Drawing on institutional theory and the literature on materiality, I address the research question: how are institutions maintained by buildings and the artifacts within them? I specifically focus on the “intangible” aspects of spaces, extending the existing literature on enchantment evoked by spaces. Based on the findings from an ethnographic study of the UK Parliament, I put forward a concept of institutional aura which is a socially constructed sense of connection with the people and events of the past amplified by the place. Institutional aura produces three effects: it grants people legitimacy and status, it imbues power and creates historical imprints of people and events from the past. Institutional aura and the processes of remembering and forgetting affect people's lack of motivation for change.
The familiar claim that generative AI drives the cost of cognition toward zero gets the problem backward. What AI cheapens is the appearance of knowledge: plausible claims that circulate as if warranted. Drawing on Epinets, this essay argues that large language models enter organizations as proposition-producing systems without the epistemic states their outputs normally imply: belief, justified knowledge, recognized ignorance, and accountability. That is the condition. The organizational danger begins when such systems are miscategorized as humanlike knowers. Their outputs can acquire epistemic authority before epistemic responsibility is established. Error becomes harder to detect because it arrives without the signals that normally make wrongness visible: hesitation, qualification, and acknowledged uncertainty. Correct and incorrect outputs can feel the same, making correction-seeking unlikely. The essay traces this progression from plausible output to miscategorization, authority capture, and epistemic misalignment, and then asks how organizations can govern epistemic standing in hybrid human-AI systems.
Organized crime has incommensurable impact on economies and societies, yet criminal organizations and careers have very scarcely been studied in management literature. To do so, we elaborate on the concept of status, arguing that career success in organizational crime is based on the acquisition of prestige, which connects three levels of action and sources of prestige: individual, organizational, and social. We find that in organized crime, status is empirically based on the unequal capacity to scare others. Such a capacity must be to some extent legitimate because criminal organizations do well only when embedded in local social structures. Criminal careers consist of three steps. The first is to establish oneself in the criminal world, before consolidating their status through control over their territory. Finally, criminals manage to make durable their status by investing in the legal economy. This study contributes to research on organized crime, status, and stigmatization
Extremist organizations and movements have long been examined in fields such as political science and sociology, often using organizational concepts to explain their structure and behavior. Yet within management and organization scholarship, extremism itself has rarely been theorized as an organizational phenomenon with implications for institutional dynamics. This essay develops a conceptual framework that positions extremism as a form of identity-driven institutional work that emerges when actors perceive existing institutions as incompatible with deeply held values. Under such conditions, institutional conflict may be framed as a zero-sum moral struggle, motivating disruptive efforts to delegitimize or dismantle institutional orders rather than reform them. Drawing on research from institutional theory, social movements, and extremism studies, I clarify how extremist organizing differs from related concepts such as institutional entrepreneurship and radical activism. In doing so, it highlights how extremism can reshape institutional boundaries, intensify field-level conflict, and influence organizational response to grand challenges.
This paper aims to advance our understanding of the intricacies of how copreneurial couples navigate their work-family interface when boundaries are blurred. While there are many studies of work-life balance and of managing family businesses, studies of the work-family interface in micro-businesses are relatively rare. Our contribution lies in extending work-family interface theories within a copreneurial context by offering a new theoretical lens, the phenomenological notion of togetherness, which we elaborate as a relational attunement and emotional sharing that involves an implicit sense of care and consideration. We do so by drawing on a study of couples who own small copreneurial leisure and tourism businesses in Greece, to elaborate how they navigate the day-to-day challenges of balancing work and family life. We elucidate their lived experience by drawing on a rarely used methodology in the field-Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
In blurring the distinction between third- and first-person perspectives of entrepreneurial action, current theories fail to differentiate the knowledge domains of scholars and entrepreneurs. We develop a shift in theorizing entrepreneurial action, focusing on a self engaged in practical reasoning. In our framework, entrepreneurial action is what makes one an entrepreneur—there is no entrepreneur prior to it. We elucidate entrepreneurial action as implicating a complex intention, with the entrepreneurial self as the cause of action. Entrepreneurship thus entails time-extended, social agency: entrepreneurs act both in the present and for the future. By regaining the first-person footing of entrepreneurial action theory, we open new avenues for theoretical development.
