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This paper aims to further research on leadership and knowledge management through formal knowledge strategies in knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs), and analyse knowledge management challenges and approaches within KIOs, especially tacit knowledge.

This paper is based on conceptual and literature research.

Managing knowledge as an organizational asset involves how knowledge is obtained, stored and organized, and accessed and shared when needed. This is crucial for KIOs. Knowledge that is not captured, understood and transferred, throughout the organization, is useless. This requires the integration of systems and processes with people and leadership. Tacit knowledge generation and transfer is especially important in KIOs. In particular, the success of KIOs depends crucially on management’s ability to give leadership in a way that supports knowledge-intensive teamwork. The global nature of internal and external knowledge networks adds to the leadership challenge. This can be made more complex by cultural differences, intellectual property protection (formal and informal) and talent scarcity.

Further research is needed to identify the types of KIO and to better understand sound common knowledge management and related leadership principles across all types of KIO and those that are more context-dependent on the type of KIO and/or its business and cultural context. More research is needed on policy making organizations, in-company policy-making research and development and creative industries.

The paper takes forward research on leading knowledge management in KIOs and introduces 14 challenging new papers in this specific field of research.

Emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) can choose focused or ambidextrous strategies to catch up with global market leaders through overseas foreign direct investment (OFDI). The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by the Chinese government in 2013, had a profound impact on Chinese multinational enterprises’ international behavior. This paper analyses how EMNEs select focused or ambidextrous catch-up strategies before and after the BRI, integrating ambidexterity and catch-up theories to provide a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of EMNE strategy.

A case study is well suited for deriving rich descriptions of empirical phenomena for which little theory exists. Because the existing literature has not yet fully explored and conceptually modeled the influence of windows of opportunity on international catch-up strategies, we use qualitative research to explore the mechanisms of strategy evolution in EMNEs.

The results show that the choice of catch-up strategy is influenced by the nature of windows of opportunity and the firm's accumulated technological capability. Specifically, the opening of institutional windows as a result of the BRI could give significant momentum to the international catch-up process by providing incentives and opportunities for EMNEs to enter more markets and new technology fields. The EMNEs studied underwent a transition from a focused strategy in the catch-up stage to an ambidextrous strategy in the beyond catch-up stage.

These conclusions can not only deepen our understanding of the dynamics of catch-up strategies in the global context but also enrich the research on the ambidexterity of EMNEs, especially in the context of the BRI.

An alliance portfolio can help latecomer firms to acquire the necessary knowledge and resources to catch up with market leaders. However, how latecomer firms construct an alliance portfolio in terms of the nature of windows of opportunity has not been fully analyzed. This paper aims to explore how latecomer firms can build appropriate coalitions according to the nature of the window of opportunity to achieve technological catch-up in different catch-up phases.

Based on a longitudinal case study from 1984 to 2018 of Sunny Group, now a leading manufacturer of integrated optical components and products, this paper explores the process of technological catch-up of latecomer firms building different types of alliance portfolio in different windows of opportunity.

This paper finds that there is a sequence when latecomers build an alliance portfolio in the process of catch-up. When the uncertainty of opportunity increases, the governance mechanism of the alliance portfolio will change from contractual to equity-based. Also, latecomer firms build market-dominated and technology-dominated alliance portfolios to overcome their market and technology disadvantages, respectively.

These conclusions not only enrich the theory of latecomer catch-up from the perspective of windows of opportunity but also expand research on alliance portfolio processes from a temporal perspective.

We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore whether and how angel investors’ emotions unfold in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Complementing recent research that has emphasized the financial calculations, we add angel investors’ own emotional arousal to the list of tools that may help them to rate investment opportunities.

Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews, we develop a phenomenological analysis of the investment opportunity evaluation process at the level of angel investors’ lived experience.

Our findings indicate that when angel investors use their emotional arousal in evaluating investment criteria, they engage in a developmental process characterized by three elements: subjective validation, social validation, and investment decision.

We illuminate how discrete emotions can complement rational considerations in the opportunity evaluation journey. Capturing the nature of emotion as action oriented, embodied, socially situated, and distributed, we embrace its adaptive socially situated dynamics.

Taking a step toward better understanding of the soft aspects in the relationship development that leads to investments, we hope this study will help not only those entrepreneurs who need funding but also those policymakers who design new incentives that improve the flow of investment into promising new ventures.

