reviews and contracts
The Academy of Management has a new publication that creates a space for management scholars to provide reviews and critical appraisals of the literature. The Academy of Management Annals released volume 1 of the new series over the weekend. The first volume contains some interesting-looking pieces (I haven’t actually read any of them yet), including a paper by Kim Elsbach and Michael Pratt on the physical environments of organizations and an article by Paul Adler, Linda Forbes, and Hugh Wilmott on critical management studies.
In an unrelated topic, check out Gordon Smith’s post on the B corporation, a new corporate governance structure that allows managers to “hard-wire their social responsibility into their governing documents.” The basic idea is that social responsibility should/can be a legally sanctioned activity of corporations if the organization can legally commit itself to certain non-shareholder stakeholder groups at founding. As Gordon notes, this illustrates how contracts can be a useful device for institutionalizing organizational identity. Gordon and I make this point in our paper, “Organizational Perspectives on Contracts,” which, by the way, is very close to finding a journal home. More on that later.
