Pär Åhlström

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, is widely expected to transform organizations, yet effective adoption and use remain challenging. Although organizations recognize AI’s potential, capability gaps and unintended employee-level consequences persist. Despite rapid growth, management research on AI in organizations is fragmented across domains, levels of analysis, and assumptions. This article presents a systematic literature review of 458 peer-reviewed business and management studies published between 1991 and 2025. Adopting a longitudinal and integrative perspective, we expose implicit assumptions about AI, clarify core constructs by distinguishing analytically distinct domains (e.g. development, adoption, use, and impact), and establish field-level boundary conditions. The review reveals a heterogeneous and unevenly developed research landscape and offers a framework and methodological approach to guide cumulative and coherent future research.

Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions constitute 75-90% of firms' total carbon footprints yet present a governance paradox: firms are held accountable for emissions they do not directly control. Environmental supply chain management (ESCM) practices represent the primary instruments for extending environmental governance beyond organizational boundaries. Yet despite widespread adoption, aggregate Scope 3 emissions continue rising, suggesting that how practices combine matters more than whether firms adopt them. Prior research examines practices in isolation, neglecting configurational interdependencies. This study employs fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on panel data comprising 239 firm-year observations from U.S. manufacturing firms (2018-2024). Eight ESCM practices serve as conditions; year-over-year change in Scope 3 emission intensity serves as the outcome. Results reveal five distinct upstream and three downstream configurational pathways to emission reduction, confirming equifinality. Monitoring appears in all successful configurations; commitment and management systems function as near-core elements. Upstream pathways exhibit higher enforcement intensity, while downstream pathways rely on collaborative mechanisms, consistent with power-based governance differentiation. Temporal analysis reveals consolidation from diverse experimentation (2019-2020) toward convergent configurations (2023-2024). This study contributes to sustainable supply chain management by demonstrating that ESCM effectiveness derives from configurational complementarity rather than additive accumulation.

Manufacturing firms increasingly face pressure to integrate sustainability practices into their operations, yet research shows mixed findings regarding the performance implications of such integration. We argue that these inconsistent results stem from insufficient attention to how sustainability practices are positioned within firms’ operations, as a network of practices- specifically whether they function as core or peripheral practices. Drawing on organization theory and the practice-based view, we analyze longitudinal data from 65 U.S.-based public manufacturing firms (910 firm-year observations) from 2009 to 2022 to examine: (1) how sustainability practices transition between core and peripheral positions over time, and (2) how this positioning affects operational performance. Our findings reveal significant dynamism in how sustainability practices are positioned within firms’ operations networks, with practices shifting between core and peripheral positions rather than maintaining fixed positioning. Moreover, while core sustainability practices consistently drive positive performance outcomes through enhanced operational efficiency, peripheral practices show negative performance effects, likely due to implementation challenges and resource conflicts. Contrary to expectations, we find no evidence that peripheral practices complement core practices to enhance performance. These results advance the understanding of how the positioning of sustainability practices within operations’ network shape their performance implications while offering practical guidance for managers on effectively integrating them into their operations.

Motivated by inconclusive findings on the sustainability-performance relationship, this study focuses on the question of whether sustainability should be viewed as a financial burden or a firm performance catalyst. More specifically, this study aims to explore the crucial yet under-examined role of quality management in the sustainability-performance relationship. However, unlike previous studies that narrow their focus to only a subset of quality management practices subsumed under one banner, such as TQM or lean, this research advocates for the integration of multiple quality management practices to cultivate “quality management diligence”, namely, a rigorous and disciplined mindset to ensure that quality is integrated into every facet of a firm. Drawing on a panel of 1876 European firms with 16,901 firm-year observations over the period of 2003-2023, panel data regression is employed to empirically examine the effect of quality management diligence on sustainability and their subsequent impacts on firm performance. The empirical findings indicate a positive relationship between quality management diligence and the adoption of environmental/social sustainability practices and between the adoption of environmental/social sustainability practices and firm performance. Our results also confirm the mediating role of sustainability in the relationship between quality management diligence and firm performance.