Bend but don’t break: a case study on the cultural entrepreneurial process in the publishing industry

Research on cultural industries has attracted considerable interest on cultural entrepreneurs as agents in complex interaction with multiple and evolving contexts. The study aims to capture the complexity and intensity of these relationships, exploring entrepreneurship as a journey driven by cultural and social dynamics on one side, and economic needs on the other. The investigation is an inductive inquiry carried out through an in-depth analysis of a single revelatory case in the publishing industry. Focusing on the relational process through which the entrepreneur and the context are co-created, the paper analyzes the entrepreneurial journey through the identification of three major stages: Divergence, Identity construction, and Institutionalization

BEND BUT DON’T BREAK: A CASE STUDY ON THE CO-CREATING STRATEGY OF A CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS

Cultural entrepreneurship dynamics have attracted considerable interest of management scholars in the last years. Research in this field has so far focused the level of analysis on the cultural entrepreneur as individual or network agency, without extensively examining a broader concept of collective agency. By investigating the case study of a three-dimensional entrepreneur in the field of the publishing industry that acts as a bookseller, as an independent publisher and as a cultural mediator, the study explores the actual possibilities of cultural entrepreneurship. We developed content analysis of three corpora of documents, tracing the evolving of the narratives in the entrepreneurial journey. Our findings position the cultural entrepreneurship on the level of a recursive collective co- creation narrative between the entrepreneur himself and different stakeholders over time. In a journey of continuous experimentation, the cultural entrepreneur evolves to a cultural mediator, in order to overcome the duality between his cultural and economic aspirations through the immersion in the social context where he works and through the use of the book as a cultural and social artifact

REBALANCING DISRUPTIVE BUSINESS OF MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS WITHIN DEMOCRATIC AND INCLUSIVE CITIZENSHIP PROCESSES- REVIEW WORKING PAPER

The purpose of this working paper is to conduct a comprehensive review of existing literature that explores the relationship between business organizations and democracy. This review draws from various fields, including management, business ethics, sociology, international law, and other relevant disciplines for this Project and has several objectives. Firstly, it aims to provide insight into prior research on how democratic institutions regulate economic actors and how these actors, particularly large multinational corporations (MNCs), resist such regulation. Additionally, it examines how these economic actors develop behaviors and economic models that pose challenges to democratic governance, such as business-related human rights violations. In the initial part of the review, we delve into the historical and contemporary aspects of the relationship between business and democracy. Furthermore, the report explores how companies can contribute to shaping a more democratic future by addressing gaps in governance, especially in cases where populist governments fail to protect the rights of their citizens. It also considers the development of alternative business models, such as social enterprises and cross-sector partnerships. Moreover, it looks into how businesses can actively engage in democratic governance and promote principles of participation. The final section of the working paper involves a bibliometric analysis, including co authorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence maps. This analysis is based on key references used by team members in their literature reviews and is designed to examine the connections that exist among various strands of research that support the research questions of the Rebalance Project

Ethics in Organizational Network Performance: Lessons from Organized Crime and Organizational Wrongdoing

This chapter builds the argument for the need of evaluating the performance of organizational networks from a business ethics perspective. Network performance is normally analyzed in terms of coordination and outcomes, two byproducts of network structure and governance, and not in terms of whether its content is ethical or not. But in a time when wrongdoing and unethical decision-making are more and more diffused in organizational networks and bring along very negative outputs such as costly scandals for companies and societies, embracing an ethical perspective on the evaluation of network performance may advance our knowledge on the nuanced phenomenology of network dysfunctionalities. This chapter builds its argument by bridging the two disconnected literatures of network performance and organizational unethical behavior. It starts examining how network studies have treated performance without including the ethical dimension in the picture. Then, it moves to organizational wrongdoing and discusses how unethical behavior is still theorized as a single-organization phenomenon. Third, it shows the implications of, respectively, the absence of ethical evaluations of network performance and of a networked view of wrongdoing. Finally, it paves the way (1) to future research on network studies, by addressing the role and impact of embracing ethical considerations in studying network dysfunctionalities and (2) to wrongdoing analyses by setting the basis to address wrongdoing in organizational networks