In this article, we draw on theories of social differentiation to show that functional differentiation is not about the division of work and organization, but rather about a multiplication of horizons for decision‐making. We argue that a systematic management of functional differentiation makes organizations smarter and more flexible. We corroborate this claim by demonstrations of how a functional approach to functional differentiation facilitates the design of new or the further development of well‐established management tools and research agendas in fields such as entrepreneurship, strategy, and human resource management. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how much value national governments worldwide place on political, economic, scientific, artistic, religious, legal, sportive, health-related, educational and mass media-related issues. This knowledge is critical as governments and policies are typically expected to be congruent with the importance these issues have for society. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on theories of polyphonic and multifunctional organization, the authors recoded and analyzed a US Central Intelligence Agency directory to test the cabinet portfolio of a total of 201 national governments for significant biases to the above issues. Findings The results suggest that governments worldwide massively over-allocate their attention to economic issues. Originality/value The authors conclude that this strong pro-economic governance-bias likely translates into dysfunctional governance and development at both the national and supra-national level.

PurposeThe literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizations have frequently been identified as one of the main challenges in the process of post-merger integration (PMI). Existing research has explored a broad variety of cultural differences in perceptions, such as those relating to expectations, norms, values and beliefs within the respective organizations, and how these affect the process and success of PMI. However, less attention has been paid to the relevance of the macro-societal context to PMI. The ambition of this article is, therefore, to advance our understanding of how macro-level societal factors define organizational cultures and affect the success of PMI.Design/methodology/approachWe draw on social systems theory as devised by Niklas Luhmann, assuming that organizations are always embedded in the macro-level societal context of distinctive realms of social reality—such as the economy, politics, religion and the arts—that make up the so-called “function systems”. Looking at the case of the integration of a Brazilian technology start-up into a market-leading corporation, we analyze the dominant orientations towards these function systems, and the changes in these orientations over time.FindingsThe results suggest that differences in organizational culture in PMI can be partly explained by differences in orientations to the function systems. Moreover, forcing dramatic changes of orientations towards the function systems within a merged entity can severely damage its raison d'etre in the first place, potentially leading to, in some sense, an account of “culture murder”.Originality/valueThis article is unique in demonstrating that organizations are multifunctional systems whose culture is defined by the highly specific and potentially varying degrees of importance they place on individual function systems and that knowledge or neglect of these functional profiles may seriously affect the success of post-merger integration. Against this backdrop, the article presents a multifunctional profiling method that may easily translate into PMI management tools.

Purpose This paper aims to extend the existing views of coopetition into the broader context of open coopetition. Design/methodology/approach The authors build on the literature about open innovation cooperation between competitors in the open-source software industry, which we generalize to show that open coopetition between competitors and third parties can be observed in other industries and institutional settings. Findings The authors outline a research program on the management challenges of open coopetition-related and argue that open coopetition can not only be observed between business rivals but also between partners from university, industry, government and further institutional backgrounds. Originality/value The authors introduce to so-far neglected roots of the emerging research program on open coopetition and extend the prevailing business focus of open coopetition research to also systematically include open coopetition between partners from business and other spheres of society.

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PurposeThis conceptual paper seeks to bridge two existing theories in a bid to broaden our analytical scope when studying the process of onboarding, retention and exclusion of organizational members. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw on the social systems theory to advance the fit theory demonstrating the pertinence of macro social factors for the determination of person–organization (P–O) fit.FindingsThe result of this conceptual groundwork is a framework for the creation of highly individual personal profiles that refrains from analyses of potentially discriminatory factors like age, race or gender.Originality/valueThe authors present an individualized, multidimensional and flexible framework for the analysis of dynamically changing constellations of P–O fit.