Intimate relations remain under-studied in alternative organization research, which has traditionally focused on socioeconomic transformation while overlooking counter-hegemonic efforts in the private and reproductive sphere. In this paper, we explore how Erotic Stories, a provider of feminist audio pornography, prefigures sexual emancipation by providing alternative sexual scripts focusing on consensual sex. Drawing on conceptual prefiguration, we trace how consent is imagined and actualized and what divergences between the two reveal about the norms being (re)produced. Our contributions are threefold: First, we expand the scope of alternative organizing to include prefiguration of intimate relations; second, we show how conceptual prefiguration operationalizes the organizational commitment to staying unfinished; and third, we develop norm-critical prefiguration as a processual and reflexive approach to alternative organizing. Norm-critical prefiguration offers a mechanism for alternative organizing to continuously reflect and revise the norms produced, thereby avoiding alternative norms to ossify into new hegemonies. We conclude that to prefigure intimate relations in less hegemonic ways, organizations must diversify the voices that shape the imaginary and continuously expand it, so that striving for utopia remains open, expansive, and generative of ongoing social transformation.
Emotional labour, the appropriation of workers’ emotions for commercial gain, is central to our understanding of service work. This study focuses on the impact of deep acting, emotional labour and empathy through an in-depth analysis of a hard-to-reach and rarely studied occupation, debt collectors. It details the ways clients’ traumas and emotional demands triggered workers’ memories of their own traumatic life events such as bereavement or violence, prompting authentic feelings/deep acting that was damaging. These observations challenge the existing assumption that surface acting is more harmful than deep acting because surface acting entails faking emotions, creating dissonance between the way workers really feel and the way they are expected to act. Such conclusions have been drawn almost entirely from studies of positive emotions. Significantly, this research demonstrates that, when dealing with negative emotions, deep acting and authentic feeling can be more damaging to workers than surface acting.
How do multiple possible action trajectories progressively narrow into one failing line of activity? While escalation of commitment scholars have long puzzled over this question, their tendency to conflate escalation with persistence and treat commitment as primarily cognitive compromises the concept’s theoretical precision and practical relevance. Adopting a communicative-relational ontology, we reconceptualize escalation as a process of communicatively constituted, ventriloquial attachment. We draw on an in-depth study of an interorganizational team to trace how such an attachment to the idea of working with blockchain technology emerged and progressively intensified in members’ interaction, pulling the team toward a single line of activity while alternatives were increasingly sidelined to a point where detaching became seemingly impossible. Our findings introduce the concept of escalating attachment , emphasizing how escalating processes are dynamic, relational accomplishments that both pull action forward along select lines of activity and hold it in place. This, we claim, resonates with practitioners’ lived experiences of how they not only hold onto an idea but also become progressively held by that very same idea. Further, our insights contribute to the communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) literature by lifting scholars’ focus away from situated (inter)action and toward how (inter)actions connect.
Population studies show that anxiety levels in the United Kingdom (UK) and other countries are at record highs, prompting researchers to suggest we live in a new age of anxiety. Work-related anxiety has a long research history in organisational studies, most often as a strain resulting from stress processes. There is much less research on how employees take steps to manage their work-related anxiety in a more planned and reflective manner. We address this deficit from the perspective of job crafting by considering how work-related anxiety motivates employees to alter aspects of their jobs to regulate their anxiety. In doing so, we identify how workplace anxiety can be more proactively managed and offer novel insights into job crafting activities. Our data are based on qualitative interviews with 45 academics who reported experiencing high levels of work anxiety working in 7 UK business schools/schools of management. We found that academics engaged in the job crafting activities of physical/psychological distancing, seeking reassurance, uncertainty reduction and introducing controls. The effectiveness of these activities was enhanced when they were honed over time through a confidence-building learning process, and was inhibited by perfectionist tendencies. Our findings are relevant to employees in occupational groups beyond academics.
Does making work more playful encourage employees to speak up or to seek feedback instead? We argue that playful work design (PWD) can lead to both outcomes, depending on how it shapes employees’ sense of ownership over their work. Drawing on extended self-theory and goal orientation theory, we propose that PWD enhances employees’ job-based psychological ownership. This heightened sense of ownership, in turn, discourages voice behavior while encouraging feedback seeking. We further show that these effects are contingent on employees’ goal orientations: performance-prove and performance-avoid orientations shape when and for whom these dynamics emerge. Using one experiment and two multi-wave survey studies, we find consistent support for our model. By uncovering the divergent interpersonal consequences of PWD, our study suggests that making work more playful is not uniformly beneficial and highlights the importance of understanding how employees interpret and enact play at work.
