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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.

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 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.

Are entrepreneurial opportunities discovered or created? The debate around this question has crucial implications for successful organizational change management in the business world. The present conceptual paper transcends this debate by embedding the concept of the entrepreneurial opportunities within a Luhmannian systems – theoretical framework which accentuates the unique role of organization and change in the age of functional differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to show how the strategic navigation of the borders between function systems such as politics, science, education, religion, art, or, of course, economy leads to the discovery or creation new opportunities for both business and social entrepreneurship.

The paper combines Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation with Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy. The key argument is that the alternative regimes of social differentiation, such as segmentation, centralization, stratification, and functional differentiation, create distinct pools of entrepreneurial opportunities to be discovered, created, and exploited by adequate business models. (Business) Organizations, therefore, need to strategically adjust the amount of attention they devote to the different forms of social differentiation. The argument is buttressed with illustrative examples of business models related to the regime of functional differentiation.

A paradoxical finding is that the multifunctional business models which explicitly draw on the value creation potential of the most recent form of social differentiation, functional differentiation, remain little known even though they infuse business organizations with a unique capacity of new venture discovery and creation in the modern society.

Multifunctional business models have so far remained unexplored in entrepreneurship theory and practice. This paper develops a first strategic approach to the discovery or creation of both multifunctional business models and a broader framework of multifunctional organization models.

This paper aims to extend the existing views of coopetition into the broader context of open coopetition.

The authors build on the literature about open innovation cooperation between competitors in the open-source software industry, which we generalize to show that open coopetition between competitors and third parties can be observed in other industries and institutional settings.

The authors outline a research program on the management challenges of open coopetition-related and argue that open coopetition can not only be observed between business rivals but also between partners from university, industry, government and further institutional backgrounds.

The authors introduce to so-far neglected roots of the emerging research program on open coopetition and extend the prevailing business focus of open coopetition research to also systematically include open coopetition between partners from business and other spheres of society.