This article traces the regimes of worth that defined energy for centuries as a productive force of human and animal labor, an understanding that transformed in the 18th century to an "industrial-energy" regime of worth supporting an economy of mass production, consumption, and profit and more recently one centered on market forces and price. Industrial and market energy and the conventions and institutions that support them are currently in a period of discursive and material ferment; they are being challenged by different higher order principles of worth. We discuss eight emergent energy justifications that argue what kind of energy is - and is not - in the best interests of society.

In this essay I lament what I see as the unrealized potential for organization studies to contribute to society by considering more explicitly issues of public concern. I suggest how we can begin to move in that direction, if we want to. Disciplinary Science Engaged Research Impact Science Problem-Oriented Research Theory Like many of you I came to the study of organizations because of experiences that intrigued me and about which I wanted to learn more. In my case I had improbably landed an internship job with the Postmaster General of the USA just as the postal service was trying to transition from being a cabinet-level and therefore highly politicized unit of the Executive Branch to an enterprise-like public corporation. Republican President Richard Nixon was trying to reduce political patronage and the cosy relationships between largely Democratic postal unions and Congress. Nixon also wanted to improve efficiency and run the mail system in a business-like way (modernizing government was a theme of his presidency). At that time the post office was huge – the largest non-military organization in the world with thousands of employees in nearly every community in the country. It owned more real estate than any other organization. It had fleets of trucks, bought vast petroleum supplies (as well massive amounts of products from paint to paper), and had large contracts to move mail with airlines, railroads, and trucking firms. It had millions of dollars of receipts coming in every day, an extraordinary cash flow the management of which was… unsophisticated. Organizationally it was not just large, but complex, and riddled with traditional ways of doing things, some probably traceable to the first Postmaster General, Benjamin Franklin. Moving the behemoth towards modern logistics and customer service was to be an extraordinary process, if possible at all given multiple entrenched political interests. It was a fascinating time and place to be and I had a fine perch in Washington DC from which to observe. The management internship programme I was in moved me around to different functional areas but I was always tied to the Postmaster General's Office and had a view from the top, essentially corporate headquarters. I did everything from assessing whether building maintenance workers could be trained to fix new optical character readers, to helping to develop Express Mail (the first new product since World War I and the development of aviation), to writing articles about mail being carried by mule in Kentucky and by boat up the Detroit River. I ran two post offices and merchandised philatelic products. I negotiated a labour contract. After I had experienced the power of organization to shape material processes and workers' lives I wanted to learn more so that I could do more. I was perhaps naive but I thought that I could be a force for good in public administration or business. Graduate school gave theoretical structure to what had been my professional life. I had essentially no intellectual training for organization studies but I did have more experience in organizations than most of my fellow students. Most of them had to do fieldwork in order to have something to write about; I had to read theory in order to write. I loved theory! It helped me to understand what I had experienced, gave me a way of looking and thinking and making sense of the world. It was so useful. As a graduate student I wrote about organizational change in the post office, and thanks to Watergate about scandals in the White House. I figured out why US presidents and Cabinet officers had large patrimonial staffs such as the White House staff and the one I served in, very unlike Europe's heads of government who rely on ministries to do their work. Early on I was very influenced by my reading of Weber whose descriptions of bureaucracy and patrimonial administration coincided closely with my observations of life in Washington. I loved Weber but other perspectives and writers were eye opening too. Many of my favourites were veiled calls to action and certainly stirred public discussion of our organizational society. I liked scholarly works with a critical and theoretical perspective, but readable too, works that would inspire comment and even action. My favourites included Selznick's pragmatist work TVA and the Grass Roots about a socialist project in the rural US, Mills' mixing of Weber and Marx in The Power Elite, and Bendix's superb Weberian study of managerial ideology in Work and Authority in Industry. It inspired my own paper on theories of success in popular business literature. Who didn't love The Organization Man, which helped me to understand the working fathers I had grown up near in a New York City suburb? Arlie Hochschild was working on what would become another favourite, The Managed Heart about emotional labour in our increasingly service-based economy. Often non-academic audiences read them too. They were impactful. Whatever my expectations had been about publishing in a management school setting at a research-intensive university, they were not supported by my realization that I needed to double-down on theory and generate novel theoretical insights, not just use theory, but make theory. Novelty trumped impact in order to get noticed. Frankly I loved immersion into a theory-rich