The use of concepts is a vital part of the research process. Many researchers overexploit popular concepts by adding more and more vague and poorly defined meanings to them, thereby making their boundaries unclear and the concepts increasingly unwieldy. We will refer to these types of concepts as hembigs – an acronym for hegemonic, ambiguous, big concepts. The article demonstrates the problem in three domains: leadership, strategy and institution. It suggests ways to mitigate the problems with dominant scientific concepts, overloaded with more or less incoherent meanings.

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An important assumption when it comes to leader–follower relationships is that compliance and subordination are basically voluntary. In this article, we problematize and develop this assumption and discuss different circumstances in which voluntariness in terms of followership may be compromised. Based on this discussion, we also suggest a tentative model of follower voluntariness, indicating dimensions in which voluntariness can be infringed upon and followership corroded and when it might be more productive to depict an asymmetrical relationship as something else than followership.

In the original tradition of the "Unplugged" section, "carte blanche" grants a wild card to world-class scholars to share their own perspective on novel ways to conceive of management today. They may offer new avenues and draw up an agenda for a specific research question. Authors have to be invited to submit to the "carte blanche" series by one of the editors.