This study interrogates the way politics and organisation constitute each other in the colonial context. It asks “what happens when one shifts the lens to the organisation itself as the tool of politics, not just the site?” I interrogate the intersection of organisation of imperial politics with the politics of organising resistance by examining how colonial power controls and subjugates native organising and resistance by drawing boundaries of MWO to demarcate the formal from the informal, the legal from the illegal and disenfranchise the native. By studying two cases of organising and resistance – one historical of Bombay Textile Mills during British colonial rule and another contemporary of Vapi chemical cluster’s pollution in the condition of coloniality. It finds that colonial power controls and subjugates native organising and resistance by using modern western bureaucratic organisation to draw boundaries demarcating the formal from the informal, the legal from the illegal. Colonial politics via formal organisation eliminates native politics of organising resistance rooted in anticipatory action and erases the locus of community’s resistance by shifting it to a distanced third party who follows obligatory action, all under the guise of protecting the abstract interests of subordinated. This study finds that the longue durée of colonial power operates by using MWO as a tool to limit and control the terms through which the disenfranchised may engage in politics of voice and resistance. The study concludes that modern western organisation is not just a site of politics, but actually a tool of control and obedience that dismantles and disables resistance, especially in the colonial context. This paper contributes to the literature on politics of organisation and decolonising management and organisation studies.
In our field, the conception of method has become increasingly black-boxed, thereby giving prevalence to the technical and procedural nature of method, obscuring its theoretical, value-laden and embodied character. This essay aims to reconnect method with the doing of research, by making us receptive to what is lost when method becomes too formalistic and ‘hardens’. Thus doing, it fleshes out three core tensions constitutive to qualitative research (epistemology vs. methodology; planned vs. situated action; novelty vs. conformity) and emphasizes the processual, performative and embodied facets of method. In the light of this, we propose a non-exhaustive set of ‘practical’ possibilities to qualitative researchers who may be interested in reframing their conception and practice of method. This essay invites qualitative scholars to reconsider what they take method to be and perhaps, dare we say, fall in love again with method as the core of our practice as researchers.
Stigma constrains life chances, social participation, and well-being, yet we know much more about how stigma is reduced through changes in external evaluations than about how internalized stigma is reduced among stigmatized individuals themselves. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a long-standing organizational intervention supporting widowed women in India, we theorize the reduction of internalized stigma as a process of “scaffolded unlearning.” We show how interventions can organize opportunities to engage in alternative practices that enable individuals to adopt new roles, relationships, and social activities while reducing the risks of departing from stigma-consistent expectations. This process unfolds in three interrelated phases—re-fastening, reautonomizing, and reassociating—in which organizational scaffolds support practices associated with belonging and security, pride and self-efficacy, and hope and social recognition. Our findings reveal how organizations reduce internalized stigma by creating the conditions for sustained engagement in alternative practices that repeatedly elicit intertwined emotional and cognitive shifts, thereby advancing research on both destigmatization and scaffolding.
Qualitative organizational researchers value evidence that offers rich insights into social phenomena. While the growing abundance of digital data holds significant potential, researchers are typically not present to observe the processes through which they are created or maintained. This article addresses the challenges this poses for those seeking to use digital data, such as emails, websites, and online videos, that exist as a consequence of naturally occurring interactions and events. We begin by problematizing the assumption that data quality depends on researchers’ presence during data creation, distinguishing a dominant epistemology of observation from an alternative epistemology of reconstruction. Building on this, we elaborate on the distinctive characteristics of digital data and the live and repository settings through which they are accessed. We then integrate these insights with the concepts of provenance and systematicity to develop an evaluative framework for assessing the suitability of naturally occurring digital data. Together, these contributions underscore the value and potential of these data, while providing practical guidance for their use in qualitative organizational research.
