Abstract The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and behavioral data, is often expected to rapidly reorganize markets and social fields. This paper investigates instances of uneven algorithmization, understood as the selective adoption of AI within the same market, by focusing on field-level legitimation dynamics in a moralized market. Empirically, we study the Danish life insurance industry and ask why the field converged on the transformative use of AI for risk prevention, while abandoning experimentation with the more incremental and economically proven use of AI in pricing. Integrating the Strategic Action Fields (SAF) framework with scholarship on moralized markets, we show how the legitimacy of contested technologies is negotiated in contested markets. We find this to be a collective and politically charged process that unfolds at the field level, where technology legitimacy becomes localized and use-case specific as actors assess individual applications. Successful legitimation depends on the cultivation of legitimacy alignments across firms, customers, regulators, and broader publics. Through strategic framing that addresses performance outcomes, moral expectations, and the moral history of the market, skilled social actors craft local regimes of legitimation that shape patterns of uneven algorithmization.
Abstract This study explores the Swedish Enforcement Authority’s decision-making process to unpack the bureaucratic production chain and the roles of tools and artefacts. The aim is to explore and describe the organization of decisions, with a focus on the ‘programming’ of the decision-making process, the actors, and their discretion in relation to tools and programmes. This process allows the analysis to move beyond conventional approaches that criticize new public management and technology for reducing individual bureaucrats’ discretion and explaining how this is met with resistance. Combining governance, discretion, and actor–network theory, this study analyses documents and interviews to describe the programming, actors, and tools for case-processing, then (re)describes the decision-making process as an actor–network, before disentangling the various dimensions of discretion. Three main conclusions are drawn. First, bureaucratic principles, managerialism, and algorithmic governance meld into a joint ‘programming’ of the decision-making process. Second, bureaucratic case management can be understood as an actor–network mobilization linking actors with artefacts, which demonstrates that the transformation from analogue to digital governance is less discontinuous than often suggested. Third, discretion exists in various dimensions, but nuanced distinctions are required to extend beyond an all-or-nothing approach.
Abstract This article presents a Bourdieu-inspired comparative analysis of migrant employment in the Swedish ICT and restaurant sectors. The study examines how firms in the two sectors mobilise different forms of capital in the recruitment of migrant workers. While existing migration research tends to focus primarily on the capital held by migrants themselves, this article shifts attention to firms as key agents in economic fields. In doing so, it analyses how firms deploy cultural, social, and financial capital in recruitment processes and how these forms of capital are converted under different sectoral conditions. The analysis draws particularly on Bourdieu’s work on the economic field and argues that migrant employment must be understood within specific economic sub-fields, such as the ICT and restaurant sectors. These sectors are characterised by different configurations of capital, recruitment practices, and patterns of labour market integration. The article also examines the role of the so-called “migration industry”, showing that ICT firms are more likely than restaurant firms to engage migration intermediaries in recruitment and migration processes. More broadly, the article demonstrates how a Bourdieusian framework can deepen understanding of the organizational dynamics and forms of capital shaping international migration and labour market integration.
The dark side of hubris, characterized by overconfidence, excessive risk-taking, and power abuse, poses significant challenges to organizational sustainability. Previous research has primarily explored alternative selection and participation procedures as solutions to problematic hubris. This study conceptualizes hubris as an accountability issue and argues that removability operates as an institutional mechanism that reinforces communal norms and constrains excesses of authority. Given the scarcity of organizations with established recall mechanisms, this research draws on the long-standing democratic governance practices of monastic communities where recall mechanisms were developed to address power abuse by leaders. We survey leaders and regular members of 112 monastic communities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and analyze these monasteries’ websites to examine how recall options are associated with leaders’ self-presentation, risk-taking, and rule-breaking behaviors. The study thus contributes to organizational sociology by positioning recall mechanisms as a pragmatic institution to balance authority in times of growing needs for effective democratic governance institutions, offering modern organizations insights drawn from long-established governance practices.
