Research on the branding of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), known as SME branding, has garnered substantial interest over the past two decades. Although researchers acknowledge the importance of stakeholders and networks as co‐creators of SME brands, a comprehensive conceptualisation of SME brand co‐creation remains lacking. The current study addresses this gap by combining systematic literature

The application of design science (DS) in the field of operations management (OM) is believed to be lopsided, with most studies pursuing theory‐to‐practice rather than practice‐to‐theory applications of DS. However, this belief has remained untested at the level of the entire body of DS applications in OM. This paper therefore reviews and synthesises 66 peer‐reviewed DS‐based publications (2003–2024)

Business and management scholars have always placed a strong emphasis on the study of capabilities. As digital technology moves from the back office to the forefront of digital innovation and transformation, organizations increasingly recognize the vital role of their digital‐related capabilities. Yet, despite the attention, substantial confusion remains in the cross‐disciplinary management and business

This review takes a transdisciplinary approach to work–family (WF) research, offering new perspectives on different family forms in the context of employment. It focuses on lone‐parents and blended families, highlighting how management research on the WF interface has been constrained by traditional definitions of ‘family’, assuming intact couple relationships. The review shows that the WF experiences

Adopting digital technologies in different organizations has become a trend over the last decade, yet our understanding regarding impact of digital technologies on strategising needs to be more cohersive. This paper reviews existing research on how digital transformation intersects with strategic management to adress this gap. Specifically, the aim is to explore how the digital context changes strategising

Existing literature on meta‐organization is divided into two distinct streams in organizational and management studies, with different definitions and boundaries, potentially leading to inconsistencies and theoretical misalignment. Can we disambiguate the conceptualizations of meta‐organizations, and what insights can be gleaned from this clarification? Using a systematic review of the meta‐organization

Geographical location sets the broad scene for people's access to knowledge and resources that are critical for career progression. Acknowledging the importance of location and following calls for a contextualized approach to career studies, an increasing body of literature on career success has incorporated geographical considerations over the past decades. However, this literature remains fragmented

Managerial heuristics – simple methods for solving problems – are critical for key functions, such as deciding, strategizing, and organizing. Yet, research on managerial heuristics has been siloed into divergent streams, creating polarization among empirical findings and sparking numerous calls for integration. The goal of this review is to integrate different understandings of the construct, different

The level of scholarly and practitioner interest in negative leadership behaviour has been increasing, but research in this field remains fragmented, and we lack a common understanding of what constitutes negative leadership behaviour and its antecedents, consequences and contexts. To address these research gaps, we systematically review 352 papers and identify 25 different negative leadership behaviours

The steady increase in academic production has been paralleled by a surge in the number of bibliometric and systematic literature reviews (SLRs) published. Over the years, scholars began to combine bibliometric analyses with SLRs. However, such combined approaches relied on fragmented methodological suggestions without clear guiding frameworks. This article introduces integrated guidelines for undertaking

Should we still use the concept of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) in management research? In response to recent and significant challenges in the management literature regarding the relevance of PCSR as a concept, we conduct a review of the literature in the field. We combine a bibliometric analysis and a qualitative content analysis to assess the use of the concept of PCSR between

The era of digitization coincides with a growing interest in social and environmental sustainability. Management scholars, therefore, turned their attention to the intersection of both trends, seeking a better understanding of how firms can manage digital sustainability. Business models are a central element in the strategic management of digital sustainability. Due to the diverse roots in the digitization

Digital technologies increasingly facilitate more transparent information exchange and the inclusion of new and more actors in organizational processes. This resulting ‘openness’ has been studied in multiple domains, including open strategy. Since increased transparency and inclusion are the main dimensions of open strategy, it seems reasonable to assume a theoretical linkage between digital transformation

Born global firms (BGs) in emerging markets differ in significant ways from those in developed countries and this study aims to comprehensively examine those differences. To do this, we conduct a systematic literature review that analyses 148 empirical research articles published during 2010–2023, highlighting how BGs from developed and emerging economies differ in terms of their firm and entrepreneurial

