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The purpose of this paper includes two interconnected objectives. The first is to provide a reconceptualisation of social value creation as social constraint alleviation. The second is to respond to the call put forward by Giuliani and Macchi (2014) to produce synergies between bodies of literature exploring the development impact of businesses. The paper focuses on ideas from the global value chain/global production networks (GVC/GPN), business and human rights, corporate social responsibility (CSR), international business (IB) and (social) entrepreneurship literatures.

The paper offers a reconceptualisation of social value creation by building on the synergies, complementarities and limitations of existing concepts identified through the literature review.

The reconceptualisation of social value creation put forward in this paper contributes to the literature in the following way. It offers a useful and clear definition of the term “social” (Devinney, 2009), and it attends to the limitations of the constraint concept as put forward by Ted London and his collaborators (London, 2011). Furthermore, it sketches out the basic ideas of a two-system approach to allow for the differentiation between symptom treatment and root cause alleviation. Finally, it offers a refinement of Wettstein’s (2012) proposed capability-based remedial action concept. The paper furthermore proposes that there are three distinct ways in which businesses generally respond to social constraints.

The paper illustrates how the redefined concept of social value creation can connect different bodies of literature and help make sense of existing empirical results, without engaging in definitional debates.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the influence of people management practices on the outcomes of organisational change projects through their contributions to organisational learning. The contributions to their outcomes of particular corporate and project-specific people management practices are considered.

Case studies of two organisational change projects undertaken by Arts Council England during 2006-2007 are used to examine how far and in what ways people management practices influence the outcomes of such projects. Organisational change is considered as an instance of organisational learning, which in turn is examined in relation to the twin activities of developing new ideas and internal sense-making.

Evidence is presented that certain people management practices, individually and in combination, influence the outcomes of organisational change projects significantly through their contributions to organisational learning.

Research into the influence of particular people management practices, and the contexts and processes through which it is exerted, is necessary to develop more generalisable conclusions. This influence is liable to be invisible to less granular research into people management as a general construct.

Research into the use of project management methods specifically to implement organisational change is sparse. The findings of this paper contradict findings from research into the influence of people management on project outcomes in general, which suggest that it does not have a significant effect.