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A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

This paper aims to challenge singular definitions, measurements and applications of corporate reputation which tend to be reductionist. The authors rebuff such narrow representations of reputation by showing the multiplicity of reputation in the case of a global management consulting firm and demonstrate how it has sustained such reputations.

Using a large cross-country qualitative case study based on interviews, focus groups, non-participant observations, workshops and a fieldwork diary, dimensions of reputation are highlighted by drawing on perceptions from multiple stakeholder groups in different geographies.

The authors find significant differences in perceptions of reputation between and within stakeholder groups, with perceptions changing across dimensions and geographies.

The theoretical implications of the research indicate a plurality of extant reputations, suggesting that a prism is more suited to representing corporate reputation than a singular, lens-like focus which is too narrow to constitute reputation. This paper offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how global firms can build and sustain multiple and competing corporate reputations.

Organizational paradoxes must first be recognized by managers before they can respond to them. Yet scholars have adopted different perspectives on how paradoxical tensions become salient and engender management responses. Some approaches have focused on the socially constituted nature of paradoxes, and others on the inherent aspects of paradoxes in the environment. The authors propose an approach that gives ontological meaning to both the socially constituted and inherent nature of organizational paradoxes. Our approach, which is inspired by quantum physics, opens up new opportunities for engaging with the socio-materiality of paradoxes, how they are measured, and the implications this has on the probabilities of managing organizational responses to paradox.

Visuals are a crucial part of strategizing, whether it be through the use of body gesture, the crafting of strategy presentations, or the use of new media technologies from videoconferencing through to data visualization. Yet studying these aspects of the strategy process is methodologically challenging and requires careful attention to how the data is collected and what questions the data analysis can address. In this chapter, we lay out choices for scholars and the opportunities these afford to new and promising agendas in strategy and management research.

The purpose of this paper is to address the paradox that individuals face in seeking to both generate new ideas and be committed to delivering standardised processes in a creative industry. The authors explore this tension in order to better understand how synergistic benefits are reaped at the intersection of these competing demands.

The paper adopts a longitudinal case study approach inside a global media organisation in the creative industries sector. Data derived from participant observations, manager interviews, administered survey instruments, and archival documentation.

The authors find that creative organisations experience explore/exploit paradoxes which are nested at three levels: knowledge, learning and motivation. Further, the authors find that managers are able to respond to competing tensions through organisational processes that allow differentiation/integration simultaneously. These management responses are supported and sustained by both structural and contextual organisational forms.

First, the authors provide a clearer theoretical explanation of paradox in creative organisations by accounting for competing demands to explore and exploit through nested tensions. Second, the authors extend the understanding of management responses to these paradox by showing how managers balance both demands simultaneously rather than cumulatively over time, thereby offering insight into how managers behave over time. Third, the authors outline the supporting role of organisational form in sustaining management responses within creative organisations at the same time in order to reap synergistic benefits.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.

In this volume, we take the baton from previous editors Dave Ketchen and Don Bergh in the Research Methodology in Strategy and Management series. Our approach is to stand on the shoulders of these editors and authors who have published in the series. So, we begin, in this chapter, by highlighting innovative work published in this volume that has provided actionable and practical suggestions for problems researchers face in their work. We briefly describe the chapters, including the first two chapters in this volume from Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Dennis Gioia, and introduce new methodologies and tools to guide researchers in their efforts to build high quality, publishable work. We also describe future work that, in our view, needs to be addressed for the fields of strategic management in particular and management more generally to continue to evolve.

This paper sought to understand at one time point what was known and not known about the status and use of indicators of internationalization of higher education in Asia–Pacific. More specifically, we identified and mapped publicly available indicators of international of higher education in the region. We examined the ways by which internationalization has been measured and the indicators used, setting up discussion of what may be missing from internationalization efforts.

The primary questions were: (1) What are the current available sources of data in the Asia–Pacific region? (2) How is internationalization measured in publicly available databases and academic materials in Asia–Pacific? To answer these questions, we carried out a structured search of academic and agency literatures. Review of these literatures led us to develop definitions and a classification system by which indicators were classified and examined.

Indicators clustered almost exclusively around measures of student mobility, neglecting a wide range of other possible measures. The authors discuss the implications for internationalization of higher education in the region and draw on existing critical literature to speculate why this might be the case, and what dimensions of internationalization are likely overlooked with such a limited focus.

Internationalization of higher education has gained considerable momentum worldwide in recent years, and higher education in the Asia–Pacific region is arguably the world's most dynamic. Despite such dynamism, no research to our knowledge has mapped the way in which internationalization is measured by actors in the region.