Value creation and the internal goods of business

In his early work, Moore argues that business itself was a MacIntyrean practice. He later rejected this view in response to criticisms from Beadle and others. Most subsequent work, including that of Moore, adopted a view of organizations, including firms, as institutions that house a core practice. We first recount Moore's early view, defend and it from various criticisms. We then briefly review research in management and finance arguing that this research supports a view of business consonant with Moore's early view. Thus, we argue that business is a distinct practice that integrates various productive and auxiliary practices to facilitate mutually beneficial transactions. We conclude by discussing implications of this view, noting that it might be viewed as a classical liberal appropriation of the MacIntyrean framework, and arguing that it poses a challenge to MacIntyreans working with a neo-Aristotelian perspective.

Shaping the Future: Strategy Making as Artificial Evolution

To investigate how firms engage in forward-looking action, we examined the processes by which a pioneering firm actively influenced the future of its industry over five decades. From our longitudinal field study, we generated a process model of strategy making that helps to explain how firms work to shape the future in some preferred fashion. Specifically, we describe our findings on shaping-oriented forward-looking strategy making in terms of “artificial evolution” processes—interventions by which a firm’s leaders challenge the status quo and leverage the internal ecology of the organization to nudge the evolution of the business landscape toward a preferred direction. This is distinct from the more conventional and commonly invoked natural selection processes that describe how firms adapt to markets or unintentionally shape them. These findings on strategy making as akin to artificial evolution complement and extend the traditional view of strategic management, which has historically focused on processes anchored in models of search and adaptation. Our findings also shed light on an exceptional mode of strategy making—one that goes beyond concerns of firm survival and competitive advantage, and tackles societal grand challenges. By accounting for constructivist, forward-looking dimensions of strategic agency, our findings also contribute to the microfoundations of strategic decision making and to organization theories, more generally.

Firms, crowds, and innovation

The purpose of this article is to suggest a (preliminary) taxonomy and research agenda for the topic of "firms, crowds, and innovation" and to provide an introduction to the associated special issue. We specifically discuss how various crowd-related phenomena and practices-for example, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, user innovation, and peer production-relate to theories of the firm, with particular attention on "sociality" in firms and markets. We first briefly review extant theories of the firm and then discuss three theoretical aspects of sociality related to crowds in the context of strategy, organizations, and innovation: (1) the functions of sociality (sociality as extension of rationality, sociality as sensing and signaling, sociality as matching and identity), (2) the forms of sociality (independent/aggregate and interacting/emergent forms of sociality), and (3) the failures of sociality (misattribution and misapplication). We conclude with an outline of future research directions and introduce the special issue papers and essays.