Most authors conclude that loose coupling plays a positive role during a crisis but very few, if any, empirically examine what concretely happens when loosely coupled organizations – that is, organizations with a high number of loosely coupled activities and units – face a crisis. The Covid pandemic opened an opportunity to answer this question, given that universities are typical loosely coupled organizations. We considered five higher education institutions in France from January 2020 to February 2021 that experienced the same national regulations and health measures. We first observed that a high level of loose coupling was not detrimental to business continuity and that in loosely coupled organizations, coupling plays the reverse role of some loose coupling in tightly coupled organizations. Second, comparing loosely coupled and coupled activities within universities, we also observed that loose coupling could have negative or positive effects, depending on the conditions imposed by the French government: stay at home and move to remote work from the first lockdown to the summer of 2020; adapt to constant changes in national health guidelines after the beginning of the new academic year. We thus identify the conditions under which loose coupling becomes a solution, or not, in times of crisis.
The main goal of this review-essay is to provide information on how to theorize in studies of organization. While there exists a small and growing literature on this topic since around 2010, no consensus has yet been reached on what rules to follow when you theorize. To assist in this process, this essay looks at some early works on theorizing that so far have been largely neglected in the current discussion. They are the works through which the topic of theorizing was first introduced in social science, and which also, as it so happens, were made by scholars who all made important contributions to the study of organizations. Two of these pioneered the sociology of organizations (Robert K. and Peter Blau), and two of them are among the central figures in organization studies (James G. March and Karl Weick). The difference between what constitutes a consensus on a topic in science, on the one hand, and individual contributions to a science, on the other, is relevant for the argument in this essay and discussed with the help of the two useful concepts introduced by Ludwik Fleck: vademecum or handbook science and journal science.
From the perspective of translation theory, society can be understood as a highly intricate web of translation relations linking function systems, organizations, milieus, and persons. This complexity makes it difficult to come up with generalizable solutions to major societal problems (“Grand Challenges”) that are acted upon exactly as intended. This leads to translation theory’s take on organizations as “distribution heads.” Organizations enter the picture not as agents that can ensure, for example, that climate-friendly actions are taken, but as “translation agencies” that re-specify, re-embed, and dispatch solutions (or “solution-ideas”) toward other organizations, milieus, and persons. Project Drawdown and Action Speaks serve as two illustrative cases of such translation agencies. Neither of them produces climate solutions themselves; rather, they conceive their role as mediating the translation of existing solutions into a multiply differentiated society. For organizational sociology this offers a valuable analytical lens: it enables a more nuanced capture of processes of transformation and social change – encompassing, but not limited to, the difficulties inherent in those transformations. This is especially pertinent for processes that are still unfolding. Accordingly, solutions do not simply spread; rather, they are spread deliberately through the coordinated work of translation agencies.
Abstract Marketization research typically takes competition as a present condition and asks what follows. We ask what precedes it. University School, a Swedish municipal upper-secondary school, was established in 2005 against private competitors that did not arrive for 16 years. Drawing on Beckert’s fictional expectations, we distinguish the imaginary of competition – the cultural material available in a field – from imagined competition, the anticipation particular actors construct from it. The school, built to meet imagined private rivals, instead generated competition with the municipal schools whose students it had been designed to attract; building for a contest that had not arrived effectively brought one into being. Competition, once produced, did not stay between organisations but migrated into the relations among teachers, students, and parents, with consequences the founders neither intended nor controlled. This paper theorises the organisational work of preparing for competition that does not yet exist, and the competition that work can itself create.
Our study analyzes the adoption of the two-tier governance model in the German foundation sector, in which the one-tier model has traditionally been dominant. Drawing on data from 9,090 foundations established between 1870 and 2012, we show that foundations established in later periods are more likely to adopt a two-tier governance model. Moreover, since the German reunification, foundations established in East Germany have been more likely to adopt the two-tier model compared to their West German counterparts. We argue that this finding underscores the role of disrupted institutional legacies. In addition, we find that foundations initiated by organizations are more likely to adopt two-tier models than those established by individuals. The contribution of our study lies in integrating the role of institutional factors and founder agency to explain deviations from institutionalized blueprints. Our research provides insights into how institutional legacies and founder type influence these deviations, thereby helping to explain the evolution of organizational forms under changing institutional conditions.
