NBS’s monthly compilation of the latest business sustainability research prioritizes in-press articles, in order to highlight cutting-edge knowledge. The list draws from Financial Times Top 50 journals and other publications.

See all monthly Table of Contents.

Research for January 2026

Academy of Management Discoveries

• Should We Talk About the News? Coworker Discussion and Affective Well-Being in a Polarized Society. Kristine M. Kuhn, Leah D. Sheppard, Teng Iat Loi.

• Performing Diversity: Navigating Tensions, Identity Threats, and Self-Instrumentalization in Applicant Diversity Statements. Joyce He, Grusha Agarwal, Sonia K Kang

• The Crisis of Dignity at Work: Dehumanization during Digital Transformation, Societal Upheaval, and Workforce Uncertainty. Cristina B. Gibson, Kevin S. Groves, Jaclyn Margolis, Carol Lusk, Kevin Sakamoto.

California Management Review

• Organizing Open Social Innovation for Grand Challenges: Unlocking the Potential of Open Spaces. Soufiane Kherrazi.

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice

• Sustainability-Oriented Institutions and the Success of Green Reward-Based Crowdfunding Campaigns. Vincenzo Butticè, Massimo G. Colombo, Carlotta Orsenigo.

• When Family Firm Reputation Backfires: The Role of Controllability in Consumer Responses to Negative CSR Incidents. Philipp Jaufenthaler, Roland Schroll, Franz W. Kellermanns.

• How Do Entrepreneurs Form Social Business Opportunity Beliefs? An Opportunity Actualization Perspective. Alexander Dominik Meister, Sönke Mestwerdt, Matthias Mrożewski et al.

• Coming Back and Giving Back: Social Class Origins of Entrepreneurs and Corporate Philanthropy in China. Shihua Chen, Khalil Jebran, Yingkun Li, Yan Ye.

Harvard Business Review

• Case Study: When High-Tech Beauty Marketing Harms Teen Health. Mohanbir Sawhney.

Human Relations

• Short-term fit, long-term trap: The career development lock of low-skilled gig workers. Xueni Zheng, Jing Du, Yuan Xiang, Lirong Long, Huanyan Xie.

• Enacting responsible leadership in cross-sector partnerships: A dynamic choreography of power. Jean-François Harvey.

• Toward a typology of boundaries in crisis management. Rachel Estey, Kristina Potočnik, Lila Skountridaki.

• Indigenous employees’ experiences of work: An interdisciplinary review. Benjamin W. Walker, Nimbus A. Staniland, Jarrod Haar, Phoebe Turner, Gray Ryburn, Ryan Meachen et al.

• Precarious work: A critical review and a proposal for future research. Vijayta Doshi, Paulina Segarra, Martyna Śliwa.

• Problematizing the role of artificial intelligence in hiring and organizational inequalities: A multidisciplinary review. Karen D Hughes, Alla Konnikov, Nicole Denier, Yang Hu.

Information Systems Research

• Social Media and Political Affiliation: How Expressing Hot-Button Opinions Affects Raters’ Assessments of Job Applicants. Teagen Nabity-Grover, Kevin D. Matthews, Philip L. Roth, Youngjin Kwon, Jason B. Thatcher.

Journal of Accounting and Economics

• Mandatory carbon disclosure and new business creation. Raphael Duguay, Chenchen Li, Frank Zhang.

• Political costs and strategic corporate communication. Christine Cuny, Jungbae Kim, Mihir N. Mehta.

• Carbon accounting quality: Measurement and the role of assurance. Brandon Gipper, Fiona Sequeira, Shawn X. Shi.

Journal of Business Ethics

• Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Information Sharing. Yifei Chen, Dan Palmon, Qi Zhang.

• Datafied Selves at Work: Ethical Boundaries of Surveillance in People Analytics. Suharno Pawirosumarto, Buyung Kurniawan.

• Marginalized Stakeholder Theory: A Normative Foundation for Decolonization. Rashedur Chowdhury.

• Climate Beliefs and Attitudes and Corporate Tax Savings. Lei Zhang, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam.

• Stakeholder Satisfaction Interdependencies in 10-K Reports. Yishan Luo, Morgan R. Frank, Sandro Claudio Lera.

