A model of management academics' intentions to influence values

Business schools face increased criticism for failing in the teaching of management studies to nurture their students’ values. Assuming that individual academics play an important role in shaping the value-related influence of business schools, I model management academics’ intentions to influence values. The suggested model encompasses academics’ economic and social values as internal variables, as well as perceived support for attempting to influence values and academic tenure as social and structural variables. A test with empirical data from 1,254 management academics worldwide reveals that perceived external support is most relevant for explaining intentions. Moreover, academics’ social values, but not their economic ones, contribute to an explanation of their intentions to influence values. The results reveal how important it is for academics to believe that their colleagues, higher education institutions, and other stakeholders support their value-related behavioral intentions

From the Guest Editors: the legitimacy and impact of business schools—key issues and a research agenda

It is an appropriate moment to review research into the legitimacy and impact of business schools. It is more than a decade now since Pfeffer and Fong's (2002) provocative paper challenging the perceived orthodoxy of business school success in the very first edition of the Academy of Management Learning & Education

Means versus ends in opaque institutional fields: Trading off compliance and achievement in sustainability standard adoption

__Abstract__ The long-standing discussion on decoupling has recently moved from adopters not implementing the agreed-upon policies to compliant adopters not achieving the goals intended by institutional entrepreneurs. This “means-ends decoupling” prevails especially in highly opaque fields, where practices, causality, and performance are hard to understand and chart. I conceptualize the conditions under which the adoption of institutions in relatively opaque fields leads to the achievement of the envisaged goals. Voluntary sustainability standards governing socioenvironmental issues illustrate these arguments. I argue that the lack of field transparency drives institutional entrepreneurs to create and maintain concrete and uniform rules, apply strong incentives, and disseminate “best practices” to ensure substantive adopter compliance. However, such rigid institutions are ill-equipped to deal with the causal complexity and practice multiplicity underlying opacity while they smother adopter agency. The ensuing tension between substantive compliance and goal achievement leads to an inherent trade-off: institutional entrepreneurs who remedy the policy-practice decoupling may enhance the disparity between means and ends, and vice versa. While sustainability standards and other institutions in highly opaque fields can, therefore, not fully achieve the envisaged goals, the trade-off can be reduced through systemically designed institutions that promote goal internalization and contain niche institutions