@misc{MairSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Seelos, Christian}, title = {The Sekem Initiative}, series = {Improving management}, journal = {Improving management}, publisher = {IESE Estudios y Ediciones}, isbn = {9788486851620}, pages = {269 -- 297}, language = {en} } @misc{MairSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Seelos, Christian}, title = {La Iniciativa Sekem}, series = {Mejorar la gestion de empresas}, journal = {Mejorar la gestion de empresas}, publisher = {McGrawHill}, address = {Madrid}, isbn = {9788448146382}, pages = {280-309}, language = {es} } @misc{MairSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Seelos, Christian}, title = {Entropy International: Enabling businesses to make a contribution to sustainable development}, publisher = {IESE Business School}, pages = {21}, abstract = {This case documents the circumstances of managing the growth phase of a start-up company. Entropy International faces the unique challenges and opportunities of social entrepreneurship but also entrepreneurship in general. Founded by a visionary environmental activist in 1996 as an environmental consulting boutique in the United Kingdom, Entropy grew with the emerging needs of large multinational corporations to publicly report on and minimise the environmental and social impacts of their operations. Entropy started out as a two-person consultancy to become the market leader in Europe, selling an integrated environmental, health and safety, quality control and reporting suite. At the time of the case (March 2003), Entropy employed 30 people and expected revenues of 1.6 million pounds for fiscal year 2003.}, language = {en} } @misc{MairSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Seelos, Christian}, title = {Sekem: Liberating a Vision, an Artistic Approach to Entrepreneurship}, publisher = {IESE Business School}, pages = {21}, abstract = {This case portrays a complex set of circumstances that frames Sekem's decisions to further grow and develop the initiative along its historical path of holistic development in the social, economic and cultural spheres. The case documents the history of the initiative and lays out the major constituents and their internal and external relations. Sekem was founded by Ibrahim Abouleish, an Egyptian who had been living, studying and working in Austria prior to his return to Egypt in 1977, the year he established Sekem. Literally starting from nothing, ie, a piece of desert land north of Cairo, Abouleish showed tremendous resourcefulness, creativity, and perseverance. Driven by a strong belief in his personal mission, Abouleish built up the Sekem initiative that in 2003 consisted of three main parts: the Sekem group of companies, the Egyptian Society for Cultural Development and the Co-operative of Sekem Employees, together employing more than 2,000 people. Sekem was also a hub managing a large network of associated farmers and companies within Egypt and abroad. It also ran a medical centre for the local community, a kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, an adult training centre, special needs education programmes, and an academy for applied arts and sciences. In 2003, Abouleish won the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize', in recognition of Sekem being the blueprint of the organisation of the 21st century. Abouleish has also received an award as an 'outstanding social entrepreneur' from the Schwab Foundation of the World Economic Forum. Abouleish's objective was to heal Egyptian society from the wounds of the past and to initiate holistic development able to create economic, social and cultural value in a sustainable manner.}, language = {en} } @article{MairSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Seelos, Christian}, title = {Organizations, Social Problems, and System Change: Invigorating the Third Mandate of Organizational Research}, series = {Organization Theory}, volume = {2}, journal = {Organization Theory}, number = {4}, doi = {10.1177/26317877211054858}, pages = {1 -- 22}, abstract = {Organizations across sectors appear to be shifting their ambitions from solving social problems to changing entire social systems. This phenomenon offers a timely opportunity to revisit what came to be known as the third mandate of organizational theory. In this paper we interrogate how organizational scholarship can productively explore and theorize the relationship between organizations and social systems in organized system change - an effort by organizations to alter the conditions that generate the characteristics of social problems and their dynamics of change. As a basis for theorizing organized system change, we develop an analytical scaffold that helps researchers to attend to fundamental aspects of the phenomenon and to achieve parsimony without blanking out complexity. Grounded in realist metatheory and principles, the scaffold reduces ambiguity, provides a backbone for empirical analysis, and favours mechanism-based explanation. We suggest that generating theoretically interesting and practically adequate knowledge on organized system change requires attention to three system realms: First, the subjectively constructed problem realm of systems concerned with processes of evaluating and problematizing situations. Second, the objectively constituted situational realm that attends to factual characteristics of situations and their dynamics of change. And third, the realm of causality understood as the mechanisms that generate both the objective characteristics of situations and the subjective criteria by which situations are evaluated as problems. In concluding, we reflect on the topics of boundaries and power as two promising areas for theorizing organized system change.