world that was intellectually challenging. The impulse I had once had to be useful to a world of organizations was however, if not gone, very much buried in conference papers, revise/resubmits, relationships with colleagues, and the need to figure out what I could write for the next special issue recently announced. I became what was valued in my professional community: a scholar who wrote about those things that were 'sellable' and sufficiently abstract to avoid the accusation of 'applied'. That earlier impulse – quietly buried – to have impact on a broader society has reawakened for several reasons. As a senior scholar I feel freer to do something outside the usual channels. And while I continue to enjoy constructing yet another publishable and hopefully smart thesis at the intersection of pragmatist theory and the French conventions school (Beamish and Biggart, forthcoming) the frisson is no longer the same. But mostly my unease at being an arms-length and often-irrelevant observer developed when I assumed administrative posts. For 11 years I was in regular contact with people who struggled to find solutions to very real problems. Six years as dean of my management school and five more as Director of the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center (EEC) revealed a yawning gap between what I wrote and real issues facing organizations, their leaders, and society. It's hard to go back to a theory cave after that. My personal experience reflects the decades-long transformation of business schools in the USA that Rakesh Khurana wrote about in From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Law schools and medical schools developed by teaching mastery of knowledge and the application of that knowledge to do good within the framework of professional ethics. Business schools started on the same track as medical and law schools but changed course. B-schools transformed from aspiring professional schools as sites for the teaching of skills and practice within an ethical frame to something akin to social science departments as practiced in disciplines such as psychology, sociology and economics. When we reproduce disciplinary departments we give up our ability to engage in scholarship that has clear connections to organizing and practice. I am not suggesting that we become organizational clinicians, rather that we create concepts, ideas, and possibilities that engage the issues of the day – the loss of middle management, the impact of gender imbalances on corporate decision-making and how new forms of expertise and authority emerge in the economy. Directing the Energy Efficiency Center was an intellectual and management stretch for me. The EEC is a cluster of applied research units, mostly based on engineering solutions to energy sustainability problems such as the colour rendering of low-energy LED light bulbs to make them more appealing to consumers and spur adoption, and figuring out how much energy it takes to produce the clean water that we consume in my state – 20 per cent of all of California's electricity goes to moving and cleaning water. Changing policy around the 'water-energy nexus' is a major effort at the EEC and involves more than a little data collection and analysis and inter-agency diplomacy to say the least. (To see more about the EEC's work view http://eec.ucdavis.edu and the centres it supports). The EEC is highly regarded by industry and government as a politically disinterested territory for developing good ideas and technologies to help the environment and the public good. We had no driving interest other than in saving energy and carbon and had financial support from multiple organizations in different sectors. After a couple of years I mostly could understand the industry and governmental, regulatory and NGO actors and the interests involved. I realized that while many of the 'solutions' industries pursued might have made good engineering sense, they made little sense from a management or social science perspective. Houses are not just physical boxes with differing thermal mass, but homes with social, cultural and historical meaning embedded in neighbourhoods. Retailers don't just want to save money on lighting, they want their goods to look attractive while displayed. People don't just buy cars for their efficiency characteristics, but for status and aesthetic reasons too. Some good technologies won't work because they are incompatible with previous technologies. Do sensors on electricity meters really manage home electricity use or are they there to spy on people and emit brain-altering waves, as one tightly knit Northern California community decided? Some solutions work, or fail to, because of network effects, or peer pressure, or economic structure. How do you push the oligopolistic industrial cooling industry to improve products when it controls the market? I could go on, but the point is that many if not most of the issues that the EEC deals with are industry structure and socio-technical problems. Society is in the technologies and technologies must live in society. The fact is social scientists are welcome, even desired participants in these sorts of efforts because engineers are problem solvers and they want things to work. They are happy to have a little chemistry, some physics, and a touch of management thinking to develop good solutions. As Director of the EEC I was invited to give the closing keynote lecture to a conference held in 2011 by the Engineering Directorate of the US National Science Foundation in Washington DC. The conferees were examining technologies in anticipation of nearly US $1 billion of sustainability funding. I started my talk by discussing three technologies (slides pulled from my technology management class) that were engineering successes but failed miserably. One failed for political reasons, one for the cultural obtuseness of the technologists, and one because it did not take into account existing institutional arrangements. The response was as expected – surprise. They