Since its inception in 2020, Organization Theory has sought to provide an open and inclusive space for theorizing – a space that explicitly embraces diversity and paradigmatic plurality. In this editorial essay, we introduce a new section of the journal, “Catalyzing & Crystallizing,” and outline how it complements the existing “Conversations & Controversies” format. While “Conversations & Controversies” is designed to capture and foster debates around important topics within organization and management studies, “Catalyzing & Crystallizing” seeks to stimulate engagement with emerging topics and conceptual ideas originating at the margins of, or even beyond, our traditional domain of scholarly inquiry. Together the two sections strengthen the journal’s commitment to theoretical plurality, to intellectual openness, and to novel and innovative forms of organizational theorizing.
Crisis management has been on the agenda of organization and management scholars for decades, but normative debate on the ethics of crisis management is rare. Most studies implicitly aim for minimal disruption of organizational functioning and a rapid restoration of the status quo, prioritizing values of control and order. In this paper, I offer a normative critique and argue that we must devote more theoretical attention to the purpose of crisis management. To this end, I propose a new purpose for crisis management that is based on the feminist ethics of care. This care-based approach is developed through three normative directions: compassionate caring, responsible intervening, and meaningful restructuring. I provide a framework for how new missions, visions, values, actionable pathways, and aspirational outcomes can advance a care-based approach in organizations, and I discuss the implications for organization theory, empirical research, and practice.
Organizational democracy is often grounded in humanist assumptions—such as individual rights, rational agency, and procedural equality—while overlooking the ecological and material entanglements that sustain both organizations and life itself. Framing this humanist foundation as the “ Anthropocentric Dilemma of Democracy ,” this article reimagines democratic organizing through the lens of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminist theory. A speculative vignette set in 2050—featuring democratic organizing with previously excluded others, such as a heatwave, an extinct bee, or a future child—illustrates how organizations might engage with material interfaces, embodied and affective attunement, and ethical responsiveness to and with forgotten kin. At its core, the paper theorizes three interrelated registers of posthuman organizing that reposition democratic subjects within interdependence and vulnerability: (I) acknowledging “heterogeneous assemblages,” (II) attuning “zoe/geo/technobodies,” and (III) cultivating “affirmative relational ethics.” This contribution advances democratic organizing literature by embedding democracy within asymmetrical ecological and techno-material becoming. It further extends new materialist and posthuman organizational theorizing through a critical and feminist exploration of how organizing can understand itself as part of—and be driven by—planetary fragility, technological exuberance, and pervasive inequity that call for affirmative responses. Finally, the paper proposes a speculative and affirmative mode of theorizing.
With reflexivity becoming an increasingly important theme in organization studies (OS), this article extends an invitation to consider how researcher reflexivity can become a conceptual resource for developing organizational research designs. Engaging with and adding to current theoretical debates on reflexivity, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and career as exemplars in proposing the importance of ‘epistemic reflexivity’, which we suggest has untapped potential to further theorizing and address scholastic biases. We discuss how reflexivity can be translated into an orientation to research that guides methodological awareness and leads to epistemologically robust research designs, encouraging new and more diverse theory generation that seeks to liberate itself from tradition and power structures within the field. Building on Bourdieu, we identify three interrelated principles of epistemic reflexivity for the construction of the organizational research object : (1) breaking with pre-constructed categories and research objects with consideration of the choices made in the research process; (2) reflecting on the researcher’s social origin and position in the academic field; and (3) the positioning of the research vis-a-vis other studies and academic traditions in the OS field . We further argue that these principles are developed throughout the researcher’s career, contributing to the construction of an embodied ‘reflexive researcher habitus’. We suggest that this reflexive research orientation to research object construction helps in moving the OS field towards heightened research transparency and methodological rigour for the development of research objects that capture the complexity of organizational phenomena and their diverse contexts.