• The Power of Retail Investors: The Effect of Online Interactions Over Environmental Issues on Corporate Greenwashing. Xiao Sun, Juelin Yin.

• Temporal (In)consistency in Sustainability Disclosure. Mirón Avidan, Judith L. Walls, Virginie Cauderay.

• Bridging the Gap, Building Trust: Structural Holes as Dual Forces in Corporate Philanthropy. Haifeng Wang, Weishu Liu.

• Who Invests, Who Gets Funded: Gender and Racial Bias in LLM-Generated Investment Advice. Ye Emma Wang, Kexin Gu.

• Careless or Clueless? the Lost Promise of Facebook. Joanne B. Ciulla.

• Integrating Drama Performance Methods with Business Ethics Education: A Mixed-Methods Approach. Yanqi Sun, Cheng Xu, Xudong He.

• Rewarding Ethical Leadership: Corporate LGBTQ+ Friendliness and CEO Compensation. Ashrafee Hossain, Abdullah-Al Masum, Samir Saadi.

• Why Do Companies Engage in the Creation of Private Governance? A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda. Benedikt D. S. Kapteina, Philipp C. Richter, Markus Scholz.

• Symbol or Substance? Environmental Protection and International Expansion in Emerging Market Multinationals. Yusi Jiang, Yunting Feng, Yuan Li

• Thinking-Being With a Garden: Developing Ecocentric Ethics for Sustainable Organising. Stephen Allen, Anke Strauß.

• Political Tension and MNEs’ Disclosure of Host-Country ESG Activities. Yi Xiang, Ying Zhang, Yongzhi Du.

• ESG Controversies and Non-Audit Service Fees: European Evidence. Tabi Frankcline Tambe, Sun Min Kang.

• Muddling Through During the Pre-Liminal Period: Women’s Transition to Entrepreneurship in the Midst of a Compound National Crisis. Hayfaa A. Tlaiss, Dmitry Khanin.

• When are Customer Boycotts Permissible? Thomas Donaldson.

• Artificial Intelligence and Disability Entrepreneurship: Moving the Field Forward. Mengjie Zhang, Weiwen Li.

• Whose Justice? A Turn to Relational Equality from the Experiences of Ethno-Racially Marginalised Women in Australian Workplaces. Dimitria Groutsis, Christine Han, Annika Kaabel.

• Reframing Sustainable Consumption: Toward an Ethical Dilemma Perspective. Leila Elgaaied-Gambier, Yacine Ladli, Fanny Reniou.

• Certified Sustainability: Third-Party Certification of Sustainable Ventures and its Relationship to Venture Funding. Dominik Schmelter, Corinna Vera Hedwig Schmidt, Steffen Strese.

• “If I Accomplish Nothing Else but Hope, That Will be Enough”: The Ethics and Morality of Market-Based Hope in Illness Entrepreneurship. Susi Geiger, Olya Loza.

• Ethical Decision-Making in Organizations in Times of Conflict: The Role of Personal Values and Collective Victimhood. Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, Inbal Moscovich, Amalya L. Oliver.

• Making Sense of Conflicts During Management Consulting Missions: A Values-in-Practice Approach. Myriam Bazdah, Florence Allard-Poesi.

• Girls Help Girls: The Gender Preference of FOF Managers. Mianzhi Wu, Yongjie Zhang, Xiangtong Meng.

• Re-enchanting Consumer Ethics Through Embodied Relationality: An Ethnographic Approach to the Attitude-Behaviour Gap. Roberta Discetti, Barbara Tocco, Matthew Gorton.

• Distinguishing Three Concepts of the Societal Good: The Managerial Case for Adopting the Thomistic Concept of the Common Good. Sara Mandray, Daryl Koehn, Matthias P. Hühn.

• Can Compassion Appeals Change the World? A Critical Review and Reconceptualization. Carmen Valor, Paolo Antonetti, Benedetta Crisafulli.

• Can Purpose and Professional Advancement Coexist? Review of Make It Meaningful: How to Find Purpose in Life and Work by Debbie Haski-Leventhal. Meena Chavan.

• Making Better Uses of Classics? Evaluating Critically the Legacy of Howard R. Bowen’s 1953 Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (1953–2023). Jean-Pascal Gond, Khodr Badih.

• The Empire’s New Clothes: A Review of “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals” by Oliver Bullough. Sorin M. S. Krammer.

