Word from the editor[Record]

  • Franck Barès

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In their article “The anglicisation of the advertising field: An exploratory study of resistance to a fashionable communication mode”, Philipe Robert-Demontrond and J.-Ph. Croizean question a phenomenon that has become increasingly widespread in France. Falling under the aegis of Critical Management Studies – a corpus focused on the various ways in which practices can become denaturalised - the epistemological and pragmatic aims pursued in this study are coherent with the perspectives generally adopted by this school of thought. Highlighting conceptions that are commonly (albeit often erroneously) taken for granted, the paper contributes four major insights. The first relates to marketing professionals’ largely unnoticed resistance to commercial communications’ anglicisation, translating a recalcitrance that plays out on a socio-cultural level. The second involves an analysis of critical discourse, replete with the various moral conventions that opponents to anglicisation tend to invoke. The third elucidates the core moral emotions driving opponents to this trend. And lastly, the moral imagination (metaphorical representations) structuring said resistance is examined in a way that complemeting the above analyses. Pham Hoanh Son Nguyen and Renato Pereira’s work - “Exploring the relationship between international growth and intra-regionalization vs inter-regionalization: the roles of host country environments and the degree of international commitments” – draws from a theoretical framework largely constructed around the advantages and characteristics of these two geographical context, using such filters to not only explain intra-regionalisation’s superiority (in international expansion terms) over inter-regionalisation but also the mechanisms by means of which intra-regional similarities, inter-regional differences and extent of international commitment interact and by so doing affect intra- and inter-regional companies’ growth trajectories. The findings serve to bolster the emerging corpus of regionalisation literature. Didier Chabanet, Guillaume Do Vale and Xavier Weppe’s article - “Managing business model innovation in a changing environment: the case of SMEs in the pharmaceutical sector” - seeks to understand how changes in the environment (such as it is perceived by owner-managers) might cause the latter to adapt their business models. Based on 43 interviews with independent pharmacists in Belgium (19) and Italy (24), the study discovers that certain respondents will tend to focus on the macro environment, and that this generally leads to their construing change as a threat. In turn, they might feel unable to adapt their business model and/or will only want to make minor adjustments to it. Others, however, will focus on both the micro and the macro environments and try to identify opportunities that sometimes go well beyond the pharmacy sector per se. By so doing, they are freeing themselves from the constraints that they perceive in their environments and will construct specific ecosystems that then enact major business model innovations. Pascal Corbel and Martial Kadji Ngassam’s contribution - “The role of trademark in the business model of open source software publishers: A case study” - starts by noting the paucity of research in this domain, justifying in turn an in-depth study of a small open source editor called Xwiki. The paper illustrates the crucial role that brands are capable of performing when they articulate the two pillars that underpin all business models, namely value creation and value capture. The demonstration is made that a synergistic, highly controlled management of brands and the developer community alike make it possible to exploit the complementarities that can arise between the two. Zouhour Ben Hamadi and Tarek Chanegrih’s article - “A typology of auditors’ postures in the face of ethical dilemmas: the case of Tunisia” - starts with the observation that the post-revolutionary situation in this country has created an excellent opportunity for studying the kinds of organisational and managerial practices that can …