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.
