There is an abundance of lamentations on the ills of academia, and a more modest, but growing, discussion on how to both reimagine academia and delegitimize its dominant micro-practices. What is missing, however, is a clearer understanding of how individual academics can help to move academia from reimagination and delegitimization to transformation. Addressing this lacuna, our article makes three interrelated contributions. First, we conceptualize a novel process that we call academic micro-transformation, where change occurs through small, interconnected acts. Second, drawing on the vocabulary of Positive Organizational Scholarship, we create a typology that demonstrates how cognitive, affective, relational, and agentic change mechanisms can be implemented through daily practices that accumulate and – over time – reshape the academic ecosystem structurally. Finally, we offer readers a practical template with a range of example micro-practices that all of us – from early career academics to emeriti – can enact on a daily basis to support academic micro-transformation.

Digital administrative systems are ubiquitous in modern bureaucracies, part of the ‘everyday’ that often goes unnoticed and creates the digital undertow. Based on an ethnographic study of a social services office in Sweden, we show how these digital systems can be understood as digital non-places, which appear as fixed and immobile to workers. This appearance masks the inherent precarity and fluidity of space that is often perceived to characterize digital spaces. By analysing the architecture, experience and social practices of a bureaucratic digital space, we show how it creates a barren, fixed world, where others are absent or reduced to ‘documentary persons’. Because the space does not allow for placemaking, in terms of physical transformation or social engagement, workers cannot transform it into a place, which would provide a sense of belonging. It is this lack of belonging, rather than a lack of meaning, that creates the non-place. Moreover, the barrenness and reduction in personhood provided by the digital non-place may nudge workers towards a ‘social production of indifference’ in the exercise of public authority. The study highlights how a place-sensitive approach can illuminate our understanding of modern workspaces, and the effects they may have on workers.

In this critical theoretical essay, I propose a Decolonising Practice Approach for research in Management and Organisation Studies. Building on practice-based scholarship—particularly Gherardi’s understanding of practice as collective knowledgeable doing—I define practice as historically sedimented, politically contested, and differentially enacted across intersectional positions. Adopting an onto-epistemic orientation, the Decolonising Practice Approach treats sociohistorical embeddedness, the political, and intersectionality not as contextual background but as constitutive dimensions of practice. I develop this argument through two complementary documentary analyses. First, a mapping of 33 empirical studies published between 2021 and 2025 shows that, even in Global South contexts, colonial legacies, struggles for recognition, and intersectional asymmetries are frequently muted in practice accounts. Second, a documentary analysis of curricular materials from foundational management programmes across five Latin American countries illustrates how teaching-as-practice stabilises Anglo-Eurocentric canons while marginalising alternative genealogies of management knowledge. The Decolonising Practice Approach offers a coherent analytical posture for strengthening practice-based research in Management and Organisation Studies, Management Learning, and Management Education by specifying how practices are made possible, contested, and unevenly lived under historically sedimented relations of power.

In this article, we seek to problematise socially constructed models of learning in higher education. Rather than another way to achieve predetermined and measurable learning outcomes, we ask what education and learning might look like if we centred the meanings that students themselves make. We do so through the concept of the lacuna , which we conceptualise as both the necessary space for learning, where predetermined knowledge and outcomes are withheld, and also the mystery of those moments of profound learning which are beyond the educator’s control. We contribute to management learning in two ways. Through the concept of the lacuna , we invite educators to reflect on the extent to which students are enabled to construct their own meanings and knowledge, and how they might surface and centre such learning. Second, we present an account of teaching practice and specific pedagogies of Collaborative Autoethnography as Pedagogy and of drawing which, we propose, are helpful to facilitate the creation of a lacuna, and through which we analyse key moments of working with and within the lacuna in the classroom.

