Identity Discovery and Verification in Artist- Entrepreneurs: An Active Learning Exercise

Entrepreneurship curricula are becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, with higher education institutions offering a variety of “entrepreneurship and” courses that cross the boundaries into other fields. Despite this, many entrepreneurship curricula are centered on business theory, which is not suitable for nonbusiness students. For example, business students are trained to define success by financial statements and organizational viability, whereas artists enjoy success by achieving creative satisfaction. This article explores the importance of identity to the entrepreneurial process, highlighting the similarities and differences between the artist and entrepreneur identities. Pedagogical in approach, the article demonstrates the utility of an active learning exercise in identity discovery and verification for artist-entrepreneurs. It highlights the critical role of identity for artist-entrepreneurs, the need to develop curricula for nonbusiness students to maximize learning, and the utility of this exercise as a starting point for artist-entrepreneurs to enact the entrepreneurial mind set in their creative work

In the Wake of Disaster: Resilient Organizing and a New Path for the Future

High-hazard organizations are unique due to their susceptibility to disasters that can have grave consequences not just for the organization, but also for stakeholders, the communities in which they operate and the environment. Though prominence is placed on understanding how high-hazard organizations avoid such events, how they create a new future when such an event does occur is underexplored. The purpose of this chapter, thus, is to investigate how organizations create a new future in the wake of a disaster through resilient organizing. Using an instrumental case study methodology, this study investigates how executives at BP, a high-hazard organization, embodied resilient organizing following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We show how resilient organizing helped BP bounce back and beyond by learning from the disaster, finding resolve, refocusing and experiencing transformation through action. In doing so, BP endeavored to prepare for, build, cultivate and commit to a new future. Insights from this research point to resilient organizing as a promising strategy for creating a new future and suggest future avenues for research on resilient organizing in high-hazard contexts and beyond

Identity Discovery and Verification in Artist-Entrepreneurs: An Active Learning Exercise

Entrepreneurship curricula are becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, with higher education institutions offering a variety of “entrepreneurship and” courses that cross the boundaries into other fields. Despite this, many entrepreneurship curricula are centered on business theory, which is not suitable for nonbusiness students. For example, business students are trained to define success by financial statements and organizational viability, whereas artists enjoy success by achieving creative satisfaction. This article explores the importance of identity to the entrepreneurial process, highlighting the similarities and differences between the artist and entrepreneur identities. Pedagogical in approach, the article demonstrates the utility of an active learning exercise in identity discovery and verification for artist-entrepreneurs. It highlights the critical role of identity for artist-entrepreneurs, the need to develop curricula for nonbusiness students to maximize learning, and the utility of this exercise as a starting point for artist-entrepreneurs to enact the entrepreneurial mind set in their creative work

Top Management Team Diversity, Equality, and Innovation: A Multilevel Investigation of the Health Care Industry

The role of women on top management teams (TMTs) is an increasingly important topic for both academics and practitioners. Despite increased attention to gender diversity on TMTs, there remains limited understanding of how gender diversity influences important outcomes of the firm, such as innovation. To this end, I investigate the relationships between two dimensions of TMT diversity—TMT gender diversity and TMT compensation equality—and firm innovation, and consider how TMT size influences these relationships. Using a unique, multilevel, longitudinal sample of publicly traded firms in the U.S. health care industry, I find TMT size to be a key driver in the TMT diversity and firm innovation relationship

Lululemon’s commitment to the environment: A tangle of seaweed, suppliers, and social responsibility

It was the morning of Wednesday, November 14, 2007. The article on the front page of the New York Times Business Section read “‘Seaweed’ Clothing Has None, Tests Show.” The story asserted that one of Lululemon’s product lines, VitaSea, which purported to contain a seaweed fiber designed to release marine amino acids, minerals and vitamins into the skin upon contact with moisture, contained no such ingredient. Both Chip Wilson, Chairman and Founder of athletic wear retailer Lululemon, and Robert Meers, Lululemon’s CEO, were about to embark on their first damage-control mission since the company’s Initial Public Offering in July. This was the most widespread negative press Lululemon had received since going public, and the aftermath of the article would question Lululemon’s product integrity, marketing and strategy, suppliers, and ethics. Lululemon’s next move would be crucial to both its survival and reputation

The Tower Building Challenge: Introducing Stakeholder Management to MBA Students

The ability to consider and analyze different stakeholder interests is a skill required of today’s business students. This paper describes a 35-minute experiential exercise using Tinkertoys® or Legos® to demonstrate and reinforce the concept of stakeholder management. The exercise, the Tower Building Challenge (TBC), is targeted toward classes in business ethics, strategy, or decision-making and requires students to work in groups to build a tower with the underpinning challenge that each group member has a different interest in how the tower should be built. Student feedback reflects on the difficulty of satisfying all stakeholders when making business decisions, the importance of making the interests of stakeholders transparent to enhance cooperation and the effectiveness of the decision-making process, and the need for stakeholder management when considering business decisions that impact stakeholders. Following this experiential exercise, students’ preliminary understanding presents an opportunity for a deeper discussion of stakeholder management. Specifically, students are prompted to consider stakeholder interests as joint, rather than opposed, when engaged in stakeholder management

Encouraging Entrepreneurship: Microfinance, Knowledge Support, and the Costs of Operating in Institutional Voids

This study focuses on the supplemented strategies of microfinance institutions (MFIs), in which the MFI offers nonfinancial services, such as entrepreneurship related knowledge, in addition to financial services to impoverished borrowers at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). We examine two contextual factors— foreign direct investment (FDI) and loan defaults— to better understand the relationship between providing knowledge support to encourage entrepreneurship and costs of operating at the BoP for MFIs. In contexts where FDI is low and loan defaults are high, providing knowledge support to encourage entrepreneurship aggravates the MFI’s costs of operating at the BoP. However, in contexts where FDI is high and loan defaults are low, providing knowledge support to encourage entrepreneurship among impoverished borrowers does not aggravate the MFI’s costs of operating at the BoP. Hence, in emerging markets where governments welcome FDI and curb loan defaults, MFIs can viably support entrepreneurship among the poor

The Ethnographic Method in CSR Research: The Role and Importance of Methodological Fit

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research has burgeoned in the past several decades. Despite significant advances, our review of the literature reveals a problematic gap: We know little about how culture, practices, and interactions shape CSR. On further investigation, we discover that limited research utilizes ethnography to understand CSR, which may provide some explanation for this gap. Thus, the purpose of this article is to illustrate the utility of ethnography for advancing business and society research via a multistage framework that demonstrates how three different types of ethnography may be applied to the exploration of CSR. We specifically focus on the alignment between stages in the research process, or methodological fit, as a key criterion of high-quality research. In doing so, we provide researchers embracing different worldviews a tool they may utilize to conduct and evaluate ethnographies in business and society research

Resource Security: Competition for Global Resources, Strategic Intent, and Governments as Owners

We develop a resource security perspective by examining the resources that multinational firms acquire when investing abroad. Firms can acquire resources to increase power and decrease dependence for long-term security (exploration) or acquire resources for relatively shorter-term gains and consumption (exploitation). We find state owned enterprises (SOEs) acquire resources for exploration, and pay more for these resources than non-state owned enterprises (NSOEs). We contribute to the literature by suggesting that long-term resource security is of immediate importance to SOEs and their home countries, that ownership influences resource acquisitions, and investments can be a safeguard for the SOE’s home country’s future