We demonstrate how angel investors’ emotions can complement their rational considerations in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Identifying boundary values for the conditions that are necessary and sufficient to advance in the process, we have demonstrated how emotion can serve as a driving or restraining force not only during subjective validation but also during social validation.

Kostova, Roth and Dacin called in 2008 for the advancement of a theoretical conception of the multinational corporation (MNC) that takes into account both power relationships among actors and the structure of its internal institutional field. While micro-political scholars of MNCs have started to answer the former part of the call regarding power, the second part has not been thoroughly addressed yet. Furthermore, the agentic aspects typical of power games and the structural aspects characterizing institutional fields have not been fully combined in a multi-level perspective of MNCs so far. Leaning on Bourdieu, we suggest an answer to the pending call. We theorize the MNC as a playing field of power emerging around the issue of finding a meta-rate of conversion of the actors’ capitals constituted in national fields. We conceive such issue field in a dynamic state due to the constant entry and exit of new players (e.g. through mergers, acquisitions or divestitures). This results in the need to continuously test the validity of exchange rates. The role of the metainstitutional field level of the MNC as a global category is also discussed.

Boundaries are a popular topic among organizational researchers, many of whom argue that over the past decade we have witnessed a trend toward permeable boundaries and in some cases a blurring between organization and environment. Contrary to received wisdom, we argue that the question as to whether organizational boundaries have become more permeable or not cannot be decided empirically but is mainly a theoretical issue. Whether or not data indicate permeability or impermeability depends on the theoretical lens employed. Against this backdrop, we review how two prominent approaches to the study of boundaries, sociological systems theory and new institutionalism, not only arrive at different conclusions but also mandate diverging avenues of research. We focus in depth on several empirical trends: advances in information and communication technologies, increasingly dynamic fields and markets, invasive transparency regimes, and meta-organizations. We then introduce the contributions in this volume, showing how they elaborate on these and other empirical trends, drawing on different theoretical perspectives, to advance our understanding of the importance of boundaries within and around organizations.

This chapter bridges two theoretical concerns: making sense of emancipatory processes within institutional work on the one hand and providing a more nuanced understanding of actorhood on the other hand. The authors develop the notion of ‘institutional co-appropriation work’ to characterise an emancipatory process whereby an institutionalised actor in a subaltern position manages to emancipate by appropriating some founding features of the elites position. The authors build on a case study focussing on the ‘Everest brawl’, an altercation high up on the mountain that revealed a critical evolution of sherpa actorhood. The authors analyse the struggles in the Nepalese mountaineering industry and show how sherpa actorhood is currently being reconfigured by the action of a few individuals willing to be recognised for their climbing abilities, and not their role as porters. This case epitomises the emergence of two distinct phenomena, explaining the magnitude of the event: the emergence of an empowered ‘new sherpa’ revealing heterogeneity of sherpa actorhood, in contrast to the accepted representations and the institutional work blurring the underlying rules and institutionalised roles of the mountaineering industry in Nepal. The implications for institutional work literature are twofold. First, the study of emancipatory processes benefits from more nuanced cases, where the actor in the subaltern position does not simply try to remove the dominant actor. Second, the notion of ‘actor’ within this stream of literature should not be taken-for-granted as is often the case.

The authors set out to study institutional work under complexity building on the struggle for legitimacy of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community in Israel as their case study. The authors took a discursive approach and were interested in what actors claim they do. The findings suggest that actors manipulate the intentions and outcomes of their acts, thereby claiming for actorhood or negating it. These differential constructions are not random but echo the norms of the discursive spaces within which they are presented and interact with other actors’ work. Overall, the authors argue that actorhood is not a pre-condition for institutional work, nor is it its outcome, but rather an integral part thereof.

We investigated how an institutional settlement concerning Native Indian gaming (the operation of gambling establishments such as casinos or bingo halls by Native Indian tribes) was preserved over time in spite of three significant challenges. Building on previous literature on settlements and institutional logics, we see settlements as institutional arrangements that manage power dynamics and competing institutional logics. Based on our analyses of the settlement and three challenges in the Native gaming field, we suggest that even seemingly volatile institutional settlements can be maintained when powerful actors balance each other’s ability to modify the settlement and different actors invoke alternative institutional logic(s). We also find that these processes can be facilitated by the embeddedness and formality of the settlement. We contribute to the settlement literature by showing how settlements can be maintained when actors draw on equally strong sources of power and different logics to counter the actions of other actors. Furthermore, we shed light on “how institutions matter” by demonstrating how institutional settlements can facilitate field stability.