This study explores how corporate Project Management Offices (PMO) in project-based organizations navigate diverse transformation paths toward organizational agility. While agile transformation is often treated as a linear process guided by maturity models or prescriptive frameworks, our research challenges this assumption by applying the lens of equifinality—the idea that similar outcomes can be reached through multiple, context-sensitive pathways. Drawing on 11 in-depth case studies across diverse sectors, we identify four distinct PMO configurations that reflect varying levels of agility and project governance maturity. These configurations—Debutant, Traditional, Agile Supporter, and Agile Leader—illustrate how PMO functions not merely as passive structures, but as dynamic mediators of change. Our findings show that agile transformation unfolds through multiple trajectories shaped by structural constraints and cultural readiness. We argue that understanding PMO evolution through equifinality reframes agility as a contingent achievement—driven not by a singular target state, but by alignment between context, capability, and purpose.
Political conversations are increasingly shaping organizational life, yet management research lacks a unified construct for understanding this phenomenon. We introduce workplace political discourse (WPD): episodic interpersonal communication in organizational settings that explicitly references partisan identities, political actors, or contested public policies. We delineate WPD's conceptual boundaries, distinguish it from six adjacent constructs, and specify three dimensions—behavioral, relational, and content—along which episodes vary. We propose a process model identifying five pathways through which WPD generates organizational consequences: four dysfunctional pathways (identity threat, resource depletion, self-censorship, and grim expectations) and one conditional constructive pathway that operates when communicative action and enabling conditions are present. Emerging evidence suggests that employees self-select into political discussions often with politically similar coworkers, meaning costs fall disproportionately on political minorities who suppress rather than express. We conclude with a research agenda targeting macro-to-micro translation, pathway differentiation, constructive versus dysfunctional conditions, and construct measurement.
In this essay, we vulnerably reflect upon an exploration of love and loss in academic life grounded in nine months of shared reflective musings following one of us receiving a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. Together, we harness the powerful metaphor of the M & ouml;bius strip to conceptualize love and loss as inseparable, co-constitutive forces shaping identity, relationality, and meaning-making. We offer four interwoven themes and the tensions we felt within them-emotional (grief/gratitude), social (isolation/connection), ethical (extraction/generativity), and temporal (very little time/lots of time)-as an invitation to reflect upon how we each engage within our roles, with our 'academic work', and with those around us. We view these tensions as both an illustration of the profound intertwining between personal and professional and love and loss and an affirmation that being an academic is not merely a cognitive pursuit, but a deeply human one.
We reflect on how recent changes in the moral landscape of Western society that prioritize harm avoidance in all its forms have led to the emergence of victimhood culture in some organizations. We explain how this cultural development has been augmented by an expansion of the concept of harm to include psychological and emotional harms that are entirely subjective and therefore impossible to refute. Together, these conditions have affected the dynamics of workplace conflict and how managers adjudicate and resolve them. We argue that when a victimhood culture takes hold in an organization and the avoidance of subjective harm is prioritized, it can lead to the sanctification of victims and dichotomous thinking habits that create two types of metaphorical monsters. We end by offering a recommendation for how managers might avoid the epistemological and ethical bind created by this type of thinking.
This provocation argues that the Academy of Management's Annual Meeting has become increasingly misaligned with the organization's stated commitments to inclusion, sustainability, and scholarly development. While AoM remains a vital institution, its flagship conference-now routinely exceeding 10,000 participants-undermines meaningful intellectual exchange and community formation through fragmenting scale, superficial paper sessions, and status-driven sociality. Two recent disruptions-the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing Trump-driven political precarity of the United States as a host location-have exposed the costs of organizational inertia and the normalization of risk and exclusion. Drawing on existing alternatives, including developmental formats within AoM and elsewhere, as well as confederated and hybrid approaches, the essay contends that the limitations of the current meeting can and should be addressed. Reimagining the conference as smaller, more developmental, and genuinely hybrid would reflect institutional care and align AoM's most visible event with its professed values.
