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The past few years have seen a swelling of interest in explicitly Christian approaches to business ethics. The time is ripe, it would seem, to map the diversity of approaches within what I term “Christian business ethics.”¹ Here I will frame the diversity of approaches as answers to the distinctive kind of question which religiously minded ethicists have brought to the terrain of business. I will not use theological or religious terms or categories, since such language is not likely to be of interest to philosophers and social scientists. Drawing up this map has been rendered easier by the fact that Christian business ethicists themselves have used a language which is readily accessible to listeners outside their traditions.

Current mainstream management theory is based on incomplete assumptions regarding the nature of human beings and human action, leading to damaging practical results. This paper aims to draw on personalism for the formulation of better assumptions for theory.

The main problems in current assumptions are analysed. A combination of the exclusion of human intentionality with a view of human beings as self‐interest maximisers who betray relationships if it is in their interest so to do, leads to practical proposals for management that distort human behaviour and tend to make people less trustworthy. Nevertheless, such assumptions are not entirely wrong; it is their incompleteness that is problematic. They need to be able to include the intrinsically relational aspect of the human being. In personalism, the human being is seen as a duality, individual‐person, which can provide a way of conceiving both the self‐interested and self‐giving aspects of human action in an integrated way.

Three brief examples of how these expanded assumptions can give us better guidance in management situations indicate the further potential of this line of research. Personalism grounds human dignity in the idea of the person as the imago dei, a Christian idea. The paper discusses the relevance of this idea for management today.

The value of the paper is that it builds a bridge between current management problems and a well‐developed philosophy, allowing the resources of this tradition of thought to be accessed towards the end of creating better management theory and practice.

The aim is to contribute to the personalist economics research agenda by exploring how personalist thought can theoretically inform the question of well-being and its measurement.

The paper draws on the work of personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. After reviewing relevant aspects of Mounier's political economic thought, the second section considers the conceptual implications for a personalist well-being measure and analyses its key tenets: integrality; heterogeneity; objectivity vs. subjectivity; and autonomy and freedom. The third section consists of a dialogue between Mounier's personalist philosophy and some aspects of Sen's capability approach applied to the issue of well-being measurement, which echoes and parallels some fundamental dimensions of personalist thought.

Firstly, the conceptual analysis offers preliminary avenues for moving towards measuring well-being using an agent model that aligns more closely with the model of the economic agent as person, as is articulated by personalists and incorporating personalist principles. Secondly, the brief analysis of ways in which aspects of Sen's capability theory dialogue with personalist economic principles demonstrate the potential for personalist principles to be incorporated into welfare assessment theory.

Personalist economics strives to re-think the foundations of economic theory by introducing the acting person as the economic agent, as opposed to the individual. Dissatisfaction with a range of mainstream economic well-being indicators suggests that there is a deficit in the normative and ontological assumptions that underlie conventional welfare economic models.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2023-0084.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the institutional logics framework adds a fresh perspective on corporate branding, particularly in times of organisational change and subsequent corporate rebranding.

The paper examines previous comprehensive approaches to corporate branding in the face of organisational transformation, applying institutional theory which adds to intelligence already developed regarding corporate branding and rebranding in this situation.

An understanding of the institutional logics framework provides insights into how corporate branding and rebranding in organisations is affected in an environment where the organisation simultaneously holds values and beliefs inherent to two or more competing institutional forms (Townley, 2002).

Further research is required to develop a model which integrates institutional logics into previous approaches to corporate rebranding.

Consideration of the underlying institutional logics of an organisation and how organisational transformation results in competing institutional logics and institutional pluralism leads to profound thinking about branding and rebranding an organisation.

Although there are a number of studies which look at how to evolve the corporate brand in times of organisational transformation, the institutional logics approach has not yet been applied to this issue, except by the author.

This paper aims to examine whether reconciling profit maximization and social welfare as two possible aspirations of company is feasible.

The possible corporate goals are presented by drawing an arc from purely profit-maximizing organizations via a combination of profit and social objectives to organizations clearly serving social utility. In addition to this sorting principle, the order of the different positions presented also takes into account the number of goals and goal-setters.

The primary finding of the study is that none of the business concepts discussed here met the initial expectations as for economic and social objectives. The study points to the need to redefine the purpose of business within a broader social science framework.

For a critical perspective, this paper considers only those standpoints that emphasize a certain form of social utility beyond profitability resulting from business activity directly or indirectly.

In addition to revealing the relationship between the two aspirations, the novelty of the paper lies in the attempt to explore through normative critique and empirical evidence the validity of the expectations regarding the goals.

Rigid environments, those with exceptionally strong cultural and traditional barriers to change, present unique challenges for institutional entrepreneurs attempting to initiate change. We utilize such a setting to examine what support mechanisms, both individual and contextual, have been utilized when attempting change in rigid environments. We examine the case of successful and unsuccessful attempts to make golf more inclusive to women. Our research supports the claim that rigid environments require more complex combinations of support mechanisms than other settings, illustrating the importance of institutions in both enabling and constraining change in such settings.

In this paper we build upon previous research that examines how workers in devalued occupations transform structural conditions that threaten their dignity into resources with which to protect themselves. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork with early childhood educators (ECE), we examine the work experiences of teachers in four distinct work contexts: daycare centers and within elementary schools, each in either the public or private sector. We find that these different school organizational contexts shape what kinds of identity challenges early childhood teachers experience. Different organizational contexts not only subject teachers to different threats to their work-related identity but also have different potential identity resources embedded within them that teachers can use on their own behalf. Thus, while all the early childhood educators in our sample struggle with being employed within a devalued occupation, the identity strategies they have developed to protect their self-worth vary across employment contexts. We show that the strategies these interactive service workers use to solve identity-related problems of dignity at work involve the creative conversion of constraints they face at work into resources that help them achieve valued work identities.

Why do managers redesign global supply chains in a particular manner when faced with compounding geopolitical disruptions? In answering this research question, this study identifies a constrained system of reasoning (decision-making logic) employed by managers when they redesign their supply chains in situations of heightened uncertainty.

The authors conducted 40 elite interviews with senior supply chain executives in 28 companies across nine industries from November 2019 to June 2020, when the UK was preparing to leave the European Union, the US–China trade war was escalating, and Covid-19 was spreading rapidly around the globe.

When redesigning global supply chains, the authors find that managerial decision-making logic is constrained by three distinct environmental ecosystem conditions: (1) the perceived intensity of institutional pressures; (2) the relative mobility of suppliers and supply chain assets; and (3) the perceived severity of the potential disruption risk. Intense government pressure and persistent geopolitical risk tend to impact firms in the same industry, resulting in similar approaches to decision-making regarding supply chain design. However, where suppliers are relatively immobile and supply chain assets are relatively fixed, a dominant logic is consistently present.

Building on an institutional logics perspective, this study finds that managerial decision-making under heightened uncertainty is not solely guided by institutional pressures but also by perceptions of the severity of risk related to potential supply chain disruption and the immobility of supply chain assets. These findings support the theoretical development of a novel construct that the authors term ‘supply chain logics’. Finally, this study provides a decision-making framework for Senior Executives competing in an increasingly complex and unstable business environment.