Democracy is a key concept in management and organization studies (MOS), but it is often not explicitly theorized. In this article, we draw on political theory to show how democracy can be clearly integrated in MOS and how this integration opens up a new and important research agenda. We provide an overview of different MOS literatures that include the idea of democracy, such as democratic organizing, corporate political activity or political corporate social responsibility. We distinguish among three research areas based on unique conceptual and analytical foci: (a) democracy within the organization, and democracy as part of the organization’s environment that (b) affects it and/or (c) is influenced by it. We develop a comprehensive framework across these research foci, leveraging four canonical perspectives on democracy (liberal, republican, deliberative and agonistic). This framework helps organize diverse MOS research on democracy, improves conceptual clarity and highlights key future research avenues. We discuss how our framework impacts MOS research, emphasize the importance of recognizing different perspectival assumptions in democracy research in MOS, and explore how studying interactions between these areas can advance such research.
What makes some organizations stay the course with their social and environmental commitments while others, in the face of political adversity and shifting stakeholder views, do not? In this paper, we argue that the answer to this question lies in capturing the differences in character between organizations and how their character shapes what organizations consider their moral obligations to be. Building on moral philosophy, we expand on the limited writings on organizational character in the literatures on CSR, business ethics and organizational theory. We use our expanded conceptualization to develop a theoretical typology of organizational characters and elaborate a process model that explains when and how an organization may shift in its moral reasoning and develop a different kind of character for itself. Theorizing organizations as agents with a moral character sheds light on the emergence of organizational purpose and offers implications for ongoing research on purpose, CSR, and ethics within organizational theory, research, and practice.
In this paper, we theorize the institutional dynamics of hype by approaching hype as involving translation that holds potential to threaten institutional orders. Theorizing the relationship between hope, expectations, and master-ideas, we build a process model of hype involving translation of a pathway passing through three distinct phases: materialization, mobilization, and immunization. In doing this, we chart a new approach to explore the role of hype when altering and potentially even disrupting institutions, without significant blowback, driving a particular form of radical institutional change. The paper contributes to seminal work on hype produced by entrepreneurship and science and technology studies, as well as to research on organizational institutionalism and the travel and translation of ideas.
This commentary responds to the theorization of individuals as institutions, arguing that person-institutions are an outcome of person-brands. We contend that the ontology of person-brands impedes their full institutionalization due to inherent fallibility, instability and the ongoing management required to maintain their public image. By leveraging marketing theory on the ontology of person-brands, we offer organizational scholars tools to assess what we term ‘institutional potential’ – a person’s ability to overcome the fallibility of their personhood to achieve institutionalization. Using Taylor Swift as our focal case, we demonstrate how instability, contention of values and meaning-making and non-transcendence beyond personhood challenge the taken-for-grantedness required for institutional sedimentation. Our insights lead to a research agenda that emphasizes longitudinal dynamics of person-institution formation and a broader taxonomy of person institutions.
What distinguishes organizations from other social collectives is a recurring question in organization theory. This article engages with the notion of "organizationality" as a recent proposition stemming from CCO (communicative constitution of organization) scholarship to address this question. We argue that by claiming to synthesize a number of insights worked out in organization studies over the last decades, what we call the "theory of organizationality" commits to a number of unproblematized ontological assumptions, which may be shared well outside its CCO source. Questioning those assumptions may, therefore, be useful to help organizational scholarship as a whole to grow on more solid theoretical grounds, making our ideas clearer not only about what it is we study but also how to relate among our various approaches and with other fields of social inquiry.
Nigam, Amis and Logue use the case of Taylor Swift to argue that "individual people can become institutions" (p. 2). Although we share their admiration of Taylor Swift and agree that much can be learned through serious research on Swift, she is not an institution, nor should individuals be conceptualized as institutions. Institutions are, by definition, larger social entities, and the benefits of viewing individuals as institutions are outweighed by negative conceptual costs. Our counter argument draws from inhabited institutionalism and is threefold. First, instead of depicting individuals as institutions, we make the case that such people are key participants in broader institutional mythologies which, although tethered to individuals, are greater than them. Second, and relatedly, this is because institutional mythologies develop, exist, and persist through the collective interactions of people-their inhabitants. Third, and somewhat separate to inhabited institutionalism, depicting individuals as institutions disattends to and diminishes other valuable, sociological means of theorizing influential persons, and we outline the alternative benefits of viewing them as leaders, totems, and cultural creators.