This review proposes a new concept, the ‘Paternal body’, to illuminate the corporeal impact, on employed men, of new fatherhood. It explores literatures on fatherhood, employment and health to reveal how fathers experience pregnancy, birth and infant‐care (infancy defined, here, as up to age two). In contrast to well‐established notions regarding Maternal (pregnant and post‐birth) bodies, there exists

How can grand challenge‐related issues be studied while comprehensively addressing contemporary needs? The literature on grand challenges has been growing, with an abundance of phenomena on which research is undertaken in a piecemeal fashion, without sufficiently offering integrated insights. In this debate essay, we challenge the proposal offered in Seelos, C., Mair, J. & Traeger, C. (2023) The future

Scholars across disciplines (e.g., medicine and health, human resource management, organizational behaviour) have paid increasing attention to employee assistance programmes (EAPs) over the past 40 years. Our study systematically reviewed 327 EAP studies published in peer-reviewed journals from 1980 to December 2021. We provided both descriptive and thematic analyses of this body of literature. We

Scholars have long studied how organizations can transition towards greater sustainability, but it is only recently that they have begun to investigate a fundamentally new stream in sustainability thinking: the circular economy paradigm. Instead of the ‘make‐use‐dispose’ approach of a linear economy, a circular economy aims at eliminating waste and avoiding damage to the environment by closing resource

Building on the rich array of literatures that explore women's ageing and employment, we conduct a comprehensive review of research on middle‐ and older‐age women and work (including menopause and post‐menopause). In reviewing these studies, we blend our interdisciplinary discussions across several domains. We reflect on the question: How are employed, middle‐ and older‐age women treated in organizations

Lack of transparency about conceptual and measurement choices in empirical studies on dynamic capabilities (DCs) amplifies difficulties scholars face on the road to conducting high-quality quantitative research. Building on the best practices of construct operationalization developed in the organizational research methods literature, we review 18 review studies on DCs research and conduct our own review

Stakeholders increasingly expect to be engaged in corporate social responsibility (CSR) agendas through dialogue; the joint creation of meaning between firms and stakeholders, or among stakeholders. Dominant conceptions of stakeholder dialogue in CSR prioritize firm interests, and uncertainty as to what constitutes stakeholder dialogue, and how it should be practiced, permeates theory and practice

In expertise research, the focus is shifting from how one becomes an expert in a specific field towards understanding how workers sustain the value and recognition of their expertise by being flexible. This so-called flexpertise requires that workers meet new expertise needs within and across the boundaries of their current expertise domains and working contexts. The current study grounds a new theoretical

Scholars have long debated the definition of social entrepreneurship, but disagreement persists. Despite sustained efforts to craft a universal definition, social entrepreneurship has been characterized as an ʻessentially contested concept’. However, little is known about the root causes of this ongoing contestation. Therefore, we delve into the literature's social entrepreneurship definitions to examine

Social media has been around for 20 years and has profoundly affected the dynamics of interactions between companies and customers. Studies have increasingly focused on how firms effectively use social media in their marketing strategies. However, the literature appears highly fragmented. Scholars have tended to investigate individual facets of social media marketing (SMM) behaviours, adopting a narrow

Engagement has emerged as a significant focus in contemporary management research, widely acknowledged for its positive impact on wellbeing and performance. However, over 30 years since its introduction, the concept of engagement remains fractured with multiple definitions, ongoing theoretical debates, and inconsistent empirical evidence of practical value. This review addresses the evolving nature

With the ascent of the concept of public value, the theory and practice of administration have shifted from a focus on management, effectiveness and efficiency (as espoused in New Public Management) towards an agenda of public value creation. This has resulted in a large, heterogenous number of scholarly publications on public value. In this paper, we review this important body of work from the period

Across global supply chains, buyers enforce labour codes as a primary mechanism for ensuring suppliers’ social compliance with international labour standards and rights for workers in supplier facilities. Yet researchers have long documented empirical evidence of the inconsistent, weak implementation of labour codes. Therefore, the effective use of this social compliance mechanism requires examining

Best practice advice for literature reviews abounds, yet little advice is available for how to infuse a literature review with theory-generative insights that break out of knowledge silos. To address this issue, we provide guidance on reviewing a range of literature for theory-generative insights through a process of knowledge transfers from a source domain onto a target domain. To do so, mainly building

