How do organizations sustain collective life when exposure to life-and-death risk becomes a persistent condition of work? Based on an ethnographic study of two elite police units operating under continuous life-and-death risk, we find that organizations sustain coordinated collective life not by eliminating fear, resolving contradictions, or restoring stability, but by continually reorganizing these pressures into shared forms of action. We identify three interrelated organizing mechanisms. First, aspirational discipline transforms vulnerability into collective moral obligation by aligning individual striving with shared purpose. Second, paradoxical knotting enables members to act through enduring tensions, such as aggression and restraint or autonomy and obedience, without having to resolve them. Third, routine enactment restores coordinated action through recurring practices of training, reflection, and operational work. Together, these mechanisms explain how organizations maintain coherent and coordinated action when danger is an everyday condition of work. We conceptualize this capacity as intersubjective resilience : the collective accomplishment through which members repeatedly transform fear, contradiction, and disruption into coordinated action under persistent life-and-death risk.
Is servant leadership really a Disneyland-inspired fantasy of sunshine, lollipops, and hand-holding that makes followers complacent and lowers the bottom line of organizations, as critics claim? This criticism overlooks that servant leaders, striving to bring out the full potential in followers, do not only give positive strokes but may also provide followers with critical feedback. To assess the role of critical feedback in mitigating the flaws of servant leadership raised by critics, this study introduces tough love, the delivery of criticism with a positive tone and clear intent to help recipients overcome their deficiencies. We hypothesize that the relationship between servant leadership and key outcomes, such as follower performance, is strengthened the more servant leaders provide followers with tough love. We contend that tough love is appreciated by followers, solidifies relationships with their leaders, and helps them to grow through self-expansion. We reason that this growth benefits their work behaviors and attitudes. With multi-source field data covering three points in time, controlling for positive and negative feedback and prior levels of dependent variables, tough love is shown to moderate relations between servant leadership and both in-role performance and organizational citizenship behaviors, with mixed results for creativity and turnover intentions.
What happens to employees’ sense of who they are online when their organization tells them how to present themselves on LinkedIn? Companies increasingly intervene in employees’ professional social media presence through training programs and internal policies, encouraging them to treat their profile as an asset to be cultivated for future return. Drawing on a 2-year digital ethnography of an in-company LinkedIn training program in a French state-owned enterprise, this article shows how the training regulates participants’ sense of their online selves by first denying that their profile has anything to do with who they are, and only then inviting them to reinvest it with personal meaning within the frame this denial has established. Regulation here operates on the identity stakes of the profile itself: on how much of themselves participants take it to carry. The uneven ways participants took up this invitation point to the entanglement of identity regulation and assetization, and to the capacity of an online self, once assetized, to keep generating value for the organization long after the person behind it has disengaged.
What does it take for a woman to thrive in an occupation that takes her to some of the most remote, rugged, and unforgiving locations on Earth? How do women geoscientists defy gendered barriers to succeed in an occupational context that requires both technical expertise and physical endurance? Using a social constructionist perspective, we examine the interplay of gendered barriers resulting from the physical and social context of such work, and women’s strategies to overcome them. We analyzed 67 semi-structured interviews with men and women geoscientists and, through the lens of context theorizing, uncovered a configuration of gendered barriers, both physical and social, the strategies employed by women to navigate those barriers, and the impact of organizational practices that perpetuate or address the gendered barriers. Women’s survival strategies to adapt to the context and organizational practices that supported adaptation often reinforced gendered barriers. Women’s change strategies and organizational practices that directly addressed the barriers were more effective.
Do digital boundaries still exist, or have mobile devices permanently collapsed the threshold between office and home? In this era of pervasive technovation, the traditional separation between professional and personal lives is undergoing a qualitative ontological collapse. Moving beyond the ‘boundary-blurring’ narrative, we theorise the generative mechanism behind this collapse: the sociomaterial entanglement of technological affordances, neoliberal organisational norms, and worker habitus. Drawing on a qualitative study of 42 UK professionals that uses the Gioia methodology, we analyse how hyperconnectivity reconfigures the work-life interface into a state of indistinction. Our findings reveal that employees adopt deliberate integration not as a preference but as a structural survival strategy within a high-responsiveness culture, facilitating the neo work-life domain. We conceptualise this neo work-life domain as a unitary, nomadic space where roles are perpetually concurrent and structured by an internalised professional habitus. Living within this neo work-life domain produces deeply paradoxical outcomes: While providing vital ICT resources, it generates compounded technostress, an environment where simultaneous stressors overwhelm cognitive recovery. Because compounded technostress triggers acute psychological risks, our primary theoretical contribution proposes that contemporary labour has fundamentally shifted from boundary management to attention management. We define ‘attention management’ as the cognitive filtering of role simultaneity and argue that it represents the final contested terrain of modern work. We conclude by highlighting the UK’s institutional ‘void’ and underscoring the urgent need for structural interventions, such as a statutory ‘right to disconnect’, to protect cognitive autonomy in a borderless neo work-life domain.
