to lay out social exchange theory.

Nell Nelson and The Chicago Times “City slave girls” series

Purpose

This paper seeks to illustrate the instrumental role of reporter Nell Nelson in beginning a national labor reform movement resulting in improved working conditions for women and children in the USA.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on archival newspaper clippings, original scrapbooks kept by prominent Chicago figures of the time, US census records, and other labor history resources, the paper synthesizes heretofore‐disparate sources to provide a more complete picture of the cause‐and‐effect nature of Nelson's Chicago Times “City slave girls” series.

Findings

The research concludes that Nelson was an instrumental force in the formation of over ten advocacy organizations that worked to transform the way women and children in the USA were treated in the workplace and was instrumental in securing legislative reforms.

Originality/value

This is the first paper to explore the role played by Nell Nelson in securing labor reforms, thus, contributing to a more complete understanding of management history.