How is class discussed in workplace diversity research? Class has long been central to social studies of inequality, yet its meaning remains fragmented and contested across sociology, political economy, psychology and organization studies. This creates a challenge for workplace diversity scholarship: although class is increasingly treated as an important dimension of diversity, it is often unclear whether class is being understood as an individual attribute, a lived experience, a structural position or an organizational process. This narrative review addresses this challenge by examining and organizing this fragmented body of literature. We develop a five-orientation framework: class as an unelaborated descriptor , class as haves , class as lived , class as located and classing . The framework clarifies the conceptual commitments underlying the different uses of class and shows how these choices shape what researchers see, explain and propose in relation to inequality at work. We argue that classing offers particular analytical potential as it redirects attention to organizational mechanisms of class reproduction. This review advances conceptual clarity while promoting practical parsimony for studying class, workplace diversity and inequality at work.
Institutional theory has long been concerned with the relationship between agency and structure in explaining how institutions are created, maintained and transformed. While early formulations emphasized the constraining power of institutional structures, subsequent work - most notably the institutional work literature - has sought to recuperate agency by foregrounding the purposive actions of individuals and collective actors. Despite these advances, institutional theory continues to grapple with a persistent paradox: agency is treated as structurally constrained when explaining institutional reproduction, yet as relatively autonomous and intentional when accounting for institutional change. We argue that this paradox stems from an implicit assumption shared across much of institutional theory: the view that agency and structure are analytically and ontologically separable. Drawing on Judith Butler's philosophical work on the formation of subjectivities, we challenge existing theoretical accounts of institutional reproduction and change by reconceptualizing agency and structures as intersubjective relational accomplishments that co-constitute institutionalization. To this end, we developed a psychosocial approach to institutional work that views embodied performativity and affective relationality as central to the enactment, maintenance and disruption of institutions, offering a novel and provocative intervention into ongoing debates on microfoundations of institutional processes.
This paper explores men’s ambivalent relationship with gender equality within the homosocial context of management teams. Analysing 10 group discussions with male managers about increasing women’s representation in executive roles highlights how the male-dominated setting influences their engagement with gender equality. The study uncovers a dynamic, often conflictual, shift between subject positions across discussions and explores how speakers navigate tensions between hegemonic masculinity and gender equality. Using the concept of ‘discursive manoeuvring’, the analysis identifies two key dynamics: first, a transition from ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to ‘benevolent’ and ‘veiled hegemony’, which serves to stabilise the status quo; second, ongoing efforts to challenge this stability by distancing from hegemonic positions. Because the latter dynamic also remains unstable, both dynamics tend to reinforce rather than transforming the status quo. The findings highlight the importance of collective interactions within management teams to explain men’s ambivalent support for gender equality. They also demonstrate, both empirically and theoretically, why progress towards gender equality remains glacially slow.
How do organizations navigate the tension between climate action and entrenched business interests? Our 4.5-year ethnographic study of an energy company examines hidden power dynamics and temporal practices that shape corporate sustainability efforts. Our analysis shows that “practicing time,” that is, actively mediating between past legacies and future ambitions, is not merely a matter of scheduling or planning. Rather, it constitutes a contested arena in which organizational actors negotiate change. We identify three distinct temporal work practices—temporal confirming, temporal compromising, and temporal borrowing—each shaped by shifting dominance between organizational units. Power constellations between units influence how actors (can) engage in temporal work, while, in turn, temporal work itself can be seen as a way of exercising power. In so doing, our study highlights how powerful units draw on temporal practices to delay change, while less powerful units leverage shifts in the salience of internal and external sustainability pressures to accelerate sustainability actions. By uncovering how temporal work and shifting power entrenchment can either accelerate or delay climate action. We highlight how time and power dynamics shape corporate responses to climate change.