While in recent years there has been a surge of studies examining the role and contribution of the chair of the board, there is still a surprising paucity of work examining the leadership role and behaviour of the chair under specific company and environmental conditions. Specifically, not much literature examines the chair role in relation to the CEO during company turnarounds, or more generally during crisis. This study conducts elite interviews with 30 chairs and CEOs of large UK-listed companies to examine the chair role in relation to the CEO during turnaround execution. Findings from thematic analysis, characterise the chair leadership as a dynamic buffering role that insulates the CEO and management team from unwarranted performance pressures arising from shareholders and other stakeholders (e.g., market analysts), while simultaneously regulating CEO emotion, cognition and behaviour towards such pressures, thereby ensuring strategic alignment and direction during the turnaround execution.
Corporate sustainability actors often work in office-based settings, spatially and symbolically removed from the ecosystems their work seeks to protect. Management scholars emphasize ecological embeddedness-long-term, place-based immersion in ecosystems-as foundational to ecological sensemaking and sustainable practice. How, then, does ecological orientation emerge without sustained immersion? Drawing on in-depth interviews with sustainability professionals, we examine retrospective accounts of formative experiences with biodiversity and nature. We introduce ecological light bulb moments (ELBMs): vivid, direct or mediated encounters with biodiversity and nature, retained for their emotional intensity, sensory vividness, and cognitive salience. The ELBMs serve as enduring interpretive anchors influential in shaping ecological commitments, even without sustained ongoing immersion in professional work. We contribute to theory by extending ecological embeddedness beyond continuous immersion to include episodic, symbolic, and affective experiences, and by theorizing-drawing on the retention component of sensemaking-how retained experiences may condition early stages of meaningful ecological sensemaking despite professionals' spatial and symbolic distance from ecosystems.
For new ventures in contested fields, securing legitimacy is a paramount challenge. In the platform economy, firms often enter with a potent entrepreneurship rhetoric, but as they face contestation over their labor and regulatory practices, this rhetoric can devolve into a calculated misrepresentation-a legitimacy lie. Yet, the process by which such lies are performed and defended over time as a form of institutional work remains undertheorized, leaving a gap in our understanding of how platform firms achieve institutional entrenchment. Uncovering this process, we theorize the legitimacy lie as a form of dark institutional work. Using 47 driver interviews, extensive archival materials, court documents, and leaked internal communications (the Uber Files), we analyze the contested operations of Uber and Ola in India (2013-2020). Our analysis reveals a recursive two-phase process. In Phase 1 (Proactive Framing), platforms construct the legitimacy of the "micro-entrepreneur." In Phase 2 (Reactive Escalation), legitimacy threats trigger a defensive escalation of dark work, including sharp increases in symbolic rhetoric, the material imposition of opaque algorithmic control, and the relational co-optation of powerful stakeholders. This dark work, in turn, provokes driver resistance, which constitutes a new legitimacy threat that refuels the cycle. This recursive process functions as the mechanism that enables the platform's institutional entrenchment. We advance institutional work scholarship by theorizing this process, explaining how the successful performance of a legitimacy lie allows a venture to cross a critical threshold from a fragile reliance on normative legitimacy to a state of durable structural power.
Research in cultural entrepreneurship has shown how entrepreneurs gain legitimacy through entrepreneurial storytelling. Entrepreneurs are seen as strategic cultural operators who draw on cultural resources to gain support from audiences. There have been calls to move beyond consensual views of culture to examine the diverse cultural resources actors mobilize. We conduct a qualitative study of an entrepreneurial program and ask: How do tensions across cultural resources shape entrepreneurial storytelling? Drawing on the ventriloquial approach, we trace how varied concerns-what actors value and are attached to-are voiced, negotiated, and contested. Our findings demonstrate the ways in which entrepreneurial storytelling is shaped by tensions between competing cultural resources, such as market expectations and scientific rigor. These tensions influence entrepreneurial decisions, including choices about business models, target markets, and engagement with stakeholders. Our study highlights the tension-driven dynamics and moral dimension embedded in the deployment of cultural resources in entrepreneurial storytelling.