Leaders from typically privileged backgrounds, such as White, male, elite-educated and upper-class individuals, often find it easier to craft an authentic identity in professional settings than their atypical counterparts. These atypical leaders, which include women, LGBT+, ethnic minorities or those from less affluent socio-economic backgrounds, can indeed construct an authentic workplace identity

Patents as intangible assets are subjects of burgeoning empirical research. However, there is limited knowledge of how patent quality and patent value can be conceptualized, distinguished, and related. Distinguishing these concepts and relating them in a theoretical framework would enable the assessment and improvement of patent quality, which has implications for all the stakeholders in patents. We

With respect to the increasing trend of companies reversing or modifying previous offshoring decisions, research on manufacturing relocation has gained momentum over the past decade. However, despite increasing efforts in this field, the general understanding of relocation still lacks maturity, with numerous conflicting results and arguments from a variety of industrial and regional contexts that are

Strategic alliances have attracted substantial attention from industry and academia over the past three decades. However, due to rapid technological evolution, saturated marketplaces, globalisation of businesses on the one hand and de-globalisation of the market on the other (as marked by Brexit and the trade war between US and China, COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war), the strategic environment

How firms respectively create and appropriate value by means of alliances are questions that management scholars have considered for several decades. Scholars have identified various factors underlying how alliances create value and how partner firms appropriate such value, respectively. Fewer studies have dealt with how both issues relate, and fewer yet have examined the interplay between value creation

Strategic alliance theories have been studied widely over the past few decades. However, their key arguments may face new limitations and challenges brought by emerging technologies such as big data analytics capability (BDAC). This paper aims to identify the challenges BDAC brings to strategic alliance theories and the associated changes to strategic alliance research. Specifically, this paper systematically

The legitimation of social enterprises is contingent upon the institutional context and targeted stakeholders; however, this claim has not been explored systematically, considering existing legitimacy strategies. Understanding the reasons behind the pursuit of legitimacy and the strategies that can be employed in specific contexts is paramount for social enterprises to obtain legitimacy and enhance

Strategic alliances play a vital role in exploration and exploitation activities, otherwise known as the ambidextrous approach for value creation. This has led to an upsurge in studies on ambidexterity in strategic alliances by giving rise to various conceptualizations and theoretical challenges. However, we lack a systematic evaluation and synthesis of the theoretical and empirical insights from this

Sustainability-oriented collaboration, a heterogeneous set of formal interorganizational arrangements that vary considerably in size, membership, focus and functioning, but share the same interest in addressing sustainability challenges of public concern, is becoming a mainstay of corporate agenda setting. Yet, the more firms interact on social and environmental issues, the more the burdens and tensions

This paper aims to re-evaluate the customer experience literature in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) domain by employing a paradox lens and constructing a model for future research direction and practitioners. Using two co-citation analysis methods—a hierarchical cluster analysis and a multidimensional scaling analysis—to investigate 312 customer experience papers from the leading H&T journals with

This paper reviews the literature on relational dynamics in information technology outsourcing (ITO) relationships, a type of interorganizational relationship (IOR) between client and vendor firms that can vary considerably in complexity. While relational dynamics are understood to reflect changes in an IOR ex-post contract which can substantially influence relationship performance and development

The economies of worth, a theory of moral cognition and coordination by sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist Laurent Thévenot, are increasingly used in organization and management studies. We critically review a broad selection of this literature to assess what has been gained from the interdisciplinary translations of the original theory. We identify in the literature multiple patterns that contribute

We review cross-disciplinary research on gossip and integrate it with two streams of theoretical scholarship: paradox theory and the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective. In doing so, we develop what we label a paradox-constitutive perspective of organizational gossip. Our perspective holds that gossip does not merely reflect or reveal organizational paradoxes but contributes

Enterprise risk management (ERM) promises to improve decision-making and help organizations avoid wicked problems. Consequently, risk artefacts may play a significant role in managers’ decision-making processes, but little is known about the relationship between ERM and managerial judgement in decision-making (MJDM). The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review of ERM, thereby