}, language = {en} } @article{SeelosMairTraeger, author = {Seelos, Christian and Mair, Johanna and Traeger, Charlotte}, title = {The future of grand challenges research: Retiring a hopeful concept and endorsing research principles}, series = {International Journal of Management Reviews}, volume = {25}, journal = {International Journal of Management Reviews}, number = {2}, doi = {10.1111/ijmr.12324}, pages = {251 -- 269}, abstract = {Editorial notes in leading management journals have urged scholars to address Grand Challenges (GC) as an opportunity for producing knowledge that matters for society. This review explores whether current conceptualizations of GC support a productive path for management and organizational scholarship by guiding empirical inquiry, facilitating cumulative theory development, and informing practice. We systematically examine scholarly articles, calls for papers, and editorial notes published in management journals for consistency in how researchers use and define the concept of GC and the scope of associated phenomena and attributes. We find three prominent conceptual architectures in use: discursive, family resemblance, and phenomenon driven. The variety and incoherence of current uses of the GC concept and the lack of efforts to improve its analytical competence lead us to suggest its retirement. Instead, we propose building on the enthusiasm around GC research and using GC as a term to define research principles that collectively help align research efforts and improve theoretical development and practice. The principles we propose capture a genuine origin story for management research on GC.}, language = {en} } @article{MairWolfSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Wolf, Miriam and Seelos, Christian}, title = {Scaffolding: A Process of Transforming Patterns of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies}, series = {Academy of Management Journal}, volume = {59}, journal = {Academy of Management Journal}, number = {6}, issn = {0001-4273}, doi = {10.5465/amj.2015.0725}, pages = {2021 -- 2044}, abstract = {This study advances research on organizational efforts to tackle multidimensional, complex, and interlinked societal challenges. We examine how social inequality manifests in small-scale societies, and illustrate how it inheres in entrenched patterns of behavior and interaction. Asking how development programs can be organizing tools to transform these patterns of inequality, we use a program sponsored by an Indian non-governmental organization as our empirical window and leverage data that we collected over a decade. We identify "scaffolding" as a process that enables and organizes the transformation of behavior and interaction patterns. Three interrelated mechanisms make the transformation processes adaptive and emerging alternative social orders robust: (1) mobilizing institutional, social organizational, and economic resources; (2) stabilizing new patterns of interaction that reflect an alternative social order; and (3) concealing goals that are neither anticipated nor desired by some groups. Through this analysis, we move beyond conventional thinking on unintended consequences proposed in classic studies on organizations, complement contemporary research about how organizations effect positive social change by pursuing multiple goals, and develop portable insights for organizational efforts in tackling inequality. This study provides a first link between the study of organizational efforts to alleviate social problems and the transformation of social systems.}, language = {en} } @article{MairSeelos, author = {Mair, Johanna and Seelos, Christian}, title = {Water is Power}, series = {Impact India. Stanford Social Innovation Review}, volume = {2}, journal = {Impact India. Stanford Social Innovation Review}, number = {Spring 2017}, pages = {24 -- 29}, language = {en} } @article{SeelosMair, author = {Seelos, Christian and Mair, Johanna}, title = {Eine lohnende Investition mit ungewissem Ausgang}, series = {Neue Caritas}, volume = {17}, journal = {Neue Caritas}, pages = {9 -- 13}, abstract = {Innovation in sozialen Organisationen bedeutet vor allem eines nicht: die Garantie auf eine schnelle L{\"o}sung von Problemen. Vielmehr ist Innovation ein Prozess, der das Lernpotenzial des Unternehmens steigert und damit auch den gewollten Mehrwert generiert.}, language = {de} } @article{SeelosMair, author = {Seelos, Christian and Mair, Johanna}, title = {Innovation and Scale: A Tough Balancing Act}, series = {Stanford Social Innovation Review}, volume = {Spring 2013}, journal = {Stanford Social Innovation Review}, number = {Special Supplement: Innovation for a Complex World}, pages = {12 -- 14}, language = {en} }