thought that engineers developed the solutions and social scientists sold them to the public. I said that if social science isn't there at the beginning, it's likely too late. Recently I gave a keynote at the Low Carbon Living Collaborative Research Centre in Sydney, Australia. I followed a panel of business executives who were befuddled by so many smart professors and PhD students who could not engage with them because there was a fundamental disconnect between what market relations demanded of business and the academics' purposes. Everyone wanted to reduce carbon in the economy but there was small-to-no common place for collaboration – different focuses, different schedules for action, and no shared stake in engagement success. These are solvable structural and organizational barriers. So it's not that we aren't welcome in important research areas where organizational issues are central and that many of us find interesting. Many of the problems that face global societies are organizing problems, problems that deal with systems, interfaces, culture, networks, institutions, and motivations in all their complexity – exactly the issues that need elucidation. I keep hearing people say we need a concerted push to deal with climate change, something like a Manhattan Project or moonshot programme, but that won't happen for carbon reduction or most other complex problems the world faces. There are too many existing technologies, interests, and institutions in place to have one concerted effort. I know of no group more intellectually capable of looking at these issues and possibilities than my organization studies colleagues in management schools. If theory-centric novelty is the purview of top management journals and top journals do not measure social impact other than citations in Google Scholar then we will not be encouraging work that has meaning outside of our small professional circle. I do believe that there is an opening for more engaged and impactful studies by organizational scholars, however. One of the things I learned as a dean working with other deans was that many fields, particularly the natural sciences, have shifted from a discipline-only-basic-science approach to discovery, toward problem-oriented and interdisciplinary work. Climate change and sustainability research now routinely includes teams of atmospheric and soil scientists, biological systems analysts, ocean physicists, and many more research areas. Public health researchers include everything from biostatisticians and toxicologists, to entomologists and social network theorists. This shift has not come easily for disciplinary science on my campus and is taking years to mature. Research partnerships that try to surmount the knowing-doing gap, varied funding sources and even authorship concerns are not trivial issues for a post-normal science world but they are being addressed. Fundamental issues such as who defines the questions and problems, what data and methods are to be used, and how the discoveries can be connected to policy and solutions are part of the challenge. What are the bases for evaluation by reviewers? What new governance structures are needed to guide the research? Assessing quality and impact demands new criteria and new understandings of research 'success'. Despite growing pains impact science is here to stay and there is increasing pressure for it in research-intensive universities. The public, whose support is a critical source of grant income in many places, is demanding that university researchers become part of the solution to the grand challenges facing societies. In the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF), a nationwide assessment of higher education institutions conducted every few years in the UK, a new criterion was added – Impact. Universities vying for high scores that mean both prestige and enhanced funding had to demonstrate through cases – not citations – how their research is having impact on the wider society. In the 2014 REF there were 6975 cases submitted for evaluation and are available for view on a database. Over 80 per cent of the cases included two or more 'field of research' codes, suggesting the importance of multiple disciplines for the examination of problems. Clearly there is a great deal of public-spirited research happening in the UK and there is now institutional pressure that will support this sort of work. In the USA the Carnegie Foundation is an important source of university classification into categories such as Baccalaureate Colleges, Master's Colleges and Universities, and Doctorate-granting Universities that are further parsed into research institutions of various intensity. Each is not just a categorical distinction but also a status marker. In 2005 a new voluntary classification scheme was introduced, the Community Engagement Classification. This classification involves certification of the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources by an institution and its larger community, which can be defined as anything from the local community to global society. 'Engaged' institutions by definition are doing more than disciplinary and abstract theory work, but rather are sharing information and in some instances collaborating in 'citizen science' projects by involving community partners in research of mutual interest. The 2015 list of Carnegie Community Engaged Institutions includes 240 schools many of which are research-intensive. If you can be persuaded that there are important social problems that invite organizational analysis, and that there are growing forces that might support our engagement in problem-oriented research, what can we and what should we do as organizational scholars mostly in business schools? First, let me say that I am not suggesting a trade-off between theory-focused and problem-focused research, but rather that more organizational scholarship take a greater public good orientation. I am also not suggesting that we become consultants but rather take up more