Critical Language and Discourse Awareness in Management Education

Communication and, through it, language have become key elements of business and organizational life. How organizations interact within their walls and with the outside world fundamentally affects business processes, creating organizational culture, shaping public perceptions, and influencing consumer choices. This essay calls for a greater acknowledgment of language and communication and suggests that management educators may want to review how they are incorporated in management education curricula. Expanding on the skill-based approach typically adopted in business school classes, the essay points to the utility of exposing business students to the dual function of language as a means of doing work and as a social action that constitutes social reality. Drawing on examples from scholarship in linguistics and discourse analysis, the essay demonstrates that the ability to notice, identify, and reflect on linguistic and discourse practices is a crucial managerial skill. Nurturing such analytical and thinking skills enables people to become not only better communicators but also critical thinkers able to understand and challenge when social control, power, or injustice is enacted in organizations

Reward-Based Crowdfunding Research and Practice

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Service Systems in Changing Paradigms: An Inquiry Through the Systems Sciences

For professionals at the beginning of the 21st century, much of the conventional wisdom on business management and engineering is founded in the 20th century industrial / manufacturing paradigm. In developed economies, however, the service sector now dominates the manufacturing sector, just as manufacturing prevailed over the agricultural sector after the industrial revolution.\ud This chapter proposes the development of a body of knowledge on services systems, based on foundations in the systems sciences. The approach includes the design of\ud the systems of inquiry, acknowledging that body of knowledge on 21st century service systems is relatively nascent. A program of action science is proposed, with an\ud emphasis on multiple realities and knowledge development through dialectic. The outcome pursued is an increased number of T-shaped people with depth and breadth\ud in service systems, in communities of inquiry of researchers and practitioners

Responses to Psychological Contract Violations in the Venture Capitalists – Entrepreneur Relationship: An Exploratory Study

The purpose of our paper is to describe venture capitalists’ responses to psychological contract violations in their relationship with entrepreneurs. In addition, we seek to establish a link between the characteristics of a psychological contract violation and the venture capitalist’s behavior. We are concerned with three forms of psychological contract violations: (i) a disagreement over the goals or strategies of a portfolio company, (ii) incompetence of the entrepreneur, and (iii) shirking and opportunistic behavior of the entrepreneur. Our results show that venture capitalists prefer active behaviors to passive approaches. Also, voluntariness of the psychological contract violation, possibilities to improve the impaired relationship, and the performance implications for the portfolio company play a key role in determining the venture capitalist’