Management education remains problem-solving-centric, yet real-world management challenges are typically ill-defined. This creates a discrepancy between classroom learning and workplace needs. Fostering divergent thinking is crucial to address this discrepancy, and engaging students in case writing is an effective way to develop this skill. While early exposure to ambiguity is crucial for developing divergent thinking, using student case writing to foster this skill in first-year management students is underexplored in academic literature. To that end, the study explores the theoretical underpinnings of case writing as a pedagogical tool to foster divergent thinking. Data was collected using a mixed-methods approach from 646 students over a 5-year period across two universities. Results show that student case writing is effective across personality types, leading to a five-stage model grounded in the student experience. This model offers a theoretical framework to understand the mechanisms through which case writing fosters critical thinking. Positioning students as coconstructors of managerial meaning under ambiguity, it contributes to our understanding of how learning emerges through storytelling. Finally, practical implications are proposed for educators.

This study explores how organizational members draw on discursive resources to enact resilience when navigating challenges in a public education institution. Drawing on qualitative interview data from educators, findings reveal that resilience is a dynamic, socially constructed, collective process that emerges through (1) invoking a bigger purpose, where challenges are discursively framed as inherent in meaningful work, and (2) growth mindset messaging, where learning is foregrounded through storytelling. Taken together, these communicative practices make up a recursive process—with drawing on past experiences of successfully overcoming adversity and discursive framing—to co-construct individual and collective resilience in the organizational context of public education. Our findings extend the literature on meaningful work, growth mindsets, and the Communication Theory of Resilience. We offer practical implications for (1) cultivating growth mindset messaging and (2) building narratives anchored in a bigger purpose to foster a collective identity.

Scholarly publishing of research on management and business topics is organized in a stratified organizational field, where limited access to authorship and homogenized research practices are institutionalized in a metricized system of quality assessment that amplifies inequality. The system privileges authors from core regions of a knowledge network and favors Western norms of knowledge production. This article explores diversity and stratification in 16 management research journals grouped into four different tiers, comparing subscription print journals and Open Access publishing across two grades of quality status. Analysis of authorship location and the use of normative Western research practices provides evidence that inequality is pervasive in the field. It is suggested that management scholars, journal editors, and universities can counteract inequality by initiating global research collaborations that engage deeply with the context of diverse forms of scholarship and knowledge and aim to disseminate in diversified publication outlets.

Business schools have been accused of reproducing management practices that lead to global crises, sparking calls for greater sensitivity to critical management education. However, while there is much academic work on the need for critical pedagogy, documented practical experience of how this works in the classroom remains scarce. Drawing on our experience in designing and teaching a course that deconstructs naturalized “management commandments,” we reveal three interwoven tensions that help explain this limitation: institutional pressures, relational challenges, and personal vulnerabilities. Our analysis shows how integrating reflexivity with an exposure to experiences of alternative organizations helps to bridge these tensions, making critical management education both accessible and relevant. Our contributions are twofold. First, we illustrate how critical management can be practiced in the classroom by anchoring the scrutiny of mainstream naturalized practices in the emergence of alternative organizations. Second, we demonstrate that the tensions and contradictions of the neoliberal university are not merely obstacles, but generative forces that—when met with reflexivity—can foster deeper engagement and broaden the scope of management education.

Social innovation education has become an increasingly prominent means through which higher education institutions seek to create positive societal impact. One approach is through place-based learning, in which students are enabled to achieve learning outcomes through experiential work in the community. Although addressing real-world problems is widely regarded as beneficial for participant organizations, communities, and learners, less is understood about how such engagement is transformed into shared social value. Our research explored how place-based learning in social innovation education creates shared social value. Drawing on an analysis of 82 projects conducted across six annual cycles of place-based learning, we develop a model of social value co-creation that illustrates how educators’ facilitation of collaboration between key stakeholders (practitioners, educators, and students) lies at the heart of successful social innovation education. The model captures a contextualized understanding of the different perspectives involved in place-based learning, thereby advancing understanding of the co-creation of social value and its significance for both researchers and educators in social innovation education.