Elites have significant influence on their institutions and therefore whether elite newcomers sink or swim has important ramifications for many stakeholders, including elites’ colleagues, organizations, and wider society. And yet ‘sinking’ seems to be relatively common outcome for elite newcomers, whose high failure rates might suggest a sub-par socialization process. Given this problem, surprisingly little research has investigated how elite newcomers experience and respond to socialization. We address this lack of research through a qualitative study of elite newcomers, specifically new politicians entering a national legislature for the first time. Drawing on interviews and archival data, we illuminate the complex and at times ruthless process of elite newcomer socialization. Specifically, we identify four new socialization challenges that impact elite newcomers and suggest how these can develop socialization tactics theory. We identify reputational vulnerability as a novel motivator, caused by these challenges and compelling elite newcomers to respond. Finally, we reveal a range of protect and promote reputational behaviors elite newcomers use to respond in order to establish and maintain their elite position.
In contrast to the concept of craft, which is shaped by Western ontological assumptions connected to colonial logics, indigenous traditional modes of production (ITMP) arise from a distinct ontological worldview that guides how making is understood and practiced in indigenous communities. To move beyond colonial framings and advance Indigenous-grounded understandings of making, this systematic review draws on 47 empirical studies published in English and Spanish focused on ITMP in Indigenous communities across Abya Yala (Latin America). The review identifies three interrelated dimensions of ITMP: a kincentric paradigm that situates humans within nature, a reciprocal economy that renders making as an act of mutual exchange, and intergenerational matriarchal leadership through which knowledge and responsibility are transmitted. Together, these dimensions form a nested model that centers cultural continuity and renewal in making. Building on these insights, the review foregrounds ITMP as sovereign Indigenous lifeways rather than peripheral forms of craft, underscores the ethical imperative to center Indigenous voices and engage Indigenous epistemologies through respectful and reciprocal relations, and advances a decolonial conception of rigor when conducting a literature review.
Alienation is seen as endemic to the labour process and organizations. Put simply, if workers do not own the means, conditions and results of production they will remain alienated from their product, productive activity, species being and fellow human and non-human others. Some scholars have highlighted that, through their structures of democratic control and collective ownership of the means, conditions and results of labour, worker cooperatives reverse the capital-labour relationship to create a non-exploitative class process and therefore hold possibilities for 'disalienation'. However, the idea that worker cooperatives can be 'disalienating' is by no means universally accepted, with others arguing that subsumption of labour to capital can only be partially addressed through a cooperative's internal structure. Central to this debate is a worker cooperative's position within the capitalist market, and we argue, their use of wage labour. This article, based on an 18-month ethnography with 2 worker cooperatives, addresses the question: To what extent are members of worker cooperatives, engaged in wage labour, able to resist the forces of alienation?
Do platform workers inadvertently strengthen the algorithmic management (AM) systems they seek to resist? Drawing on 37 interviews with digital labor platform managers, this paper provides an organizational perspective on workers' "algoactivism" in food and grocery delivery. We reveal that platforms are not passive targets and their reactions to algoactivist acts unfold through a dynamic cycle of sensemaking across three stages: noticing, framing, and acting. We identify key determinants at each stage, explaining why platforms react differently to worker acts. Unlike traditional organizations with formal conflict management procedures, we suggest that platforms operate as adaptive socio-technical systems, continually recalibrating managerial mechanisms through experimentation. We find that workers exploit gaps that platforms subsequently close, rendering them unwitting contributors to their own control. Explaining workers' algoactivism and its role in shaping AM practices, we situate sensemaking within the duality of AM, highlighting how its interpretive flexibility creates tensions between intended design and actual use. We refine this conceptualization, asserting that the recursivity of AM is not open-ended, as interpretive flexibility may shrink with platforms continually adapting to algoactivist acts. While mutual shaping persists, recursive dynamics may compress worker agency, exposing the limits of algoactivism and challenging assumptions about its emancipatory potential.
There is a high prevalence of historic sexual abuse in institutions and organisations that have a duty of care towards children. Through a qualitative, abductive analysis of the evidential material submitted to the Religious Organisations and Settings investigation within the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) I theorise value frames for understanding how the perpetrators of child abuse may be privileged over victim-survivors within organisational contexts, contributing towards their protection. Value judgements are intersubjectively co-constructed and, in relation to the abjection of victim-survivors, perpetrators are framed as having higher worth. Three contextually relevant value frames are embedded into everyday processes and practices to protect perpetrators: intrinsic value - denoted by unquestioned, unconditional esteem; holy value - denoted by reverence of the edicts of faith and religion; and kinship value - denoted by the idea of the religious organisation or setting as 'family' and 'community'. I extend existing research by showing that the dynamic relationship between protection and abjection produces and maintains a fairly stable, though contingent, value hierarchy in which perpetrators are positioned above and better than victims, further enabling abuse to go unreported or unremarked.