Drawing on Taylor Swift as an example, we propose that people, as individuals rather than as representatives of an office, can become institutions. We propose that an individual can become a focal point around which a distinctive and enduring set of roles and repertoire of interactions across roles emerges, enabling and embodying a distinctive set of values. In doing so, these people together with the role relations around them become institutions. As institutions, they provide an important blueprint for social life for at least some people in a broader society. Our work advances organizational and institutional theorizing by proposing a new mode, individuals, by which institutions, with their attendant values, norms and understandings, can develop and spread.
Legitimacy tests occur when an event – such as an organizational accident, revelations about unethical business practices, or the detection of potentially harmful products – calls into question the conformity of an organization’s modus operandi with the expectations of its evaluating audiences. In this paper, we draw on the concept of justification work to improve our understanding of how legitimacy tests arise, evolve and are eventually settled. Specifically, we theorize how legitimized higher-order principles (orders of worth) are mobilized through discursive and material account giving during legitimacy tests. Our framework emphasizes the process of complexifying accounts as legitimacy tests evolve, which can serve to decrease the initial polarization between challengers and focal organizations. Furthermore, we theorize the conditions that affect whether or not a legitimacy test becomes settled, such as social actors’ competence in mobilizing appropriate orders of worth and aligning situational evidence with established societal categories of value.
The proliferation of unsupported, misleading, and deceptive communication in public discourse, often referred to as post-truth communication (PTC), presents a pressing challenge to democratic societies today. While PTC thrives on attacking established organizations such as political parties, academic institutions, traditional news media, and societally engaged corporations, in doing so it also brings forth its own forms of organization of various degrees. However, the organizational dynamics of PTC have received limited attention in organization theory, thus far. We shed new light on these dynamics based on a perspective that considers communication as constitutive of organizational phenomena (CCO). We further advance this perspective by integrating Robert Cooper's notion of "dis/organization" and Michel Serres' notion of the "parasite." We develop a model of escalating dis/organization, highlighting how PTC maintains its own organizational properties by persistent disordering of established organization. More specifically, we show how PTC accomplishes interconnectivity, identity, and actorhood by disordering these same properties in established organization through escalating disruption of decision-making, identity simulation, and authority exploitation. Our contribution to organization theory is twofold. First, we offer an explanation of how PTC attains its organizational existence at the expense of disordering established organization. Second, we develop a model that specifies in detail the dynamics between PTC-driven and established organization as a two-sided form of escalating dis/organization. In addition to this, our study yields practical implications for how established organization can de-escalate PTC by embracing rather than seeking to suppress its foundational disordering properties.
While the future is unknowable, this intriguing temporal category has become a predominant issue in modern discourse. However, less is known about how actors navigate tensions and contradictions that arise when engaging with the future in strategy-making. This gap is problematic, as unresolved tensions may limit social actors' ability to generate novel insights and fully embrace the future's uncertainty. This paper presents a dialectical framework that explains inherent future-related tensions and contradictions in the strategy-making process, showcases four perspectives of the future-incremental, expanding, punctuated, and speculative-and explores how social actors synthesize these tensions through the practice of imagining. In doing so, this paper contributes to scholarship on future-making and strategy-making, highlighting theoretical implications and outlining promising avenues for future research.
Scholars have used network concepts and methods to explain a wide range of organizational phenomena. Despite this broad interest, prevalent approaches tend to neglect a critical constitutive dimension of network ties: their history. We invoke the concept of relational history to signify the temporal path and biography of a network tie. We argue that a network tie's history shapes what the relationship means to the parties involved, what can be accomplished in and through the relationship, and how the relationship might further evolve. In directing the attention of organizational network researchers to the relational history of network ties, we aim to complement and expand the field's predominant focus on structuralist, ahistorical and reductionist views of relationships and networks. We highlight how a relational history perspective has the potential to reorient core debates in organizational network research, such as those around network cognition, agency, brokerage and multiplexity. We also illustrate the implications of adopting the proposed relational history perspective for the data and methods used by network researchers. Overall, we argue that accounting for relational history can stimulate new research across a broad spectrum of organizational phenomena.
