Organization Studies Scholars Research Articles

Can a case be made for “unlearning” in the study of religions?

The concept of “unlearning” has been positively endorsed in both self-help literature and organizational research, but has yet to be discussed in the study of religions. Is there room for it in the conceptual space of religious socialization, pedagogy and spiritual seeking? Where does it occur in the spiritual journey, and what is its purpose? From the perspective of social learning, and drawing on a definition and model from organizational studies, the case for “unlearning” is considered with reference to those leaving religion. Addressing research gaps identified by organizational-studies scholars, I consider how leavers experience the process of freeing themselves from previously held beliefs, practices and commitments. What is revealed is an iterative and emotionally fraught process in which even voluntary religious leavers struggle to move on, often feeling powerless, even coerced by others. Whilst there is a broad fit between the basic process model of unlearning and what leavers experience, that is not the full story. Furthermore, questions remain about whether “unlearning” is a necessary or suitable concept, not least because it is rarely used by scholars of religion or practitioners themselves, all of whom prefer other terms.

“Making the unimaginable imaginable?” The power of artmaking in understanding animal vulnerabilities and “humanimal” relationality in Organization Studies

The vulnerabilities of nonhuman animals in human–animal relationships have received scant attention in Organization Studies (OS). What could OS scholars learn about animal vulnerability and “humanimal” relationality by turning to the context of artmaking, where sensate animals, human artists, spaces, materialities, artworks, affects and critical audiences come together? Building on feminist vulnerability literature and insight from posthumanist affirmative ethics, we here analyze Finnish artists Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson’s artmaking, works, and their exhibition Siat – Pigs in particular, where the agency and vulnerability of animals can be conceived in non-anthropocentric, immersive and affective ways. We contribute to OS research by demonstrating the affective power of posthumanist artmaking that comes with the radical repositioning of the human in relation to others, as well as political motivation to elicit empathy for the plight of animals in the factory-farming complex. Specifically, we show how these insights can illuminate what is currently not centered or discussed enough in OS, help us to better acknowledge co-constituted humanimal vulnerabilities, and extend discussions on empathy in OS to include (hyper-vulnerable) animals in the factory-farming complex. We contend that by extending vulnerability ascriptions to animals, caring with the unseen and silenced agents in society, acknowledging our shared vulnerability and by taking further action, we can gradually change the exploitive ways in which humans have treated other animals in our organized society, and more emphatically work for the well-being of the many unseen “others.”

Politicizing and humanizing management learning and education with Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire is widely acknowledged as one of the leading 20th-century philosophers of education. Freire’s ideas have been leveraged by scholars across the social sciences, including in the field of organization studies where it has come to inform extant understandings of management learning and education. While such engagements with Freire have enriched many germane discourses in our field, we have yet to excavate the full potential of his writings. This special issue aims to remedy this oversight by illuminating myriad promising trajectories through which scholars in organization studies can return to Freire’s ideas with the intention of enhancing the future of management learning and education.

Bridging the Understanding of Sustainability Accounting and Organizational Change

The role of sustainability accounting in promoting organizational change toward more sustainable practices is a relevant area of research for both accounting and organization studies. Despite the interdisciplinary nature of this topic, while accounting research was imagining and exploring the transformative potential of social and environmental accounting practices since the inception of this activity, scholars in organization studies have recently developed a more general interest in this matter. This article aims to review how the association between sustainability accounting and reporting and sustainable organizational change has been examined in both disciplines to elaborate on some potential bridges to foster the creation of an interdisciplinary research field around this association, where a fertile conversation could develop. The mapping of this literature prompts us to propose five bridges around: how accounting and reporting are conceived; the direction of causality between sustainability accounting and organizational change; the assemblage of explanatory factors; theoretical foundations; and research methods.

Fashion and Organization Studies: Exploring conceptual paradoxes and empirical opportunities

Although frequently perceived as inconsequential and frivolous, fashion is a central interdisciplinary concept and a substantial global industry. This necessitates taking it seriously, both as a set of theoretical tensions, and as a concrete empirical phenomenon of rich potential interest to organization studies. Our essay outlines and further develops fashion’s conceptual and empirical expressions, and suggests subsequent avenues for valuable research. In particular, we commence with a discussion of three key definitions, namely fashion as individual manner, fashion as organizing of dress and fashion as a system. This enables us to problematize its industry and economy, from their historical roots and evolutions, to their varied organizational frictions, forms and practices today. We then conclude by examining the ongoing, substantial changes within the fashion industry as we have known it since the nineteenth century, and considering its potential implications and openings for organization studies scholars.