How do older employees maintain trust and demonstrate value in age-diverse teams where seniority does not confer authority? In flat-structured teams where members hold similar titles, younger employees may question why older colleagues have not advanced, creating status incongruence and lowering trust in their ability. Drawing on status characteristics theory, we argue that older employees' relational age (i.e. the average age difference from their younger peers) can be negatively associated with co-worker trust and task performance. We further propose that older employees' voice behavior mitigates the negative effects of relational age. In Study 1, using a round-robin survey design with 199 employees across 56 Taiwanese teams, we find that voice moderates the negative relationship between relational age and co-worker trust, as well as the indirect effect on supervisor-rated performance. In Study 2, a vignette experiment with 177 Australian participants, relational age reduced trust via lower perceived competence (but not warmth), and this effect was eliminated when the older worker displayed voice. Our research shows how age-based status beliefs can be challenged in professional teams, contributing to scholarship on workplace stereotyping, intragroup status hierarchies, and proactive strategies in age-diverse teams, while offering practical guidance for sustaining older employees' careers.
Critical research is facing calls for practical relevance through academic activism, affirmation of alternatives, collaboration with practitioners and critical performativity, with earlier traditions of critique dismissed as being negative, detached, and ineffective. This paper challenges this framing by returning to debates within Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly Theodor Adorno's analysis of 'thinking actionism' - that is, a form of self-defeating critique based on a prioritization of practice, na & iuml;ve optimism, faith in collectivity, and academic self-aggrandizement. Using this theoretical lens, we problematize trends within recent practice-oriented and impact-focused critical scholarship and offer three provocations. First, we caution against equating critique with practice and impact and dismissing critical theory. Second, we highlight the indirect and often unintended influence of critical theory on practice and revisit Frankfurt School approaches - such as immanent critique and negative dialectics - as theoretical resources that advance the relation between theory and practice. Finally, we evaluate examples of intellectual engagements that illustrate the potential for this more dialectical approach to politics and organizing.
This article critically examines the complex dynamics related to dignity at work (DAW) in contemporary precarious employment in the United Kingdom. It argues that current DAW frameworks are typically focused on workers with one job, but what about the experiences of those who need to work in multiple jobs to make ends meet? To consider this, the article focuses on the complex experiences related to dignity when navigating between and participating in different workplaces, presenting the notion of 'dignity in, out and between work'. It provides a four-dimensional framework to renew DAW debates. The first two reflect original DAW frameworks revealing 'work intensification' and 'poor management, exploitation and abuse'. However, this article expands these conceptually and empirically by presenting a thematic broadening of work intensification and extensification across a mixture of jobs, with fragmented and complex temporal and spatial aspects of work. The third and fourth dimensions contribute two significant elements to DAW discussions. 'Stigma, humiliation and shame' incorporates issues such as in-work poverty and foodbank use. Finally, we emphasise tensions related to 'the value of work', where workers' contribution was not appreciated even if they held socially significant jobs.
We have only a limited understanding of the micro-level interactions that enable individuals to overcome the social and technical challenges associated with adopting socially beneficial practices. This article explores this question by zooming in on a case in which gamification mechanisms foster such adoption over the long term. Drawing on an abductive analysis of longitudinal qualitative data-including interviews, observations, and secondary sources-we examine how local authorities in France leveraged gamification to encourage households to adopt innovative waste management practices. Our findings identify three social mechanisms-affiliation with the group of adopters, insulation from pushback, and extension of the gamified experience. Through those mechanisms, gamification not only facilitates adoption but also transforms sympathizers into committed advocates, reinforcing engagement over time. These findings contribute to the literature on practice adoption and social dynamics by demonstrating how gamification sustains early adopters' long-term engagement with practices that require overcoming technical complexity and social adversity. In addition, the analysis advances the gamification literature by offering a processual perspective on the social mechanisms that drive the long-term impact of gamification.