Organisational reputation has long been understood as a rational stakeholder evaluation of expected future performance based on signals from past actions. Yet when people encounter news of organisational misconduct, these judgements are often immediate, emotional, and moral. How these emotional reactions influence reputation judgements remains poorly understood. To address this lack of understanding, we integrate social judgement research from social psychology with psychophysiological methods to study the affective dimensions of reputational decline. Across three experimental studies involving professionally produced news broadcasts featuring a high-reputation automobile manufacturer, we measure participants’ facial expressions, electrodermal activity, and survey-based reputation assessments. Study 1 (N = 245) demonstrates that character violations generate stronger negative emotions than competence violations. Study 2 (N = 90), conducted in a biometric laboratory, shows that combined character and competence violations produce the strongest negative emotions and elevate contempt—a moral emotion signalling rejection from the community—but not anger or disgust. Study 3 (N = 298) provides evidence of a partial indirect effect where negative emotions transmit the effect of combined violations on early reputational decline. Our findings make two primary contributions. First, our findings suggest that society’s judgements of organisations are not formed solely through reflective evaluation. Rather, immediate emotional responses systematically accompany and mediate early reputation judgements, particularly when misconduct signals failures of organisational character. In particular, contempt emerges as a discrete moral emotion in stakeholders’ negative affective responses. Second, we illustrate how psychophysiological methods—including facial expression analysis and electrodermal activity measurement—can capture the spontaneous affective micro-processes underlying social evaluations.
Recent scholarship positions stakeholder theory as an ethical and democratic response to contemporary authoritarian tendencies in corporate governance. This paper problematises this assumption by showing that many dominant formulations of stakeholder theory reproduce a governance configuration long associated with authoritarianism: the formal recognition of multiple stakeholder voices combined with the retention of ultimate decisional primacy by managerial elites. Drawing on political theory, the history of organisation studies and archival research, we argue that stakeholder theory is internally divided between two divergent trajectories; a unitarist trajectory that legitimises consultation without power, and a pluralist trajectory that embeds enforceable countervailing authority. We develop this argument through a historical reconstruction of three intellectual lineages underpinning stakeholder governance: liberal corporatism, fascist corporatism, and Progressive-era scientific management. While fascist corporatism institutionalised stakeholder representation while centralising authority, Progressive Taylorists articulated a pluralist alternative that linked organisational efficiency to institutionalised power-sharing and by doing so was instrumental in supporting consumer spending and long-lasting economic growth. The paper’s theoretical contribution is threefold. First, it reframes stakeholder theory as a contested political project rather than a unified paradigm. Second, it re-politicises stakeholder governance by reconnecting organisational design to broader structures of political authority. Third, it advances a historically grounded pluralist model of stakeholder democracy capable of countering contemporary forms of corporate and political authoritarianism.
While the effects of digital platforms on established markets are widely recognized, we know little about the process that produces these effects. We explore this issue through a longitudinal process study of how Netflix’s entry into the European audiovisual markets reorganized these markets. We find that Netflix’s efforts hinged on the creation and use of a proprietary market information regime, offering an alternative outlook and vision for these markets compared to that of the incumbents. The focus of attention provided by these respective market information regimes had a formative effect on platformization. Rather than following a fixed lifecycle, shifts in the degree of overlap between the market information regimes of Netflix and the market incumbents resulted in a platformization process with sequential phases characterized by teleologic, evolutionary, and dialectic mechanisms. The result was a synthesis combining features of the established and the platform-based market orders. This new order had substantial effects on both production and consumption markets, including a growing imbalance between the supply and demand for creative resources and accelerated consumption, as well as wider societal effects that triggered questions regarding cultural representations and creativity.
This paper investigates how the rapid and extreme financialisation of higher education in the Brazilian case may contribute to theorising the neoliberal university. We present a first-hand empirical study based on Brazil’s seven listed HEIs. We investigate the new actors that control them and analyse their organisational structure, which represents a variation of the neoliberal university. In Brazil, the state has promoted policies that supported the entry of new financial actors into higher education. The literature on the neoliberal university investigates how state policies have forced universities to adopt managerialist practices in order to engage with the market. In academic capitalism, developing market-like activities does not mean that the neoliberal university has become part of the market, nor that it is structured as a full corporation. At most, it resembles a private enterprise, which can be termed a ‘light neoliberal university’. In Brazil, the full-corporation-neoliberal-university is a conglomerate of HEIs controlled by financial investors from corporate headquarters, where financial indicators are considered the primary drivers of performance to the benefit of shareholders. These market consolidators and market makers do not integrate with the new economy in the manner described by academic capitalism; rather, they incorporate academia. Thus, we frame this form as capitalism in academia, since these are corporations that perform academic-like activities. We posit that the academic logic supporting the social contract between universities and the societies in which they are embedded breaks down when it is replaced by the market logic of generating shareholder value. This is the deleterious effect of the full-corporation-neoliberal-university on the institutional fabric of higher education. The rapid expansion of distance learning at very low tuition fees, which delivers higher financial margins, puts pressure on all types of HEIs and on the academic labour market, while compromising education quality and completion rates.