In France, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was marked by intense cooperation between hospitals and a high level of job satisfaction, both of which declined in subsequent waves. How can these dynamics be explained? This paper demonstrates that the collective mobilisation cannot be accounted for solely by an injection of financial resources and the strength of a shared professional ethos; it claims instead that relations of cooperation must be understood as relations of power. Drawing on a qualitative study in 14 French hospitals (139 interviews), it shows that the initial wave created conditions and mechanisms that greatly enabled cooperation, but which then waned with ensuing waves. The paper argues that cooperation is related to three types of relationships that had improved during the first wave: those between healthcare professionals, between healthcare staff and top hospital management, between healthcare professionals, patients and their families. It identifies the mechanisms behind these relationships, respectively: the suspension of competition between doctors and departments, the greater autonomy given to healthcare professionals in management decision-making, and the absence of patients’ families, which enabled caregivers to reassert their professional authority. Conditions conducive to cooperation were no longer present during subsequent waves, making cooperation more difficult.
Our “Beacons of Organizational Sociology” series makes available, through essays or first-time translations, concepts and texts that have shaped debates in organizational sociology in non-English-speaking countries or presents reflections on such debates by established scholars. The second text in this series presents a model for holistic organizational analysis, named The Pentagon Model. The model is developed in Norway and has, during the last two decades, been successfully applied in many research projects, both basic and applied, and in different kinds of organizations. The model has also proved to be well-suited for educational purposes and for the dissemination of research-based findings. The model builds on established organization theories and rests on a basic argument that most organizational issues concerning qualities and capabilities can be fruitfully sorted into five interdependent categories: formal structure, technology, culture, interaction, and social relations and networks. This taxonomy can be used both as guidelines for data collection by qualitative or quantitative methods and for sorting findings into corresponding groups of variables. The model has proved to be widely applicable and can be used for studying phenomena on different organizational levels: individual, collective, system and ecological. It can also be used with different time perspectives: to explain things that happened in the past, to describe present-day situations, and to point to upcoming challenges and future possibilities.
In times of ongoing uncertainty and disruption, organizational resilience plays a key role in sustaining functionality and enabling adaptation. A central challenge of resilience lies in balancing stability and flexibility – an inherent organizational paradox. While this tension is well acknowledged in theory, there is limited insight into how individuals within organizations navigate it in practice, particularly in settings with high societal relevance and structural constraints. This study explores how employees and managers in German critical infrastructure organizations engage with the flexibility-stability paradox in their daily work, and how these practices relate to organizational resilience. Based on 40 qualitative interviews, the study identifies three key areas where tensions are especially pronounced: (1) organizational framework conditions between structure and adaptability, (2) work behavior between autonomy and collective processes, and (3) leadership between egalitarianism and directive clarity. The findings contribute to resilience research by offering empirically grounded insights into individual responses to paradoxical demands. In addition, the study further develops the concept of paradox work by highlighting its contextual nature and the variation in how individuals approach tension-laden situations.
Social sustainability has become a widely known term, not least in the area of housing and urban development. While the literature has improved our understanding of the various meanings and interpretations of the concept, there is still a need for studies that explore processes of organising for social sustainability as processes of translation that can take into consideration several dimensions of translation, i.e. shifts in meaning, as well as agency and interests. This paper aims to address this issue-complex by exploring how social sustainability is conceived and translated into practice in urban renovation projects. The contribution of our analysis is that we show how resources within organizational theory and research can contribute to a more general understanding of how popular but vague concepts are or are not transformed into action and the implications of this.
Researchers often examine how technology controls the labor of precarious workers while demonstrating the limits of technology on controlling professional workers. Drawing on a subset of 46 in-depth interviews pulled from a larger sample, I uncover how technical control operates in entry-level office work. Technical control takes one of two forms. First, workers conduct all their tasks in a computer program. I call this task-oriented technical control. Second, workers must log all their offline work into a computer program. I call this social-oriented technical control. The types of jobs controlled by the latter are often done by women and are jobs where control routinizes social interaction. Social-oriented technical control is also experienced more negatively than task-oriented technical control. I therefore show how technical control transforms gendered disparities in work tasks into gender inequality in workplace experiences. I also expose that work has become less autonomous higher up the occupational hierarchy than most researchers observe.
Organizational sociology focuses heavily on organizations and interorganizational structures. However, the societal effects of organizations tend to be neglected in this research context. This article aims to provide the conceptual groundwork for overcoming this situation. It discusses the concept of “organizational society,” developed in the second half of the 20th century, where impacts of organizations on social structure and societal development were a core focus. A common issue in this research was its focus on a specific organizational form: bureaucratic structures, which are typically large and characterized by a division of labor. We refer to this organizational form as an archtype and contend that its dominance is increasingly questioned in the 21st century. Building on this, the article proposes incorporating new forms of organization and it particularly considers hyper-organization, partial organization, and platform organization. Conceptualizations of these new forms of organization, however, have two weaknesses: First, they assume the archetype has been replaced by either hyper-organization, partial organization, or platform organization, neglecting both the persistence of the archetype and the heterogeneity of new organizational forms. Second, they inadequately address the societal preconditions and consequences of new organizational forms. The paper concludes with prospects of overcoming these weaknesses.
