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Corporate acquisitions are typically studied as isolated events, potentially underestimating their embeddedness in broader business contexts and connections to other acquisitions. As disruptive events that can cause abrupt interruptions to ongoing business, acquisitions may have effects extending far beyond the consolidating parties. This chapter proposes an event-centred analytical framework for understanding industry dynamics around acquisitions. Inspired by event system theory and studies on business network dynamics, we develop four analytical approaches: discrete events, event clusters, event chains, and nets of intersecting event chains. These concepts extend temporal perspectives beyond individual acquisitions to examine co-occurring acquisitions during limited periods, sequences of acquisitions by serial acquirers, and complex structures where multiple acquisition chains intersect over time. Using data from 719 acquisitions in the Swedish IT industry (1994-2003), we demonstrate how these approaches reveal dramatically different views of competitive environments. The analysis shows that some acquisitions appear isolated, while others belong to clusters or chains, with the most complex forming nets of intersecting event chains connecting 142 acquisitions across 43 chains. This contextual approach offers insights into the complexity surrounding acquisitions and provides researchers and managers with analytical tools to better understand the temporal and spatial context of strategic actions. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Anna Bengtson, Susanne Åberg, and Peter Thilenius; individual chapters, the contributors.

The sharing economy, characterised by digitally intermediated exchanges among peers, has extended into the financial sector. While the sharing economy is often seen as democratising access to and the provision of resources and services, it remains unclear if its users and providers reflect the diversity of society at large. Using unique auction data from the financial sharing economy platform Toborrow, this paper categorises users and providers in the financial sharing economy. Findings indicate that participants are relatively homogeneous: the typical user and provider is a young male residing in a large city, suggesting that the reach of the financial sharing economy does not yet align with its democratic potential. This paper highlights the untapped potential of the financial sharing economy among underrepresented groups who could greatly benefit from alternative lending and borrowing options. Expanding access to these sharing economy platforms may help fulfil their promise of inclusivity and broaden the impact of the sharing economy within the financial sector.

Despite the prevalence of teams in research, there is a lack of a good understanding of how their size and diversity affects their performance. We develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes two dimensions of research performance for an academic paper: impact (i.e., subsequent citations) and prestige (i.e., ranking of the journal where research is published). We propose that, while larger teams will enhance linearly the impact of research, they will affect its prestige in a nonlinear fashion. We further contend that these effects will be moderated by knowledge and international diversity of the teams. We test these hypotheses using bibliometric data between 1990 and 2020 on more than 1.4 million papers and 18 million citation counts across 22 subfields in management. Our results confirm significant benefits for research impact from both team size and diversity, but also highlight drawbacks when teams become very large and heterogeneous. Moreover, we find a nonlinear positive effect of team size on research prestige that can be offset only by high levels of knowledge diversity. These findings are robust to a variety of proxies, controls, and estimation techniques, including instrumental variables and propensity score matching. We discuss practical implications for stimulating research performance in business schools.

This session explores the nuanced role of cognitive diversity in team and organizational performance, focusing on contrasting perspectives and emerging research. Cognitive diversity, defined as variations in thought processes, perceptions, and information processing, is generally perceived as beneficial for team decision-making and organizational value, as supported by studies from McKinsey and Deloitte, amongst others. However, recent literature suggests that its effectiveness is context-dependent. For example, firms with an innovator strategy or those in less competitive environments may benefit less from cognitive diversity. This complexity is further highlighted in startup contexts, where the role of early joiners and non-founding employees becomes significant. Empirical studies, such as those by Sako, Qian, & Verhagen (2021), and theoretical models from the organizational learning literature, propose a reevaluation of decision-making processes and the importance of leveraging knowledge diversity. The session underscores the importance of recognizing cognitive diversity's nuanced impacts, particularly in startups and innovative environments.

The Journal of Management Studies, founded in 1963, is celebrating its 60th year. Clark et al. (2014) conducted a bibliometric analysis for its 50th anniversary assessing whether the journal had maintained its leading international ranking and sustained its mission to serve as a broad-based management outlet. In this review, we build on and extend their findings by examining trends in the journal over the past decade (2012–22). We present a broader analysis of JMS by exploring its unique identity within the management journal ecosystem and examining its scope and breadth in terms of topics, methods, and author demographics to document JMS's evolution, impact, reach, and accessibility. We develop a new bibliometric framework that employs a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses (including regression, text, and language analysis) to cover a broad range of considerations for a journal and its stakeholders. In so doing, we contribute to the bibliometric and review research areas by proposing new metrics (related to diversity, equity, and inclusion) and analysis tools to assess the relative position of an academic journal. Employing this framework, we conclude that JMS has retained and enhanced its position as a leading, cutting-edge general management journal.

In this emerging research paper, we introduce a project exploring the role of a commercial real estate property company called Mestro on enhancing the efforts of its clients to provide environmentally sustainable venues for their clients who also value environmentally sustainable business practices. Mestro provides real time energy usage and advanced reporting systems that enables commercial property owners to optimize tenant energy consumption. Through the lens of service dominant logic, we will perform a multiple case-based study to understand how Mestro, in collaboration with its commercial property clients and their tenants, creates an ecosystem where all parties co-create value for each other. In addition to the case studies, we will analyze actual energy consumption based on real data provided by the participating commercial property companies on tenant energy usage.

Triple bottom-line challenges are increasingly related to the long-term survival of companies. Both researchers and businesses understand that the transformation towards a sustainable future is dependent on green IS initiatives. However, companies base their decisions on business cases when investing in IS. Many of the required changes that green IS can offer—especially when it comes to new systems that require new business models—are not captured by business cases. This paper presents a model that widens the perspective on value creation. The presented Sustainable Stewardship Management Model (SSMM) allows companies that strive for a stewardship role to evaluate both existing and new forms of green IS by combining casual and effectual decision-making. The model is a result of a collaboration with several large Swedish commercial real estate companies, their tenants, and a non-governmental organization (NGO). The model will be tested in a follow-up project.