• A ‘Sticky’ Past: The Viscosity of Organizational Memory in Navigating Ethical Change. Yentl Dudink, Yvette Taminiau, Nicolas Bencherki.

• What Happens After Whistleblowing? A Systematic Literature Review of the Post-whistleblowing Phase. Chamari Lalanthi Edirisinghe, Wouter Vleugels, Andrew Noblet.

• The Business–Social Paradox of ESG Investing: Responding to Persistent Tensions over Time. Christel Dumas, Céline Louche, Rebecca Bednarek.

• Tech Ethics, Organizational Values, and Ethical Work: Insights from a Qualitative Study of Five UK-Based Digital Technology Businesses. Andrew Jonathan Maile, Edward Brooks, Rebecca Park.

• Detecting Gender Stereotype Biases Against Women Entrepreneurs in Large Language Models. Xian Cao, Hongfei Li, Ruoqing Zhu.

• Ethical Leadership in Climate Action: Navigating National Government Intervention, Financial Constraints, and Corporate Decarbonization. Lilian Ng, Xiaoqiong Wang, Nataliya Zaiats.

• My Oppressive Past- and Present-Day Vulnerability: Understanding How and When Authoritarian Leadership Adversely Impacts Black Employees at Work. Darryl B. Rice, Shona G. Smith, Erica Johnson.

• Social Sustainability Practice: The Interplay between State and Community Logics. Sithabile Chindondondo, Colin David Reddy.

Journal of Consumer Psychology

• The politics of impact: How political ideology shapes perceptions of the environmental impact of individual actions. Aylin Cakanlar, Katherine White, Remi Trudel.

• Homelessness-based impact hiring and consumers’ contagion concerns. Brandon J. Reich, Wanying Shi, Cindy Xin Wang.

• Changing beliefs or changing behavior? Understanding the belief-to-behavior process and intervening to curb the impact of misinformation. Hogeun Lee, Dolores Albarracín.

Journal of Consumer Research

• From Stigma to Support: “Black-Owned” Labels and Expertise Stereotypes in Cannabis and Psychedelics Markets. Chethana Achar et al.

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

Water stress and industrial firm productivity. Xiaojun Yu, Russell Smyth, Yao Yao, Quanda Zhang.

Does central supervision mitigate border pollution? Evidence from the national specially monitored firms program in China. Panbing Wan, Lin Chen, ZhongXiang Zhang.

Do sufficiency consumption changes drive emissions down? A production network approach. Célia Escribe, Philippe Quirion.

Firm ownership and pollution. Tsz Chun Kwok, Daniel Spiro, Arthur A. van Benthem.

Heterogeneous responses to carbon pricing: Firm-level evidence from Beijing emissions trading scheme. Ruijie Tian, Huajin Wang, Da Zhang, Xiliang Zhang, Thomas Sterner.

The non-green effects of going green: Local environmental and economic consequences of lithium extraction in Chile. Leonardo Peñaloza-Pacheco, Vaios Triantafyllou, Gonzalo Martínez.

Data, information, and the environment: An introduction to this special issue. Erica Myers, Ludovica Gazze, Andrea La Nauze.

The effect of extreme heat on economic growth: Evidence from Latin America. Juliana Dueñas, Alejandra Goytia, Bridget Hoffmann.

Journal of Finance

• Carbon Pricing versus Green Finance. Lasse Heje Pedersen.

• Corporate ESG Profiles and Investor Horizons. Laura T. Starks, Parth Venkat, Qifei Zhu.

• An Economic View of Corporate Social Impact. Hunt Allcott, Giovanni Montanari, Bora Ozaltun, Brandon Tan.

• Subtle Discrimination. Elena S. Pikulina, Daniel Ferreira.

• Second Chance: Life with Less Student Debt. Marco Di Maggio, Ankit Kalda, Vincent Yao.

Journal of Financial and Qualitative Analysis

• Climate-Triggered Institutional Price Pressure: Does It Affect Firms’ Cost of Equity? George Skiadopoulos, Cheng Xue.

• Nexus Effect: Unraveling the Impact of Political Patronage Connections on Corporate Investment. Ping Guo, Guifeng Shi, Gary Gang Tian.