Over the past four decades, flourishing empirical research has attempted to establish the mechanisms and conditions underpinning improvements in exporters’ innovation and productivity via the learning-by-exporting (LBE) effect, and the domain has gained legitimacy and empirical credibility. However, the literature's findings are largely fragmented and require systematic review and analysis to draw

We introduce a special issue of International Journal of Management Reviews that demonstrates how to use review articles to address societal grand challenges—complex, large-scale issues facing humankind, such as climate change, inequality and poverty. First, we argue that review articles possess unique features that make them particularly useful for addressing societal grand challenges. Second, we

It is believed that workplace creativity and innovation are fostered by positive leader behaviors and positive workplace relationships and hindered by the opposite. However, some challenge this view and argue that creativity and innovation can also be fostered when employees experience what is increasingly referred to as “the dark side of leadership”. Research in this area is sparse, contradictory

Despite the increasing popularity of the Ability, Motivation, Opportunity (AMO) framework in the Human Resource Management (HRM) field, AMO research is at a crossroads in theoretical and empirical development. This is due to (a) a lack of clarity about the conceptualisation and measurement of AMO variables, (b) the construction of AMO articles that do not distinguish between AMO differences and AMO-enhancing

Organizations often face challenges in incorporating the sustainable development goals (SDGs) into their strategic agendas. Despite the availability of guidelines from leading practitioners, such guidance often lacks the scientific insights provided by academia. In this study, we examine the integration of scholarly management literature into practical guidelines for achieving the SDGs. To do so, we

Dirty work research has long analytically prioritized focusing on the people who do dirty work, largely sidestepping who the clients of dirty work are and what contribution they can make to workers’ experience of the job as more or less dirty. We address these oversights through a systematic review and analysis of 65 articles, theorizing the role played by clients within dirty work. Firstly, we propose

Transitioning to a circular economy (CE) model has been proposed to solve many grand environmental challenges. While research on CE has been extensively reviewed, less is known about the implicit underlying assumptions of this work. Understanding these assumptions is critical as they typically go unchallenged yet play a significant role in shaping research fields. In this paper we conduct a problematizing

Despite the increasing awareness of impacts of organizational activities on the natural environment and the urgent need for sustainable management of ecosystems, emerging research on employee green behaviour in the field of management and organizational science is largely fragmented, requiring an integrative review. Seeking to better understand research opportunities and advance theoretical and empirical

Voice mechanisms in organizations provide an opportunity for employees to have a say about their work. As new digital mechanisms, such as social media (SM), are being increasingly adopted by organizations for knowledge sharing, employee engagement and general communication, it is important to consider the extent to which SM may facilitate employee voice. The limited attempts to examine SM and employee

Industrial productivity dilemma refers to a situation in which modifying and refining existing technologies helps maximize an industry's productivity but constrains productivity from leaping forward. As substantial research exists on this topic in both management and economics, we seek to clarify the concept and its utility. We synthesize relevant studies in various disciplines by reviewing 731 pieces

This paper explores how management and organization research has shed light on the relation between standards and power. The narrative literature review intersects so far unconnected categorizations from standardization and power literatures to systematically map out the broad knowledge structure of the power-related literature on standardization. As a result, the paper details six power-related notions

Editorial notes in leading management journals have urged scholars to address Grand Challenges (GC) as an opportunity for producing knowledge that matters for society. This review explores whether current conceptualizations of GC support a productive path for management and organizational scholarship by guiding empirical inquiry, facilitating cumulative theory development, and informing practice. We

Digital transformation has become a research focus in recent years. Likewise, internal communication (IC) is one of the fastest-growing specialisations in public relations and communication management. This research explores digital internal communication (DIC) at the nexus between digital transformation and IC. We provide an integrative review of the literature; our thematic analysis of selected journal

What role peers play in individuals’ decisions to become entrepreneurs and to what extent peer effects play a role in influencing behaviours at the various stages of business venturing are important questions for scholars and policymakers. This systematic review takes stock of the recent additions to the literature around the phenomenon of peer influence in entrepreneurship. The review identified 2894