Strategy

Abstract: Research Summary Social and environmental challenges in our society offer opportunities for innovation. Having a strong mission can enhance both opportunity recognition and strategic alignment; however, aligning strategy and mission can be challenging when an organization pursues its social mission in pluralistic ways. How can mission-driven organizations manage pluralistic local initiatives while cohering to their missions? Using an inductive field study, I trace how Slow Money, an organization fostering sustainable local food systems by connecting food entrepreneurs with local investors, translated its core mission into different mission-oriented local initiatives. I find that mission-oriented local initiatives were recombined to create novel strategies curated and diffused by the central leadership, and I show how, rather than derail an organization's mission, pluralistic local initiatives can foster strategies for social innovation. Managerial Summary Organizations addressing social and environmental challenges often are mission driven. Though a mission can help guide strategy decisions, it also can lead to strategy confusion, especially when an organization consists of many local groups with different interpretations of the mission. I use the case of Slow Money, a nonprofit supporting sustainable local food systems, to understand how an organization can transform an assortment of mission-based strategies into an asset rather than a liability. I find that by promoting an open exchange of local initiatives and strategies, Slow Money's central leadership validated strategy diversity. It also provided its local groups with the opportunity to borrow and repurpose other groups' initiatives. In this way, diverse local strategies created mission unity while also increasing organizational social innovation.

Abstract: Business schools are crucial to integrating sustainable development into management thought and practices, thereby promoting a paradigm shift toward responsible management education. Despite many business schools pledging to adopt the United Nations' Principles for Responsible Management Education, they have been criticized for failing to develop change agents toward sustainability. To fill this gap, this paper demonstrates how interdisciplinarity can be connected to responsible management education through critical and instrumental perspectives. To this end, we apply an interdisciplinarity model to 37 Principles for Responsible Management Education Schools' Reports, using content analysis, text-mining, and network theory tools. As a result, our findings suggest: (i) a taxonomy of critical and instrumental interdisciplinary studies and (ii) a framework of Principles for Responsible Management Education schools engaged in critical and instrumental interdisciplinarity. The framework we develop can serve as a diagnostic and prognostic tool for assessing how interdisciplinary can improve responsible management education in business schools. Our findings contribute to theory advancing research on the intersection of responsible management education and interdisciplinary approaches.

Abstract: The worsening climate, biodiversity, and inequity crises have existential implications. To help resolve these crises, supply chains must move beyond a minimal harm approach. Instead, supply chains must make positive contributions to and harmoniously integrate with the living systems around them. Despite agreement on this urgent need, supply chain management research still lacks a shared roadmap for establishing economically sustainable supply chains that actively regenerate social?ecological systems. This essay deepens the understanding of regenerative supply chains, inviting supply chain scholars and practitioners to rally around timely questions and codevelop new answers. We first scrutinize the paradigmatic assumptions that continue to anchor contemporary research and practice in supply chain management, showing how these once helpful assumptions now hold the community back from seeking much needed solutions. We then offer real-world examples and synthesize emerging arguments from multiple disciplines to propose three new principles of regenerative organizing: proportionality, reciprocity, and poly-rhythmicity. We also delve into the implications of pursuing these regenerative principles for supply chain coordination, governance, and resilience. Finally, we reflect on the fit of empirical research designs and methods for examining the creation of new regenerative supply chains and the conversion of existing supply chains.