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This perspective article provides an overview of current research on paradoxes within family business settings and outlines emerging trends and potential avenues for future research in this field.

This article is inspired by a systems-theoretical approach to business family paradoxes.

The article suggests that increasing research interest in more-than and neither-nor approaches to paradox could propel the digital transformation of paradox theory and facilitate the strategic management of family business paradoxes in multi-stakeholder environments.

This article synthesises the state of the arts in the field of research on family business paradoxes and proposes future research agendas.

This article shows that business family and family business research is dominated by reductionist and biased concepts of culture that are in sharp contrast with recent advances in anthropology and the broader social sciences that would allow for more fine-grained analyses.

Through an inbound theorizing approach, state-of-the-art anthropological and sociological concepts of culture are introduced to family business research.

The resulting interdisciplinary update unveils that prevailing concepts of culture in family business research confuse cultures with countries or nations and neglect the processual constitution of culture.

The article advocates a research agenda emphasizing the social construction and reproduction of culture as well as the need to systematically draw on findings from anthropology and sociology so as to allow for better cross-cultural comparisons in the field of family business research.

The literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizations have frequently been identified as one of the main challenges in the process of post-merger integration (PMI). Existing research has explored a broad variety of cultural differences in perceptions, such as those relating to expectations, norms, values and beliefs within the respective organizations, and how these affect the process and success of PMI. However, less attention has been paid to the relevance of the macro-societal context to PMI. The ambition of this article is, therefore, to advance our understanding of how macro-level societal factors define organizational cultures and affect the success of PMI.

We draw on social systems theory as devised by Niklas Luhmann, assuming that organizations are always embedded in the macro-level societal context of distinctive realms of social reality—such as the economy, politics, religion and the arts—that make up the so-called “function systems”. Looking at the case of the integration of a Brazilian technology start-up into a market-leading corporation, we analyze the dominant orientations towards these function systems, and the changes in these orientations over time.

The results suggest that differences in organizational culture in PMI can be partly explained by differences in orientations to the function systems. Moreover, forcing dramatic changes of orientations towards the function systems within a merged entity can severely damage its raison d'etre in the first place, potentially leading to, in some sense, an account of “culture murder”.

This article is unique in demonstrating that organizations are multifunctional systems whose culture is defined by the highly specific and potentially varying degrees of importance they place on individual function systems and that knowledge or neglect of these functional profiles may seriously affect the success of post-merger integration. Against this backdrop, the article presents a multifunctional profiling method that may easily translate into PMI management tools.

This article explores the concept of state entrepreneurship, particularly focusing on its darker aspects when states act as creative destroyers.

This study employs a systems-theoretical approach to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the nature of statehood and its role in driving disruptive innovation. The research design includes an analysis of cases of state-mandated planned obsolescence, examining the ethical, political and economic implications of these strategies.

The main findings highlight that while state-driven innovation is often justified by noble goals such as climate change mitigation, these strategies may lead to ethically questionable outcomes, particularly when economic benefits for the state or associated entities are involved. The study also demonstrates that several aspects of state entrepreneurship align with established definitions of dark side entrepreneurship. The article concludes by underscoring the need for further research into the social costs incurred as states pursue their entrepreneurial missions.

The article demonstrates that states are organisations that pursue business models that would be considered unethical if adopted by other organisations. These models include strategies of state-mandated forms of planned obsolescence, a strategy commonly regarded as environmentally unsustainable or even criminal if performed by business organisations.

This article is devoted to conditions and examples of how theories may be applied as methods in the fields of management research and organization studies.

An introduction to minimum requirements for a successful refunctionalization of theory as method as well as to nine contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management on “Theory as method” is provided.

The review of these nine cases suggests that the use of theories as methods is not necessarily harmful for the former, and particularly not for the more robust among them.

This article sheds new light on the value of theoretical monism or loyalty and calls for a reassessment of the relative value of expertise in a specific research field, method and or theory.

This conceptual paper seeks to bridge two existing theories in a bid to broaden our analytical scope when studying the process of onboarding, retention and exclusion of organizational members. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

The authors draw on the social systems theory to advance the fit theory demonstrating the pertinence of macro social factors for the determination of person–organization (P–O) fit.

The result of this conceptual groundwork is a framework for the creation of highly individual personal profiles that refrains from analyses of potentially discriminatory factors like age, race or gender.

The authors present an individualized, multidimensional and flexible framework for the analysis of dynamically changing constellations of P–O fit.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how much value national governments worldwide place on political, economic, scientific, artistic, religious, legal, sportive, health-related, educational and mass media-related issues. This knowledge is critical as governments and policies are typically expected to be congruent with the importance these issues have for society.

Drawing on theories of polyphonic and multifunctional organization, the authors recoded and analyzed a US Central Intelligence Agency directory to test the cabinet portfolio of a total of 201 national governments for significant biases to the above issues.

The results suggest that governments worldwide massively over-allocate their attention to economic issues.

The authors conclude that this strong pro-economic governance-bias likely translates into dysfunctional governance and development at both the national and supra-national level.

This study aims to present a solution-focused approach to current problems and criticisms faced by business schools.

To facilitate the required shift from problems to solutions, this study outlines a theory method and demonstrates how it has informed my teaching at Financial Times (FT)-ranked business schools and other institutions of higher education in two subjects and on three continents.

The study reports on two student exercises showing that even advanced business school students confuse organizations with political economic hierarchies.

The study concludes that business schools pursuing a smart specialization strategy by challenging this reductionist view may turn into new schools of management distinguished by a broader, multifunctional concept of themselves and their impact on their environment.

Social distancing. Travel bans. Confinement. The purpose of this paper is to document that more than 50% of the world population is affected by World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations for the 2020 coronavirus crisis. The WHO admits that the evidence quality for the effectiveness of these recommendations is low or very low.

This self-contradiction is confirmed by a WHO document published in October 2019 as well as supporting documentation from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

This viewpoint concludes that an obvious resolution of this self-contradiction would be to limit restrictions and interventions to those for whose effectiveness the WHO’s document reported that there was at least moderate evidence.

A shift of focus is suggested from discussions on the commensurability and social costs of anti-COVID-19 interventions to their actual effectiveness.

This study aims to highlight the critical role case fatality rates (CFR) have played in the emergence and the management of particularly the early phases of the current coronavirus crisis.

The study presents a contrastive map of CFR for the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and influenza (H1N1 and H2N2).

The mapped data shows that current CFR of SARS-CoV-2 are considerably lower than, or similar to those, of hospitalised patients in the UK, Spain, Germany or international samples. The authors therefore infer a possible risk that the virulence of the coronavirus is considerably overestimated because of sampling biases, and that increased testing might reduce the general CFR of SARS-CoV-2 to rates similar to, or lower than, of the common seasonal influenza.

This study concludes that governments, health corporations and health researchers must prepare for scenarios in which the affected populations cease to believe in the statistical foundations of the current coronavirus crisis and interventions.