Aristotelian phronesis as a key factor for leadership in the knowledge-creating company according to Ikujiro Nonaka

Some Western organizational studies scholars have proposed that Aristotelian Phronesisrepresents a way of including practical reason in research on business topics such as decision-making, knowledge management, ethics and leadership. Ikujiro Nonaka, a Japanese scholar with notable theoretical and practical contributions to knowledge creation in organizations and with extensive experience in Japanese corporations, has joined this group of academics. As an Eastern thinker, he takes on a Western classical tradition, namely the virtue of Phronesis, making an important contribution to the application of ethical notions to business practice, in this case knowledge management. To locate his conceptualization of Aristotelian practical wisdom, we briefly describe his theory of knowledge creation, pointing to phroneticleadership skills as essential drivers of knowledge creation in organizations. Furthermore, we assess Nonaka’s incorporation of practical rationality from the point of view of the Western classical tradition.To conclude, we discuss the scope and limits of the use of Phronesisin Nonaka´s contribution, and ultimately suggest that incorporating the will helps us to understand prudence as a virtue and not just as an intellectual habit.

Learning to use the past: the development of a rhetorical history strategy by the London headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company

Organization studies scholars are increasingly interested in how managers use the past to obtain competitive advantage. Little research has been done on the history of the corporate use of history which means that we know little about the circumstances in which the corporate use of rhetorical history was pioneered. This paper historicizes rhetorical history. It uses the experience of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) to develop understanding of how companies used the past to advance interests in the face of political threats. Founded in 1670, the HBC is one of the oldest firms in the Western world. For much of its history, its senior managers invested few resources in the firm’s ‘heritage infrastructure’ and rarely used history in its communication with outside stakeholders. This paper shows how it learned to use history as a strategic asset gradually and by observing other firms. At the end of World War I, it began to make substantial investments in heritage infrastructure. This allowed the firm to turn its long history into an asset. This paper stresses the politicized nature of the corporate use of the past.

Exploring Materialization of Institutional Logics: A Case of Changing Tax Regimes and Procedures

Organization studies scholars have employed the notion of institutional logics to produce a more comprehensive understanding of institutional change processes and outcomes. Their focus has been on ...

Postfeminism, Men, Masculinities and Work: A Research Agenda for Gender and Organization Studies Scholars

Mobilizing the concept of postfeminism as a sensibility, this article invites organization and gender scholars to examine how postfeminist masculinities are discursively constituted and performed by men within contemporary work contexts. Acknowledging that women are interpellated within postfeminist discourses as empowered and autonomous subjects whose lives are shaped by individual choice, this article explores the implications for men, in particular how men variously perform postfeminist masculinities and the implications for addressing gendered inequalities within the workplace. Developing a research agenda, this article outlines three research trajectories: (1) problematizing a gender binary in which women are depicted as empowered at work and men in a state of crisis; (2) interrogating signs of ‘new’ postfeminist masculinities coded as inclusive in the workplace; and (3) examining how different types of men perform postfeminist masculinities at work. This article concludes by providing examples of research questions to generate future organizational scholarship in these areas.

BRINGING THE HORIZON BACK IN: THE MID-RANGE APPROACH TO ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES

In recent years there has been a growing discussion of the lack of impact of organizational studies and, amongst other comments, on a drift away from the public sector agenda. Taking as a starting point two recent key addresses by James March and Jean-Claude Thoenig, both directed to organizational studies scholars, this paper seeks to contribute to this debate both in terms of focus and in terms of methodological approach. It argues in favor of a mid-range territorial focus on organizational affairs and to a place based action-investigation approach to methodology. In doing so it draws on the experience of the Center for Public Administration and Government of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo with local level innovation during 1995 – 2008 and on a current project on urban vulnerabilities which has been largely shaped by these conclusions.

Organizing resistance movements: contribution of the political discourse theory

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of articulating Political Discourse Theory (PDT) together with Organizational Studies (OS), while using the opportunity to introduce PDT to those OS scholars who have not yet come across it. The bulk of this paper introduces the main concepts of PDT, discussing how they have been applied to concrete, empirical studies of resistance movements. In recent years, PDT has been increasingly appropriated by OS scholars to problematize and analyze resistances and other forms of social antagonisms within organizational settings, taking the relational and contingent aspects of struggles into consideration. While the paper supports the idea of a joint articulation of PDT and OS, it raises a number of critical questions of how PDT concepts have been empirically used to explain the organization of resistance movements. The paper sets out a research agenda for how both PDT and OS can together contribute to our understanding of new, emerging organizational forms of resistance movements.