The entanglement between technology and methodology in qualitative research has largely been overlooked in management and organization studies (MOS). In this paper, we rectify this inattention, proposing that the way we analyze qualitative data be viewed as a socio-technical practice. Guided by social construction of technology (SCOT) theory, we identify the implications of the adoption and normalization of CAQDAS by the qualitative research community, including in MOS. We find that the rise of CAQDAS has been coupled with the legitimization and institutionalization of what we term indexical coding: the practice of ordering, labelling, and retrieving textual data segments. While indexical coding is often treated in MOS as methodologically authoritative and analytically indispensable, we problematize its dominance showing how it threatens interpretive agency and methodological pluralism. We propose ways forward that restore interpretive agency, reconnect data analysis to methodology, reclaim analytical pluralism and recognize the need for reflexivity in technology use - practices made more pressing with the advent of generative AI and its integration in CAQDAS.
The convergence of bureaucratic systems in higher education is fueled by a variety of actors. However, academics in their roles as researchers are typically conceptualized as recipients or resisters. In this paper we study an instance of non-convergence—the slow, scattered, and sparse emergence of ethics review procedures for social science in Europe—and identify the role of researchers in movement towards convergence. We examine the actors, pressures, and actions that lead to the emergence of ethics review procedures for social science research in three theoretically sampled countries—Denmark, Finland, and France. Contrary to established theory we do not observe change emanating from states, professional associations, or intermediary organizations. Instead, we show that pockets of researchers sought out, created, and expanded ethics review procedures for social science. We conceptualize these researchers as vanguard actors: members of a profession who seek out practices that will allow them to continue their work in a changing environment and expand it to include new audiences, methodologies, phenomena, resources, and collaborators. In establishing new practices that ensure the viability of their work, vanguard actors are a distributed, unintentional, bottom-up engine of practice change. We contribute to the literature on the convergence of forms and practices in higher education by showing how vanguard actors are distributed points of action that organize movement towards convergence as they engage in their daily research work. We enlarge understandings of professions and stratification by showing how practicing members, operating as vanguard actors, create profession-level changes in practices. Finally, we complicate critical conversations about ethics review procedures in social sciences by calling attention to the heterogeneity of researchers, including those who understand ethics review procedures to be a resource.
There is a broad consensus that transparency is increasingly important in management and organisational research. However, in the context of qualitative research, there are concerns about researchers applying inappropriate transparency criteria or templates in their work. In this article, we sought to understand how qualitative management researchers are actually enacting and communicating transparency practices. To do so, we conducted a comprehensive genre analysis of qualitative research across six management journals, which enabled us to map out transparency practices and identify three genres of writing about research transparency: protocol, diary, and critique. Based on our analysis, we motivate a genre repertoire approach to research transparency, a reflexive and pluralistic way of addressing transparency concerns in our field. This approach highlights researcher discretion and responsibility, moving the methodological debate beyond suggesting new practices, checklists, and templates for transparency in qualitative research. The genre repertoire approach aligns with the diversity of scholarship in organisation studies and invites further critical scholarly debate on methodological transparency and its place in the future of qualitative research.
This conceptual paper proposes use of a time-proven U.S. Army battle handover framework, right seat riding (RSR), as a unique, boundary-crossing qualitative research approach and process to access the ‘lifeworlds’ of others. In military contexts, RSR aims to facilitate comprehensive exchange of knowledge and understanding between units as they transfer responsibility for complex operations. Through in-depth discussion, extensive review and detailed sharing of practices, and fully-immersive job shadowing, RSR offers incoming personnel optimal chances for understanding the lifeworlds of those they are replacing. In this paper, using our own lived experiences as combat veterans and practitioners of RSR, we assume a practice-theoretical perspective to dissect RSR and reimagine it as a reflexive, phenomenological research approach and process. We propose that, adapted for qualitative research, RSR helps researchers and participants assume one another’s perspective as ‘flipped research’ in a case of, “Here’s my life. Take it. Now give it back to me.” We demonstrate how achieving such mutual understanding boosts traditional methods by creating co-developed, comprehensive participatory research. Thus, RSR acts as an accelerant for existing methods and techniques by re-orienting research to/from the participant’s perspective, actively engaging participants, advancing shared understanding, and ensuring its completeness. Finally, we illustrate how RSR can be applied to a range of qualitative research methods and settings to gain richer data, deeper insights, and improve outcomes.
