Word from the editor

This new issue of Management International (MI) is comprised of a thematic file that takes three articles from Atlas-AFMI Association’s annual conference; and ten contributions (nine articles plus a research note) selected according to MI’s normal modus operandi.

The thematic file - presented by our colleagues François Goxe and Michaël Viegas Pires, from MI’s Atlas-AFMI French-language section – is organised around the topic of “Crisis and adaptation in international management”. The three papers featuring in this selection all come from Atlas-AFMI’s 11th Annual Conference, which was held in May 2021. The questions they address are fundamental in the field of international management and include the effects of exogenous shocks; the variety of modes used to manage diversity in international organisations that have (or will soon have) developed this quality – and how subsequent managerial choices affect their internationalisation processes; and the various dimensions that constitute diversity (and the measurement thereof). A very warm thanks to our two colleagues who, as guest co-editors-in-chief, have done a very rigorous job of selecting and synthesizing content to compile a thematic file of great quality. Thanks as well as to all our Atlas-AFMI colleagues for their precious ongoing support for the journal.

The following articles have been chosen in line with the journal’s regular protocol.

In their article “Multi-Business Models Strategy and Disruption. Carrefour’s Conquest of the Organic Market“, Arthur Caré and Pierre Roy analyse how an established company might run a succession of business models (BM) as part of a disruption strategy aimed at gaining advantage over new market entrants. The study finds that established companies who have built a BM portfolio are better equipped to withstand disruption; and that managing such portfolios in a strategic perspective facilitates the subsequent conquest of mass markets. The research is entails a longitudinal case study focusing on Carrefour and the strategy it adopted in the French food distribution sector to cope with disruption in organic farming.

Guillaume Plaisance’s contribution, “French non-profit organisations facing the Covid-19 crisis: A resources and stakeholders approach”, looks to determine how useful stakeholder and resource dependency theories are in analysing French non-profits’ response to the recent pandemic. It is a broad investigation that passes these theories through a societal orientation filter and operationalises them in such a way as to highlight the positive effects of maintaining short-term performance governance mechanisms; the positive effects of stakeholders’ being dependent on a societal orientation; but also the negative effects for viability, including as a result of the way that roles differentiate depending on the societal orientation’s timeframe.

Yves Plourde’s article “The geographic scope of environmental problems and the impact of internal support on the success of local interventions of international NGO: The case of Greenpeace” is an attempt to improve understanding of the way in which international support affects the implementation of environmental NGOs’ local interventions. The study examines 102 interventions carried out by five of Greenpeace’s national-level organisations in Europe. The results show that the benefits of international support depend in part on the geographic scope of the issues that the NGO is addressing. Whereas interventions targeting international problems benefit from an organisation’s international support, others targeting local problems are more likely to succeed when carried out without this input. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for the management of NGOs and for theories of management.

In their article “Territorial resilience and financial resilience: What conceptual and practical articulation? Exploratory study on the resilience strategies of 8 European cities”, Céline du Boys and Bruno Tiberghien take as their starting point the observation that local authorities are being increasingly challenged by the ever-widening range of risks and crises that have arisen in the 21st century, intimating a need for much greater resilience - a capacity that literature tends to treat in terms of its individual, organisational or geographic dimension, without any real attempt to integrate these three approaches. The paper examines both the conceptual and the practical linkages between territorial resilience and public finances, exploring the resilience strategies of eight European municipalities and determining how their strategic thinking breaks down in territorial and financial resilience terms. The authors find that notwithstanding a certain inhomogeneity in practice, a more or less embryonic articulation has started to take root.

Mobilising a sample of 247 Belgian family-run SMEs, Jonathan Bauweraerts, Olivier Colot and Xavier Brédart’s article - “Analysing the relationship between innovation and internationalisation in family SMEs” - uses structural equation modelling to demonstrate a positive linkage between these two variables. The authors also discover that moderate or high levels of non-family involvement in a management team mitigate this positive relationship. On the other hand, the positivity of the relationship tends to be accentuated in companies run by second and subsequent generation family owners.

Sylvie Berthelot and Michel Coulmont’s article “The financial rout of Sears Canada: the tip of the financialisation iceberg” notes that many companies’ business models have evolved towards a financialisation paradigm for a number of years now. Despite the damage done to their industrial and commercial activities, what these companies increasingly focus on nowadays is financial transactions deemed capable of maximising short-term shareholder value. Sears Canada offers a prime example of this phenomenon. Once viewed as a Canadian flagship, in summer 2017 the company had to apply for protection under the country’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act before being subsequently wound up. The article highlights the practices in which the shareholders and the board of directors had engaged, as well as the particular financial arrangements that would ultimately bring about its financial collapse.

The purpose of Amel Bouderbala and Ferid Zaddem’s article - “Dissemination of the principles of social responsibilities to companies: Case of a network in the post-revolution Tunisian context” – is to understand the linkages shaping the relational structure of a network of CSR-disseminating organisations in Tunisia. It achieves this by ascertaining what kinds of entities constitute this kind of network; the respective role that each plays; how entities relate to one another; and how the network functions as a whole. A qualitative paper rooted in an interpretivist approach, the study also makes an empirical contribution by offering theoretical and concrete suggestions to organisational stakeholders with an interest in CSR dissemination strategy and modalities.

Anne Goujon-Belghit and Jocelyn Husser’s article “Judgment in the ethical decision-making process: a qualitative semiological and structural analysis in the field of purchasing” seeks to apprehend the determinants of the ethical judgments made by buyers facing a dilemma in this respect. Mobilising a theoretical framework shaped by Jones (1991) and by Fritzsche and Becker (1984), the study analyses a sample of 172 buyers and applies a novel methodology combining three analytical methods (lexical, semantic and structural). The ensuing findings reveal that ethical judgment is contingent on eight key elements, namely confrontation, consequences, valuation, commitment, individual qualities, absence of emotion, speed of judgment and contingency factors. Judgments are predicated on people’s assessment of economic, commercial and social consequences. Respondents did not find ethical dilemmas to be anything particularly shocking.

In their article “The digital transformation of brick-and-mortar retailers: managing the transition to an omnichannel customer experience”, Sabrina Hombourger-Barès and Franck Barès note that the digital transformations that accompany connected commerce can be a real challenge for physical retailers’ business models. Hence their longitudinal case study of the Société des Alcools du Québec, one of the first retailers in this Canadian province to ever engage in such a process. The paper reveals the mechanisms underpinning the kind of channel integration that tends to be associated with customer experience management at both a strategic and an operational level. A holistic, four-phase scenario is used to capture business model transitions in terms of the strategic priorities, value propositions, resources and skills, organisational adjustments and performance evaluations that they involve.

Sébastien Point and Cédric Baudet’s research note - “Justifying the choice to adopt, the intent to use and the effective use of the NVivo software” - examines 295 French-language journal articles published between 2004 to 2019 and suggesting how to conduct analysis using the software in question. Highlighting the limitations of these texts as well as any errors and omissions they contain, the authors make recommendations that are useful to researchers and practitioners (and scientific journal reviewers or editors) who are interested in NVivo and want to justify its adoption and use.

We hope that you enjoy this issue – and wish you, on behalf of MI’s editorial board, a happy and healthy 2023

For the editorial committee

Patrick Cohendet