Rethinking Global Leadership Development Programmes: The Interrelated Significance of Power, Context and Identity

Organization studies scholars have examined leadership development processes on only a handful of occasions. This paper argues that an organizational lens, rather than individualized and decontextualized research, can significantly advance this under-theorized field. A critical organizational framing, in particular, assists not only in problematizing the ‘leader’ identities produced within contemporary leadership development programmes (LDPs), but also in surfacing the ways in which power, context and identity can be inextricably linked within specific practices. The article contributes to critical leadership and organization studies in three main ways. First, it theorizes through a critical identity lens the regulatory practices that constitute an idealized leader self in two separate global LDPs, and which create tensions and paradoxes rarely examined in studies of LDPs and organizations more generally. Second, it examines participants’ considerable resistance to the prevailing models of global leader prescribed in the two programmes. Third, our dual case analysis highlights the role of discursive context, enabling us to compare two particular strategies of leadership development through identity regulation: ‘investiture’ and ‘divestiture’. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this analysis for rethinking theory and practice, and suggests future research directions for critical organization studies of leadership and LDPs.

Understanding the rift, the (still) uneasy bedfellows of History and Organization Studies

Although the use of History has become increasingly discussed and more widely applied within Organization Studies (OS), its relevance for OS still remains far from centrally accepted. This article historicizes the relationship between Sociology and History as a means of better understanding the tensions, perceived and real, that exist between History and Organization Studies. In particular we analyse three differences of epistemological standpoint (method, objectivity and usefulness) that are commonly seen as the foundation stones to incompatibility. Perhaps surprisingly for an analysis of apparent disciplinary differences, we find that these distinctions in terms of approach, once closely examined, are rarely clear-cut and historians and OS scholars are frequently closer in intention and method than they are distant. However, despite their large intersection of interests, we argue that important distinctions between the two fields should be acknowledged. Our contribution to the debates over the need for more historical approaches within OS therefore centrally rests on abandoning aspirations for fully integrative models of working together, in favour of cooperative modes that concede the fields’ differences. This subtle shift of emphasis will, we believe, greatly benefit OS scholars who hope to include historical perspectives in their work.

Joking Aside, Insights to Employee Dignity in “Dilbert” Cartoons: The Value of Comic Art in Understanding the Employer—Employee Relationship

Catholic social teaching makes the moral argument for the importance of dignity at work, and organization studies scholars have documented workers’ plight. Yet, neither perspective sufficiently provides a sense of the feelings that managers and employees have toward one another. Adopting an aesthetics approach, and drawing from comic art and the cartoon strip Dilbert, this research provides an alternative view to understand challenges to employee dignity. Like aesthetics and art, comic art reflects feelings and attitudes and aims to provide insight into contemporary life. The results from surveying Dilbert found that managers often viewed their subordinates as exploitable commodities and threatened them with abuse. They point to a possible structural explanation for why employers view their workers so disparagingly and why employees feel their dignity challenged. This research makes evident the potential value of an aesthetics/comic arts perspective to understand and address issues concerning human behavior in the workplace.

Organizational ethnography and methodological angst: myths and challenges in the field

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the myths and challenges in the field of organizational ethnography and methodological angst.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is initially written as an invited keynote address for the 3rd Annual Joint Symposium on “Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences” (University of Liverpool Management School and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management, Liverpool, September 3‐5, 2008). It explores what might be distinctive about organizational ethnography and how that might be different from “anthropological” ethnography. In particular, it engages a kind of collective methodological performance anxiety among organizational studies scholars without formal training in anthropology who do ethnographic research.FindingsThe paper argues that it is time to be explicit about a variety of forms of professional angst that many ethnographic researchers within organizational studies carry which have not been discussed.Originality/valueThe paper is of value to those willing to consider the myths and challenges that need engaging and perhaps uprooting and casting off.

Making a Difference: Organization as Design

Mainstream organizational research is based on science and the humanities. Science helps us to understand organized systems, from an outsider position, as empirical objects. The humanities contribute to understanding, and critically reflecting on, the human experience of actors inside organized practices. This paper argues that, in view of the persistent relevance gap between theory and practice, organization studies should be broadened to include design as one of its primary modes of engaging in research. Design is characterized by its emphasis on solution finding, guided by broader purposes and ideal target systems. Moreover, design develops, and draws on, design propositions that are tested in pragmatic experiments and grounded in organization science. This study first explores the main differences and synergies between science and design, and explores how and why the design discipline has largely moved away from academia to other sites in the economy. The argument then turns to the genealogy of design methodologies in organization and management studies. Subsequently, this paper explores the circular design methodology that serves to illustrate the nature of design research, that is, the pragmatic focus on actionable knowledge as well as the key role of ideal target systems in design processes. Finally, the author proposes a framework for communication and collaboration between the science and design modes, and argues that scholars in organization studies can guide human beings in the process of designing and developing their organizations toward more humane, participative, and productive futures. In this respect, the organization discipline can make a difference.