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Management theory is a diverse field where multiple theoretical perspectives coexist and coevolve, leading to conceptual pluralism. While conceptual pluralism is useful for grasping different aspects of the complex reality we live in, it may limit the further development of knowledge on elemental concepts. In this article, we focus on knowledge on the natural environment (NE) in management theory. We argue that management scholars and practitioners often rely on theoretical lenses that tend to reify the NE, thereby limiting the conceptualization of some of the essential properties of the NE. Drawing on the example of the conceptual development of the ecosystem services (ES) at the intersection of economics and biology, we identify the advantages and the limits of interdisciplinary theory-building and testing. Finally, we discuss how tools from the philosophy of science can be useful for proposing a way forward for integrating reliable knowledge on the natural environment in management theory.

Why would an academic project incentivized towards scientific publications be repurposed to become a medical platform for responsible innovation? Patient Innovation, a non‐profit medical platform that focuses on the sharing and dissemination of innovations to find solutions for rare and chronic diseases, was initially set up as an academic research project. However, team members reframed their core purpose from conducting research on user innovation to providing global access to these innovations and creating societal impact. Using a framing lens to understand organizational repurposing, we illuminate how serendipitous inspiration, moral emotions and the power of socially conscious users and catalysts drove this emergent reframing of core purpose and develop a model of organizational repurposing. We show how a frame drift towards a change in purpose occurs spontaneously in interactions, as actors frame and reframe situations and feel inspired and morally motivated to transcend their immediate self‐interests and serve collective goals.

Everyday experiences speak to the accelerated pace of innovation in this era of continual change. Sometimes, innovations enhance the value of existing products and services. At other times, they render existing business models obsolete, disrupt value‐networks, prompt providers to rethink who their customers are, and lead customers to rethink what they value. What does it mean to manage in such a world of disruptive changes, and how might we research this phenomenon? Together with the contributors to this special issue, we anchor, explore and extend the meanings associated with the concept of disruptive innovation. In particular, we discuss several perspectives on disruption – evolutionary, relational, temporal and framing – that culminate in a performative (as opposed to a predictive) approach to thinking about the phenomenon. In doing so, our intention is to open up the agenda for both researchers and practitioners.

In this study we integrate insights from ‘top‐down’ and ‘bottom‐up’ traditions in organizational change research to understand employees’ varying dispositions to support change. We distinguish between change initiation and change execution roles and identify four possible role configurations in which top managers (TMs) and middle managers (MMs) can feature in change. We contend that both TMs and MMs can play change initiation and/or change execution roles, TMs and MMs have different strengths and limitations for taking on different change roles, and their relative strengths and limitations are compounded or attenuated based on the specific configuration of change roles. We subsequently hypothesize employee support for change in relation to different TM‐MM change role configurations. Our findings show that change initiated by TMs does not engender above‐average level of employee support. However, change initiated by MMs engenders above‐average level of employee support, and even more so, if TMs handle the change execution.

Research has shown that management practices are adapted and ‘made to fit’ the specific context into which they are adopted. Less attention has been paid to how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence the adaptation process. How do organizations manage the tension between allowing local adaptation of a management practice and retaining control over the practice? By studying the adaptation of a specialized quality management practice – ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence) – in a multinational corporation in the aerospace industry, we examine how the organization manages the adaptation process at the corporate and subsidiary levels. We identified three strategies through which an organization balances the tension between standardization and variation – preserving the ‘core’ practice while allowing local adaptation at the subsidiary level: creating and certifying progressive achievement levels; setting discretionary and mandatory adaptation parameters; and differentially adapting to context-specific and systemic misfits. While previous studies have shown how and why practices vary as they diffuse, we show how practices may diffuse because they are engineered to vary for allowing a better fit with diverse contextual specificities.

Studies on institutional change generally pertain to the agency-structure paradox or the ability of institutional entrepreneurs to spearhead change despite constraints. In many complex fields, however, change also needs cooperation from numerous dispersed actors with divergent interests. This presents the additional paradox of ensuring that these actors engage in collective action when individual interests favor lack of cooperation. We draw on complementary insights from institutional and regime theories to identify drivers of collective institutional entrepreneurship and develop an analytical framework. This is applied to the field of global climate policy to illustrate how collective inaction was overcome to realize a global regulatory institution, the Kyoto Protocol.