Environmental disruptions such as geopolitical upheavals, war, deglobalization, and resurgent nationalism increasingly unsettle organizations and their identities. Existing research on organizational identity largely focuses on environmental complexity, overlooking ambiguous environmental conditions where dominant logics erode rapidly, and substitutes remain underdeveloped or fragmented. How do organizations respond to identity threats in such ambiguous conditions? We conducted six years of ethnography at the Kazakh State Circus (KSC), an iconic Soviet cultural organization that became destabilized in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Our inductive process theorization shows how organizational identity reconstruction unfolded through epigenetic alteration: a collective, negotiated, recursive process that retains options for reversibility. Four mechanisms – shared sensing of identity threats, collective rediscovery of sedimented meanings, negotiated weaving of identity carriers and logics, and cautious reinforcing of emergent identity - enabled the circus to reconfigure identity elements, regain stakeholder support, and reposition itself as a Kazakh cultural entity. We contribute by theorizing epigenetic alteration as a process that reconstructs identity without rupture and is stabilized through cautious reinforcing amid continued environmental ambiguity.
Drawing on a 16-month ethnographic study at a global marine engine company, this paper investigates how mechanics’ autonomy and workplace power relations are shaped when labor is mediated by algorithmic management systems (AMS). Can workers’ engagement with AMS generate emancipatory forms of agency not fully subsumed under managerial goals? Mobilizing Simondon’s perspective on technology, this paper examines the mechanics’ capacity to act through AMS and shows how aspects of this engagement become partially decoupled from organizational ends. The findings highlight the dual character of algorithmic technologies: as instruments of organizational control and, simultaneously, as sites of potential emancipatory agency for workers.
Organizational research has long recognized the importance of discursive legitimation in both maintaining and disrupting institutions. While prior scholarship has explored how legitimacy is constructed and sustained in organizations, comparatively less is known about how it is actively undermined to support institutional change. This study examines the discursive strategies that attempted to erode the legitimacy of the European Union (EU) in the UK Parliament leading up to the 2016 Brexit referendum. Focusing on the European Research Group (ERG), a faction within the Conservative Party sceptical of EU integration, we analyse how its members mobilized language, seeking to challenge perceptions of EU legitimacy by targeting organizations underpinning the EU as an institution. Through our case study analysis, we identify a process of recursive deficiency framing, in which institutional shortcomings are repeatedly emphasised and constructed as systemic failings. This framing is amplified through entity-specific targeting, where organizational bodies are portrayed as proxies for institutional flaws through the use of synthetic evocative epithets – emotionally charged labels and slogans that enhance resonance. Together, these strategies work to undermine normative legitimacy and destabilise cognitive legitimacy. The study contributes to research on discursive legitimation by illuminating how language can be strategically used by and against organizations to contest and erode institutional legitimacy, thereby supporting institutional transformation.
This article analyzes the seemingly impossible radical transformation of a factory into a worker cooperative despite a multinational corporation’s refusal to cede its brand and its announced plans to shut down the factory and relocate its production. With a hybrid ethnographic approach, this research addresses the interwoven (holistic) spatial and temporal dynamics of one such transformation. The resulting study builds on and expands Lefebvre’s concept of experimental utopia to the organization studies domain to clarify the process of radical transformation and the conditions under which a new social space gets produced within a collective survival context. Furthermore, this study introduces the notion of a mechanotransducer , which is essential to the production of a worker cooperative. The results prioritize the value of a holistic spatiotemporal conceptualization of utopia, in accordance with a Lefebvrian perspective.
We explored the politics of commemoration at the 10th anniversary of a catastrophic bushfire event to explore how vulnerability to the Other can set the terms for an ethics of commemoration. Through an interpretative analysis of interviews with firefighters at the time of the official commemorative event of the Black Saturday fires, we respond to calls to better understand our ethical obligation to remember those whose lives have been lost during catastrophic events. We draw on Levinas to theorize an ethics of commemoration. We argue that there are two aspects to a Levinasian ethics of commemoration. First, it involves recognizing that an ethics of commemoration is a response to the unwilled address of the Other. Second, the address from the Other brings a responsibility to ensure that commemoration fosters a commitment to learn the lessons from past fires and to do things differently in the future.