• Green Pressure, Lean Measures: Unveiling Corporate Downsizing Within the European Union Emissions Trading System. Jana Boeckx, Kristof Struyfs, Wouter Torsin.

Journal of International Business Studies  

• CEO-to-employee pay ratios, societal-level income inequality, and citizens’ subjective well-being. Kaifeng Jiang, Yingya Jia, Jia Yu.

• Global meets local: community political ideology and Chinese cross-border M&As in the U.S.. Yinuo Tang, Juan Bu, Weilei Shi.

• Business and management research on societal wellbeing: a historic, multi-journal and large language model analysis of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Farzam Boroomand, Anne S. Tsui, Wilfred Mijnhardt.

• The data-based power of big-tech multinational enterprises. Ke Rong, Ronaldo Parente, William Newburry.

• Climate vulnerability and stock price crash risk worldwide. Xiaoran Ni, Yi Si, Bohui Zhang.

• Institutions and social entrepreneurship: a hierarchy of institutions to revisit institutional voids, support, and configurations. Ute Stephan, Lorraine M. Uhlaner, Christopher Stride.

• Reframing social entrepreneurship in IB: from institutional constraints to generative processes in Creation Theory. Sharon A. Alvarez.

MIS Quarterly

• Digital Resilience for the Climate Crisis: A Multi-Perspective Analysis. Wai Fong Boh, Nigel P. Melville, et al.

• Guardrails for Human-AI Ecologies: Norm-Based Coordination and Design for Predictability. Thomas Grisold, Nicholas Berente, Stefan Seidel.

• Rethinking Responsibility in the Digital Age: A Narrative Approach. François-Xavier de Vaujany, Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, Jeremy Aroles, Lucas Introna, Scott Davidson.

• Judgmental Bot: Conversational Agents in Online Mental Health Screening. Ryan Raimi, Antino Kim, Sezgin Ayabakan, Alan R. Dennis.

• Mitigating Bias in Hate Speech Detection With a Small Number of Expert Annotations: A Prompt-Based Learning Approach. Dongjun Wei, Michael Chau, Zhepeng (Lionel) Li.

• Editor’s Comments: Beyond Green IT: From Digital Sustainability to Responsible Technology. Susan Brown.

Operations Research  

• Fair Fares for Vehicle Sharing Systems. Adam N. Elmachtoub, Hyemi Kim.

Organization and Environment

• Reimagining ESG: A Tetralemma Approach to Multifunctional Sustainability Reporting. Steffen Roth, Vladislav Valentinov.

• Sustaining Unsustainability: The Legitimation Paradox of Unsustainable Companies. Irene Pollach, Christiane Marie Høvring, Christa Thomsen, Anne Ellerup Nielsen.

• Carbon Emissions Reduction or ‘Relocation’? A Study on the Corporate Response to Climate Change and the Role of Environmental Law. Lipeng Pan, Yongqing Li, Hanlu Fan, Qingliang Tang.

• Good Data, Good Questions: Leveraging Comprehensive, Direct-Observation Data Sets for Impactful Research on Organizations and the Environment. Dror Etzion, Lucie Baudoin, Leandro S. Pongeluppe et al.

• Perceived Air Pollution and Innovative Work Behavior: An Empirical Examination Based on Conservation of Resources Theory. Arindam Bhattacharjee, Anita Sarkar.

• Earnings Pressure and Firms’ ESG Performance: Do Executive Environmental Experience and MBA Experience Matter? Ge Ren, Ping Zeng, Xi Zhong.

Organization Science 

• Knowing Enough to Be Dangerous: The Problem of “Artificial Certainty” for Expert Authority When Using AI for Decision Making and Planning. Paul M. Leonardi, Virginia Leavell.

• Lending Leniency: The Relationship Between High-Status Affiliations and Consumer Acceptance of Products in Contested Markets. Lionel Paolella, Amanda J. Sharkey, Maima Aulia Syakhroza.

• Revolutionary Sparks: Exploring the Resource Spillover Effect of Street Protests on Entrepreneurship. Jeremy Lei Xu, Milo Shaoqing Wang, Shon R. Hiatt, Haemin Dennis Park.

• Social Purpose Formation and Evolution in Nonprofit Organizations. Farah Kodeih, Henri Schildt, Emma Sandström, Davide Ravasi, Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä.