The world is fuelled by tensions, contradictions and dilemmas that cannot be solved, or where both the solution and the problems are unknown. Organizing in this milieu requires a theory for a world that is unknowable and still needs to be managed. We argue that such a theory can be built by drawing on rhetoric, but not the conventional form of rhetoric that is fascinated with persuasion, cognition, and knowledge construction. We turn instead to the history of rhetoric as it developed into a set of practices capable of informing individual and collective action in the face of an unknowable reality. This alternative perspective leads to theorizing the tensions and contradictions of organizing, not as a gap that must be filled with knowledge to be reified as a 'thing', nor as a cognitive ambiguity blurring opposing demands, but as a mystery that cannot ultimately be known (a 'no-thing') but can be enacted through ritualized practices of inquiry to inspire imagination and pragmatic action. We illustrate our theoretical argument with anecdotal examples inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals.
Within the organizational change literature, resistance is often treated in ways that tether it to change as its shadow side and, consequently, minimize its value. In contrast to prior approaches, we offer a generative approach to theorizing resistance to change—one that suggests important contributions it can make to change when considered in its own right. We discuss three such contributions: surfacing rather than covering deep-rooted societal conflicts, fostering the development of group and organizational identity, and sustaining important differences. We offer narrative vignettes that illustrate each of these: the differing responses of evangelical Christians and human rights groups to World Vision, a humanitarian aid organization, and its brief decision to allow the employment of individuals in same-sex marriages; United States Roman Catholic sisters’ response to a Vatican Apostolic Visitation; and the steps taken by attorneys in Texas to resist the death penalty in counter-intuitive, entirely legal, but rarely enacted ways. In doing so we demonstrate how resistance in and of itself can address both theoretical and practical tensions pertinent to change. Theoretically, it can add a “neither/nor” dimension to “both/and” approaches to paradox and dialectics. Practically, it suggests why many standard ways of dealing with major societal conflicts are unlikely to succeed and what can be done instead.
Over three decades ago, Marshall Scott Poole and Andrew Van de Ven proposed using paradoxes to develop more rigorous and robust organizational theories. We reignite their efforts while offering two important advances. First, we introduce to their initial ideas the expanding paradox literature to suggest how scholars can generate creative theories by surfacing and engaging tensions. We label this process paradoxical theorizing , which we define as a set of practices leveraging interdependent contradictions to generate new theory. Second, recognizing that extant theorizing emphasizes cognitive analysis and formal reasoning, we seek to expand this approach by unpacking four modalities of paradoxical theorizing and identifying the embedded tensions within each modality. We contribute to organizational theory by explicating a process and modalities that draw on tensions to generate more creative theories.
Classical views on organizing for innovation suggest that exploration and exploitation can be balanced in ambidextrous organizations by first separating and then integrating the two. In this paper, we argue that exploration and exploitation can be intertwined to foster ongoing, distributed innovation throughout an organization. To develop this argument, we draw on literature from design, inspired by Herbert Simon, and from narratives, inspired by Paul Ricœur, to expand upon classical organizational views rooted in a representational perspective. From the design literature, we theorize the role of Kairos, or the opportune moment. From narrative theory, we theorize the role of Aion, a circular notion of time. These two concepts of time complement Chronos, a linear notion of time around which organizations have traditionally been structured. Our core thesis is that actors’ ability to simultaneously engage in exploration and exploitation requires the structuring of all three notions of time. We then discuss the organizational implications of this thesis for innovation at work.
The work of a triumvirate of social thinkers – Adam Ferguson, Bruno Latour and Roger Friedland – is used to argue for the ontological centrality of law to the construction of human societies. Confirming its place as a central institutional order supports the contention by Roger Friedland that the law has a set of distinctive practices animated by the substance ‘justice’. Together, these practices constitute a distinctive logic that can impact on organizations not just by specifying their form but also by providing dominant logics. Such logics can vary dependent on the historical development of particular societies, as illustrated by the distinction between civil and common law systems. Law enters into forms of relation with other logics and is conditioned by relations of class and power. The implications for students of organizations are drawn out.
