Rethinking Business Management

Two developments in the business world have brought to a head the crisis of ethics. On the one hand, against the backdrop of the astonishing success of global markets, major corporate scandals have raised concerns about integrity in business. At the same time, cultural and technological trends are questioning the philosophical assumptions about the human person upon which modern economics is based.""Rethinking Business Management: Examining the Foundations of Business Education"" draws together the work of distinguished scholars and professionals from history, medicine, law, economics, theology, philosophy, and business management. This groundbreaking book offers new, person-centered perspectives on business management and business education for the twenty-first century. This unique volume offers equally profound insights for practicing managers as for business educators, historians, theologians, political theorists, and philosophers.These insights include: effective management must be based on sound business science and robust ethical and anthropological conceptions of human flourishing; profit is an essential and indispensible element of success in business, and needs to be grounded in a broader understanding of human flourishing in business; cultivating an understanding of the moral life in business requires more than rules; and, developing virtuous character is needed to protect and promote human fulfillment rather than simply making business life more predictable.

This important and original book places the case study in international business research in its historical context, critically evaluates current case study practices in the field and proposes a more pluralistic future for case research within international business and international management research. While the case study is the most popular qualitative research strategy in the field, only a narrow selection of possible approaches is currently used. IB and IM researchers typically rely on a case study approach that could be characterized as 'qualitative positivism'. The editors and contributors look beyond this disciplinary convention and encourage greater pluralism in IB and IM case research. Their key argument is that increased awareness of prevailing disciplinary conventions - and their limitations - increases the potential for methodological innovation and versatility in case research. The contributions provide critical, novel and innovative perspectives on the case study in IB and IM research. The book offers inspiration to case authors and an authoritative methodological reference for those publishing and reviewing case research. It will also be highly regarded by postgraduate and doctoral students in IB and IM as well as both qualitative and quantitative researchers in the field.

This book offers innovative ideas and frameworks for sustainable strategizing to advance business by scaling-up its positive impact, which is so urgently needed at this time in the 21st century. It shows practitioners how to effectively deal with socio-ecological systems’ disruptions to their operating environments and play an active role in transforming markets toward a sustainable future. In short, the book demonstrates how to make business sense of sustainability, highlighting new approaches and examples that translate sustainability into strategy and action. The ultimate goal is to provide a path toward a thriving future for both business and society. This book was written for strategy practitioners and decision makers who want to understand why sustainable strategizing is important in today’s business world and are seeking actionable business knowledge they can apply in their companies. It was also written for students of management and can be used as a supplemental text to support traditional graduate and undergraduate management courses.

What do business school graduates learn, and how helpful is it for managing in the everyday, messy reality of organisations? What does it mean to apply 'best practice', or to take up 'evidence-based management' and what kind of thinking does this imply? In Rethinking Management, Chris Mowles argues that many management courses still largely assume a linear and predictable world, when experience tells us that the opposite is the case. He questions some of the more orthodox conceptual assumptions that underpin much management education and instead, encourages leaders and managers to take their everyday experience of working with others seriously. People in organisations co-operate and compete to get things done, and constrain and enable each other in relationships of power. Because of this there are always unintended consequences of our actions - uncertainty is inherent in the everyday. Chris Mowles draws on the complexity sciences, the sciences of uncertainty rather than certainty, and the social sciences to explore more helpful ways to think and talk about our lived reality. He takes concrete examples from contemporary organisations, to argue that understanding the radical implications of uncertainty is central to the task of leading. Rethinking Management explores narrative alternatives to the ubiquitous grids and frameworks that are routinely taught in business schools, and encourages management professionals and educators to recognise the importance of judgement, improvisation and the everyday politics of organisational life.

This volume challenges reigning shareholder and stakeholder management theories using philosophical and theological dimensions of the Catholic tradition. The contributors, including management theorists, moral theologians, economists, ethicists and attorneys, debate complicated issues such as the ethics of profit seeking, equity and efficiency in the firm, the shareholder value principle, social ethics of corporate management, the principle of subsidiarity and modern contract theory. While contributors share a respect for the power of markets, they also assign value to community, common goods and personal virtue. Essays combine organizational and management theory with philosophical and theological accounts of human purpose. A central arguement of this collection is that the tradition of Catholic social thought provides principles that enable fruitful conversations across disciplines regarding the purpose of business and economic activity.

The purpose of this book is to reimagine the concept of culture, both as an analytical category and disciplinary practice of dominance, marginalization and exclusion. For decades culture has been perceived as a ‘hot topic’. It has been written about and deployed as part of ‘a search for excellence’; as a tool through which to categorise, rank, motivate and mould individuals; as a part of an attempt to align individual and corporate goals; as a driver of organizational change, and; as a servant of profit maximisation. The women writers presented in this book offer a different take on culture: they offer useful disruptions to mainstream conceptions of culture. Joanne Martin and Mary Douglas provide multi-dimensional holistic accounts of social relations that point up similarity and difference. Rather than offering totalising or prescriptive models, each author considers the complex, polyphonic and processual nature of culture(s) while challenging us to acknowledge and work with ambiguity, fluidity and disruption. In this spirit writings of Judi Marshall, Arlie Hochschild, Kathy Ferguson, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway are employed to disrupt extant management cultures that lionise the masculine and marginalise the concerns, perspectives and contributions of women and the diversity of women. These writers bring bodies, emotions, difference, resistance and politics back to the centre stage of organizational theory and practice. They open us up to the possibility of cultures suffused with multifarious potentiality rather than homogeneity and faux certainty. As such, they offer new ways of understanding and performing culture in management and organization. This book will be relevant to students and researchers across business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology.

Business schools around the world have grown and prospered in the last few decades, but what does the future hold for business schools? This book explores the potential future disruption of the business school tradition by considering funding, value chains, strategic groups, value orientation, innovation and business models.

"Business Schools Face Test of Faith." "Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?" As these headlines make clear, business education is at a major crossroads. For decades, MBA graduates from top-tier schools set the standard for cutting-edge business knowledge and skills. Now the business world has changed, say the authors of Rethinking the MBA, and MBA programs must change with it. Increasingly, managers and recruiters are questioning conventional business education. Their concerns? Among other things, MBA programs aren't giving students the heightened cultural awareness and global perspectives they need. Newly minted MBAs lack essential leadership skills. Creative and critical thinking demand far more attention. In this compelling and authoritative new book, the authors: · Document a rising chorus of concerns about business schools gleaned from extensive interviews with deans and executives, and from a detailed analysis of current curricula and emerging trends in graduate business education · Provide case studies showing how leading MBA programs have begun reinventing themselves for the better · Offer concrete ideas for how business schools can surmount the challenges that come with reinvention, including securing faculty with new skills and experimenting with new pedagogies Rich with examples and thoroughly researched, Rethinking the MBA reveals why and how business schools must define a better pathway for the future.