• Entrepreneurship and Gentrification. Luisa Gagliardi, Olav Sorenson.

• When Do Gender-Diverse Teams Engage More Investors? Evidence of Threshold Alignment Benefits at Techstars. Dana Kanze, Alessandro Piazza.

• Market Demand, Competition for Knowledge Workers, and Impact on Invention: Evidence from Electric Vehicle Technologies. Jino Lu.

• Second-Order Knowledge Intermediaries and Multi-Country Entrepreneurial Entry into a Nascent Industry. Diana Jue-Rajasingh.

Organization Studies

• Media Review: Redefining Management. Ratan Sarkar, Eeshita Goyal.

• Media Review: The Invisible Cage as a New Form of Alienation in the Gig Economy. Fatma Jemaa.

• Media Review: The ‘Objective Necessity’ of Resistance: Corporeal fragility against algocracy. Maria Daskalaki.

• Mapping Heterotopia: Enjoyment as practice in two alternative spaces. Mickael Peiro, Jeremy Aroles, Edward Granter.

• Media Review: How Can We Make Better Futures? Alice Comi.

• Media Review: The Stigma Matrix. Samira Nazar.

• Competing With Smart Machines: The dark side of ‘conjoined agency’ in contemporary organizations. Daniel Fisher, Peter Fleming.

• Kafka and Organization Studies. Nora Lohmeyer, Elke S. Schüßler.

• Degrowth and Organization Studies. Angelique Slade Shantz, Niki Khorasani, Madeline Toubiana.

Research Policy

• The living lab and the cursed catalyst: Navigating the legitimacy challenges of innovation intermediaries for sustainable innovation. Cylien Gibert, Quentin Plantec.

• Green industrial policy and latecomer catch-up: A missed green window of opportunity for domestic solar PV module manufacturers in Indonesia. Ulrich Elmer Hansen, Ivan Nygaard, Yohanes Berenika Kadarusman.

• Innovation under dual policies: The impact of R&D subsidies and emissions trading on green patenting in Sweden. Jessica Coria, Jūratė Jaraitė.

• Harvesting or nurturing? Corporate venture capital and startup green innovation. David Wunder, Markku Maula.

• External search for specialized knowledge and green new product development speed: A dual mediation mechanism and moderating role of absorptive capacity. Hoàng Thu Thảo, Huy-Cuong Vo-Thai, Trong Tuan Luu.

• Impact of digital transformation technology adoption on worker wages. Seungil Lee, Jungsoo Park.

• Navigating sustainability paradoxes: Unveiling the dynamics of transformative change in the food industry. Nhat Strøm-Andersen, Julia Szulecka, Markus M. Bugge, Ellen-Marie Forsberg.

• Retrovation typology: Exploiting and exploring past knowledge for nostalgic and sustainable innovation. I. De Noni, S. Blasi, E. Sabbadin.

• Rethinking the Third Mission: Organizing dissonance in transformative universities. Gesa Pflitsch, Max-Peter Menzel.

• Managing multi-stakeholder co-creation to address grand challenges: The role of paradox management capabilities. Muthu De Silva, Federica Rossi, Caroline Paunov.

• European regions transitioning to green markets: the role of related capabilities and public procurement policies. Carolina Castaldi, Milad Abbasiharofteh, Sergio Petralia.

• Nourishing sustainability innovation: Scientific trajectories in industrial protein research. Marco S. Giarratana, Martina Pasquini, Markus Simeth.

• Trademarks and the innovativeness of social enterprises. Mirko Hirschmann, Joern H. Block, Gorgi Krlev.

• Contextualizing policy mixes – A configurational study on rapid transitions. Jouni K. Juntunen, Shah Rukh Shakeel.

• Knowledge ecosystem emergence: Organizing participation, identity, and actorhood to bridge the governance void. Ermal Hetemi, Paavo Ritala, Anna Jerbrant.

Sloan Management Review  

• How Leaders Stay True to Themselves and Their Stakeholders. Elizabeth Heichler.

• Are You an Authentic Leader or an Authentic Jerk? Hannes Leroy et al.

• The Greenhushing Trap. Frederik Maibaum et al.

• Effective Allies Don’t Just Offer Support — They Change Systems. Alyssa Tedder-King et al.

See all monthly Table of Contents.