Contributions published at Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm (Andreas Scherer)

While today it is universally acknowledged that COVID-19 has generated immense challenges for businesses and societies worldwide, public perceptions varied significantly at the time of the pandemic’s initial appearance, even among democratic societies with comparable media systems. The growing scholarship on grand societal challenges in management and organization studies, however, tends to neglect the initial social construction of issues as complex, uncertain, evaluative, and widespread. We address this shortcoming by exploring the initial communicative enactment of COVID-19 in the media-based public discourse in Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. By applying a social problem work lens, we identify three mechanisms that explain the maturation of COVID-19 into a grand challenge, further showing how these are contextually dependent on differences in discourse quality. We add to research on grand challenges, issue maturation, and framing dynamics by theorizing how issues become constructed and acknowledged as grand challenges in the first place.

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Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an important means of addressing grand challenges. Although research on the topic has accelerated, scholars have yet to articulate an overarching framework that links the different pathways taken by social entrepreneurs with the positive effects of these efforts. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a systematic literature review which enabled us to conceptually differentiate between social value and social change as distinct outcomes of social entrepreneurship and identify seven pathways for achieving these outcomes. Building on our analysis, we outline a research agenda for questions pertaining to: the dynamics between social value and social change; how contextual factors and social entrepreneurs influence various pathways; design principles of business models and innovations that facilitate social value and social change; and defining, measuring, and ensuring accountability for social value and social change.

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The governance of corruption is increasingly important in a global business environment involving ever more frequent transactions across diverse institutional contexts. Previous scholarship has theorized a fundamental tension between the enforcement of organizational compliance and the achievement of social ends, finding that efforts to remedy policy-practice decoupling in the governance of corruption and other complex global issues can exacerbate means-ends decoupling. However, these studies have tended to apply a rather static lens to a highly evaluative and processual phenomenon, meaning we still lack in-depth understanding of the dynamics underlying the interactive communicative processes of sensemaking and negotiation involved in working out the problems of both means-ends and policy-practice decoupling across different institutional contexts. To address this gap, we present a longitudinal qualitative study of the governance of corruption that identifies the emergence of locally contingent and open-ended sensemaking processes arising from and surrounding problems of decoupling. Specifically, we identify four key sensemaking mechanisms across different contexts and periods that ultimately shifted the focus of the actors away from a compliance-based approach toward a new shared understanding of progress as achievement, i.e., the mechanisms of localized theorizing, leveling, recalibrating, and public criticizing. Based on these findings, we develop a model to explain the role of sensemaking in the governance of corruption and the dynamics of decoupling.

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Obskure Organisationen hüllen sich in einen Schleier der Verschwiegenheit. In der Regel als Verein organisiert, werden darunter beispielsweise Männerbünde wie Logen und Zünfte oder exklusive Clubs verstanden. Formal liegen die Ziele solcher obskuren Organisationen oftmals im Bereich der Wohltätigkeit, der Traditionspflege oder der Aufrechterhaltung lokaler Brauchtümer. Dennoch gilt für das organisationale Innenleben das Gebot der Diskretion. Mitglied wird man auf Einladung und erst nach sorgfältiger Prüfung und Bewährung. Dies weist auf eine Diskrepanz zwischen formaler Zielformulierung und tatsächlichen Organisationspraktiken hin oder ist zumindest ein Indiz für multiple Funktionen, die obskure Organisationen für ihre Mitglieder haben. Obskure Organisationen ermöglichen intime und vertrauensvolle Netzwerke der Mitglieder, wo ohne die Organisationen keine wären.

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How are social entrepreneurs different from commercial entrepreneurs? This study sheds light on this issue by applying the perspective of entrepreneurial cognition and by arguing that social entrepreneurs are even more susceptible to cognitive biases than commercial entrepreneurs. The empirical study of 205 Swiss entrepreneurs could confirm that social entrepreneurs tend to be more overconfident and prone to escalation of commitment than commercial entrepreneurs, while the study found no differences for illusion of control. The findings indicate that cognitive biases are an important puzzle piece to understand the differences between social and commercial entrepreneurs.

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