Most approaches to qualitative research methods in management and organization studies (MOS) implicitly enact spatial perspectives, crystallized in the idea of "accessing the field." Field sites are thus performed as objective spaces in which research takes place. In this paper, we set out to challenge this spatial perspective by developing a processual approach that conceptualizes fieldwork as "inquiry" as defined by John Dewey. To this end, we draw on an inter-case analysis of four independent research projects to demonstrate the processual, fluid, continuous, and shared constitution of a field of inquiry. We call this alternative approach "dancing with the field." It allows us to move beyond the highly spatialized notion of access to the field and to materialize or prioritize different forms of relationality. We understand "accessing the field" and "dancing with the field" as two intertwined and complementary modes of both attachment to and detachment from the field. We reflect on the methodological implications of these movements.
Moving away from a tradition of craft production to an increasingly bureaucratic, mass-produced mode, the field of organization studies is becoming more formulaic. The subfield of "organizational aesthetics" is an example of a potential antidote, a nomadic foray into more exotic research contexts. However, the exploration of aesthetic phenomena for organizational purposes has largely conformed to an entrenched utilitarian paradigm that pursues managerial relevance and prioritizes "function" over "form." This essay highlights the blocking capacity of the utilitarian paradigm, questioning its assumptions and promoting a non-utilitarian perspective on aesthetics, inspired by the writings and poetry of Jim March. Drawing on art history, I direct attention to the aspects of aesthetic phenomena that militate against organization and commercial exploitation, and stimulate appreciation of beauty, sensory experiences and more elegant, less formulaic writing.
Managing differences is a perennial challenge of social life. Although such tensions appear across time, space, and cultures, their manifestations vary widely - who is in conflict and why, who is marginalized, and whether diversity is best addressed at the level of collectives, sub-groups, or individuals. Yet despite profound differences in social histories, demographic compositions, and local challenges, diversity scholarship and practice have converged on a remarkably similar, United States-based approach to managing difference under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The effectiveness of many such programs remains uncertain even within the United States, raising doubts about their suitability for global export. We suggest that this convergence reflects a form of soft, epistemic neocolonialism, in which the same diversity categories and proposed solutions spread across the world through institutional influences rather than local needs or demonstrated effectiveness. While identity-based approaches may advance marginalized groups in some settings, their application elsewhere risks misalignment and the diversion of limited scholarly resources from locally salient concerns. We conclude by calling for decolonialisation and greater pluralism in how societies define and manage diversity.
Drawing on interviews with 27 professional investors and proceeding from a resource dependence theoretical lens, this study investigates how professional investors perceive the effectiveness of mandated approaches to increasing board independence in achieving intended governance goals in the Nigerian banking sector. We inductively identify three distinct effectiveness categories for board independence approaches: quixotic, symbolic, and practical. We further unpack seven contextual factors that influence these perceptions, namely person-specific utility; board cronyism; loss of independence over time; disconnection with business realities despite their technical competence; non-executive directors' (NEDs') concern for business survival; NEDs' subservience to the major shareholder; and NEDs' reputational standing. We provide insights that demonstrate that the mandated approaches to increasing board independence are not universally effective in achieving intended governance goals and must instead be evaluated within their institutional and contextual realities.
By any measure and in every higher education context, university students need more mental health and wellbeing (SMHW) care and support. Institutional mental health clinical capacity cannot keep up with student demand, and misguided university leaders advocate increasingly for educators to serve as SMHW "first responders" or "front lines" supporters. In this article I argue that institutional leadership should stop expecting, assuming or pretending that educators are mental health experts and that educators themselves should refuse to serve in this quasi-clinical capacity. As a sustainable and ethical alternative, I show how experiential learning connects educators with positive SMHW outcomes through fostering relational skills development. Experiential educators can enable mental health-supporting outcomes with learning opportunities we already employ. I end with four actions that experiential educators should take, staying out of a health provider role.
