Special Issue on Managerial Values and Organizational Identities in the Developing World (January 2017)

Guest Editors: Anirvan Pant Strategic Management Group, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
Abhoy K. Ojha Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management Area, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

This call for papers is interested in how managerial values and organizational identities intersect in the behaviours, practices, actions, and strategies of managers in developing world enterprises. Even as the developing world converges towards management ideas and practices rooted in the evolution of the industrialized West, it sustains – both at an implicit and explicit level – practices and values emerging from the local managerial ethos. The valorization of frugal production methods and the continued organization of businesses into business groups speak to the resilience, or at least, persistence of indigenous managerial values and organizational self-conceptualizations that do not necessarily conform to the path of convergence with enterprises domiciled in the industrialized West. In their book, The India Way, Cappelli et al. (2010) observe that leading Indian firms explicitly prioritize goals associated with a national or social mission over the pursuit of shareholder value maximization. The extremes of aspiration and deprivation that characterize the developing world can foster paradoxical tugs on managerial values that challenge our understanding of how organizational identities evolve. There is, therefore, a need to examine how and which managerial values are acted upon within developing world enterprises and how these values are reflected, projected, or disguised in the organizational identities of these enterprises.

We consider the following questions to be relevant, but by no means collectively exhaustive, with regard to the theme of this special issue:
1. How has the salience of managerial values and value categories in the self-conceptualizations of developing world enterprises changed over time?
2. How do organizational identities in the developing world shape and get shaped by the interpretation and enactment of taken-for-granted managerial values such as professionalism?
3. How do enterprises in developing countries articulate and manage organizational identities in the context of potentially conflicting managerial values, such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism, or shareholder value and social good?
4. What roles does values work (work conducted by managers that enables the emergence of values practices) (Gehman, Trevino & Garud, 2013) play in the capacity of developing world enterprises to adapt themselves to the competitive context unleashed by programmes of economic liberalization?
5. Over and above the role of economic factor endowments and differences in comparative advantages in nations, do managerial values explain and do organizational identities articulate the reputation developed by developing country multinationals for low cost production, improvisation, and fast follower capabilities?
6. How can positive identities (Roberts & Dutton, 2009) help us understand the evolution of aspiration in developing world enterprises?

Important Dates:
Deadline for submission of manuscripts: June 30, 2016
Decision of manuscripts: July 29, 2016
Submission of revised manuscripts: August 19, 2016

All submissions in double space should be submitted to jhv_special_issue@iimcal.ac.in by email. The word file attachment should have the title of the paper as the file name. The text of manuscripts should not ordinarily exceed 5,000 words. All articles must be accompanied by an abstract of 150–200 words and up to six keywords. For detailed manuscript submission style, etc, please refer to the JHV website http://jhv.sagepub.com/.