Purpose This study explores how conflict plays a role in the maintenance of institutional practices. It focuses on the conflict between miners and supervisors, and the dominance of production over safety, in the context of the Soma Mining Disaster. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected through in-depth interviews with coal miners in different companies in Soma, Turkey. The analysis was conducted in three stages, including thorough reading, detailed empirical examination and theoretical interpretation. Findings Lack of control over the conflict creates an opportunity for supervisors to disregard rules and avoid solutions. The ongoing disregard for rules and avoidance of solutions risk miners' critical evaluation of production-centered institutional practices and development of collective resistance against those practices. Supervisors thus try to isolate the conflict into individual relations with miners and deemphasize its institutional character. When the conflict is isolated, associated problems seem to be temporary, individual rather than permanent, structural matters; then, there is no need for control over supervisors. A vicious circle emerges while the conflict becomes a relation of institutional maintenance for the production-centered understanding. Originality/value Past studies address conflict implicitly, mentioning its institutionally disruptive and creative aspects while discussing conflict as a threat to institutional practices. In contrast, this study directly explores conflict with its four characteristics and highlights its maintenance aspect as well as deliberate use. Institutional actors can deliberately and strategically reproduce conflict for the maintenance of institutional practices rather than reactively respond to it.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how childfree dual-career professional couples (DCPCs) engage in boundary management in the context of work-life balance, and how their strategies are shaped by the organizational norms in which couples are embedded. Drawing on boundary theory, the study explores how boundary management is enacted not only individually but relationally, at the dyadic level. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative, abductive design based on semi-structured interviews with 21 childfree dual-career couples, with each partner interviewed separately and the couple analysed as the unit of analysis. Boundary theory served as the principal sensitizing concept, while the analytic structure emerged from the data. Findings The findings reveal that childfree DCPCs actively manage work-life boundaries, and that their strategies are organized along four continuums: boundary management (integration to segmentation), negotiation (compromise to collaboration), planning initiation (individual to joint) and flexibility orientation (tasks to time). Four couple types, careerist, conventional, non-conventional and egalitarian, occupy different positions along these continuums and couples adopting the same nominal strategy often did so for different reasons. Boundary strategies were further shaped by organizational expectations, particularly an ideal-worker norm that presumes childfree employees to be continuously available. Practical implications The findings suggest that organizations should decouple boundary entitlements from parental status and address the informal ideal-worker culture through which childfree employees are presumed available and penalized for protecting their boundaries, supporting work-life balance more equitably across all household configurations. Originality/value The study advances boundary theory by reconceptualizing boundary management as a set of relational continuums rather than discrete individual tactics and by demonstrating that it is co-constructed not only between partners but between couples and their organizations. It challenges the managerial assumption that childfree employees are inherently more available, reframing their perceived availability as the product of invisible boundary work.
Purpose Organisational health (OH) is increasingly recognised as a strategic capability that enables healthcare organisations to remain resilient, adaptive, and sustainable in highly dynamic environments. However, limited research explains how organisations actively manage organisational health through organisational processes and how dynamic capabilities (DC) underpin this process in practice. This study aims to develop an empirically grounded explanation of organisational health management (OHM) by exploring the management practices adopted by healthcare leaders and examining how sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities interact to sustain OH. Design/methodology/approach Guided by the DC perspective, this study adopts a qualitative multiple-case design involving 21 healthcare organisations and 46 semi-structured interviews with senior managers. Data were analysed using the Gioia methodology to develop a process-oriented grounded theory that explains the recursive relationships between organisational practices and DC. Findings The findings reveal that OHM is best understood as a recursive organisational process rather than a collection of isolated management practices. The grounded theory model identifies fifteen empirically derived microfoundations organised into the three DC of sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring. Rather than operating sequentially, these capabilities interact through continuous feedback mechanisms that enable organisations to interpret environmental change, mobilise strategic responses, and continuously renew organisational structures, practices, and capabilities. Originality/value This study contributes to OH and DC research by developing a process-based grounded theory of OHM that explains how DC are enacted through interconnected organisational microfoundations in healthcare organisations. Beyond its substantive contribution, the study also shows how the Gioia methodology can move from descriptive thematic analysis to an interpretive, process-oriented theoretical explanation, contributing to qualitative theory building in management and organisation studies.
Purpose This paper responds to Jääskeläinen’s (2026) two questions about researchers’ connection to decolonization and reflection on ethical dilemmas in Indigenous research contexts. It examines how reconciliation changes the practical meaning of the four R’s: respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility. Design/methodology/approach This collaboratively written reflexive viewpoint is informed by duoethnographic principles. The authors compare situated experiences of research, teaching and supervision in Indigenous contexts, then interpret points of convergence and difference through the four R’s. Findings Decolonization and reconciliation are distinct but interdependent. Decolonization confronts colonial structures and epistemic inequalities. Reconciliation sustains the accountable relationships through which structural change is negotiated. It recasts the four R’s as obligations to recognize community authority, center community priorities, negotiate mutual benefit and remain accountable beyond a project’s formal end. Research limitations/implications The argument is situated and does not claim universal applicability. Its value lies in transparent positionality and critical reflection across different relationships to colonization. Practical implications Communities should help determine research questions, methods, benefits, knowledge governance, interpretation and dissemination. Institutional ethics approval begins rather than exhausts researchers’ accountability. Social implications Ethical decolonizing research can bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge into dialogue while preserving the integrity and authority of each. Originality/value The paper clarifies how reconciliation supplies the relational accountability needed to sustain decolonizing change and turns the four R’s from procedural principles into continuing tests of research practice.
