How can leaders navigate the bumpy road to redemption for the past sins of an institution and/or its leaders? To illuminate the commonalities and complexities that emerge when leaders seek institutional redemption, we critically analyze three cases-the Volkswagen emissions scandal, Germany; Georgetown University's sale of 272 enslaved people, United States; and the residential school system, Canada. In doing so, we showcase how seeking institutional (vs. personal) redemption can involve distinct complexities. By synthesizing these emergent insights using a self-in-systems approach, we outline how traveling the road to institutional redemption requires leaders to effectively manage considerations related to multiple systems in ways that allow them to manage accountability for the institution while maintaining their own legitimacy (and avoiding being morally tarnished by the institutional transgression). We conclude by exploring redemption as an intentional change process that promotes "resolve" and opportunities for moral transformations that can benefit individuals, institutions, and society.
Drawing on my 2026 OMT Distinguished Scholar address, I address the question, what if organization and management theory (OMT) actually mattered? Amidst maladies including a growing publication treadmill, salami-sliced research, misconduct, and a peer-review crisis made worse by generative AI, I argue that we as scholars should ask bigger questions that matter for people and policy. In doing so, I argue that we should become more politically engaged, urging us to also become more inclusive of Global South scholars and scholarship. Using examples related to emancipatory entrepreneurship, alternative mental health treatments, stigmatized work, and AI's effects on inequality, democracy and warfare, I highlight the kinds of research questions we might address as a field, emphasizing the importance of theory alongside more practical and political engagement. I also call for reforms in scholarly evaluation to value quality and real-world impact over the number of papers published.
This paper presents an edited practitioner-academic conversation among eight leading scholars and practitioners on the enduring question of business purpose. Drawing on two Academy of Management symposia, the conversation reveals two distinct but potentially complementary views. One emphasizes the firm's purpose as the efficient provision of goods and services and clearer boundaries between business and other societal institutions. The other understands purpose more broadly in terms of stakeholder value creation, human flourishing, and societal well-being. To interpret these positions, we bring the conversation into dialogue with Aristotelian practical rationality, Weberian rationalization, and contemporary scholarship on organizational purpose. We develop a framework distinguishing accounts in which stakeholder goods are subordinated to profit through an end-means logic from those in which profit and intrinsic values are integrated through a part-whole understanding of the firm's societal role. The framework provides a basis for examining how organizational purpose is justified and enacted in practice.
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.