This theoretical article examines the unintended consequences of workplace inclusion efforts, arguing that excessive socialization can paradoxically lead to exclusion. Utilizing Robert K. Merton’s theory of unintended consequences as a conceptual framework, the study critiques the assumption that collective social activities inherently foster inclusivity. While such initiatives aim to promote collective well-being and personal growth, they may inadvertently alienate individuals who prefer to opt out of energy-intensive interactions. To flesh out that claim, this article introduces a theoretical process model that challenges the homogeneous view of employees that underpins existing inclusion strategies, advocating for a more flexible, individualized approach that moves beyond collective enforcement. The findings offer a novel perspective on the importance of flexible organizational scripts, encouraging organizations to adopt more nuanced workplace inclusion strategies that respect diverse employee preferences and needs.
Labor market entering and workplace integration of marginalized migrant groups remain a pressing challenge for policymakers and one of the central topics in the research. Yet, as researchers with migrant backgrounds, we have become increasingly frustrated over dominant discourses, both in the research and in the public sphere that rarely center the voices of those who are the subjects of integration on an equal footing. In this essay, we call for a change of perspective, arguing on why refugee voices should be centered in studies of labor market entering and workplace integration in the management and organizational literature. In doing so, we highlight how their voices are prevailingly absent in this literature and how this omission prevents refugees from being understood analytically as actors with agency. We also suggest and illustrate how the use of biographical interviews and solicited diaries, while not commonly used in the organizational and management literature, have, despite some limitations, the potential for redressing this problematic shortcoming and give greater attention to the choices made by refugees, and their own voices.
In this article we argue that organizational research on competition has left the relation between organizations and consumers largely unaddressed. While marketing scholars have explored how individual organizations try to manipulate the relation with specific groups of consumers, less has been said about how competing organizations collectively form and influence their relation with consumers. This is especially the case in contexts of public services provision, such as education. To explore this relation, we examine how upper secondary schools in a quasi-market fictionalize their offerings to influence students’ desire. By analyzing 117 school descriptions from Stockholm’s (Sweden) upper secondary school market, we identify four ideal types of fictionalized offerings: The Doorman, The Role Model, The Butler, and The Gardener. These fictionalizations perpetuate two consumer fictions, namely desirable futures and identity realization. Through these fictions, prospective students are invited to realize their supposedly incomplete selves. Our research contributes to the organizational study of competition by showing that schools respond to competition by reinforcing a consumption rationality, potentially shaping students’ desire for certain educational qualities. Additionally, we contribute to critical educational research by questioning the assumption that competition fosters innovation.
Institutions remain essential units of sociological analysis, and yet they persist as conceptually fuzzy nearly five decades after the emergence of new institutionalism. In the following essay, a historical, comparative, and evolutionarily-informed framework for differentiating institutions from the individuals, organizations, and clusters of organizations that inhabit them is presented. Drawing from a diverse array of sociology, this model offers two key contributions to the study of organizations: an institutional ecological model built up from actors, organizations, and constellations of organizations and a theory of institutional culture that rests on a rehabilitated conceptualization of generalized symbolic media and its role in standardization and exchange between organizations. Implications are discussed.
We adopt an ethnographic approach grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to examine the controversies surrounding student performance in a Brazilian State School recovering from a post-disaster scenario. By tracing the networks of actors – school staff, students, educational regulations, and community concerns – we illustrate how translation processes shape and stabilise organisational actions. The analysis reveals that controversies over project-based versus traditional learning approaches prompted continuous renegotiation of roles, interests, and goals. These renegotiations drew on output-based regulations, prior award-winning educational projects, and local socio-environmental issues to enact a provisional future that the school should achieve. Our findings suggest that contradictory interests in highly regulated public institutions do not necessarily mean a lack of success in achieving collective objectives but instead create opportunities for their creative redefinition. We demonstrate how past experiences and imagined futures influence public managers’ and employees’ decisions in negotiating these controversies, temporarily stabilising organisational practices.