research that is directly connected to the many obvious issues that face our global economy and society. I am arguing for an intellectual space that we build somewhere between consultancy (where one gets paid to solve a problem that has been defined by a client) and speaking only to one's erudite peers (preferably in a precious language that only the right people will understand). Clearly there are some of us already doing this sort of work but the legitimacy that comes with prestigious funding sources, publications in respected journals, and recognizable career rungs are hardly in place. But these are organizational problems that we can solve, if we want to. First, I don't think there is a funding issue at all. In fact if we are willing to partner with other disciplines that depend on problem-oriented research we will have access to new research riches, ideas and relations. I am asked all the time if I am available because I have gotten outside the management school. The problem is getting up and meeting people and letting them know that you are willing and able to participate. That's not a small barrier because at least in the USA B-schools tend to isolate themselves from the main campus. However, jumping barriers is good intellectual exercise. There are multiple ways to start. Would this pass the legitimacy test for people worried about their careers? It depends. It will take the right people, the right universities and research institutions, and the right journals to support these efforts, and it will take time. But given the signs that there is interest in truly impactful social research maybe this is the right time. For those of us who have made a career out of interpreting the footnotes in Capital remember that Marx was an activist and journalist as well as a theorist of the highest order. He could mix it up with material reality. Weber worked as a hospital administrator during World War I, and was a political pamphleteer and essayist (remember 'Politics as a Vocation' and 'Science as a Vocation'?). I happen to agree with a favourite activist of mine, Gloria Steinem, who said, 'Feminist theory came from feminist activism – it wasn't the other way around'. Maybe we will become better theorists by leaving our theory caves and using our ideas and abilities to help solve a world of organizational problems. I say, let's find out.

The sociologist Nicole Woosley Biggart uses charisma as theorised by Max Weber to analyse how direct selling functioned in the America of the 1980s. She shows that these charismatic companies relied on the commitment of their female staff and therefore needed to appeal to them emotionally: encouragement to perfect themselves; desire for recognition; devotion to protective and exemplary bosses whom they saw as having special qualities; the sense of belonging to the social and affective community of saleswomen. The primary mainspring of this ‘adventure’ capitalism was affective enchantment.

Following Philip Selznick's lead in using pragmatist social science to understand issues of public concern we conducted a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry (CCI). We find that social heuristics - collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision-making frames - significantly shape economic and non-economic decision-making practices. Social heuristics are the outcome of industry-based "institutionalization processes" and are widely held and commonly relied on in CCI to reduce uncertainty endemic to decision-making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational to industry co-participants. In the CCI - a project-centered production network - social heuristics as shared institutions sustain network-based social order but in so doing discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically nor structurally reductionist.

cannot completely discard this fabric. Instead Graeber wants us to find disjunctions in bureaucracy through local acts of resistance, deviance and improvisation. Here we find a topic which many organizational scholars will find much closer to home in the contested employment relationship. Graeber may not provide many original insights into organizational life but he offers a wake-up call for any scholars who may have started to overlook the seductive power of bureaucracy in contemporary organizations and the ways in which workers attempt to circumvent social control. The Utopia of Rules is a thrilling journey in a world which could not be duller.

A growing religious-environmental movement is working to reconcile environmental thought and practice with the mission and ministry of religious organizations. We examine two leading interfaith social change organizations and identify key strategies they routinely employ to create shared meaning and alignment between environmentalism and faith. They reframe stewardship in religious organizations by (1) highlighting and interpreting environmental themes in sacred texts and scriptures, (2) celebrating and fostering mutual awareness of environmental action by faith-based organizations, and (3) providing resources and creating linkages between clergy and lay leaders across religious congregations. By emphasizing moral and spiritual rationales for the adoption of resource-saving products and behaviors at both the congregational and household level, these networked organizations help shift the perception of global climate change from an insurmountable problem to one that is being addressed in cooperation with similar others. Our investigation reveals organizational actors deeply engaged in growing moral calls for political action to address climate change and underscores the need for more socially realistic models of technology adoption and behavior change.

Project production networks or PPNs are now the primary means for organizing in many industries including fashion design and manufacturing, moviemaking and construction projects. PPNs enable professionally and geographically distributed participants of a common project to bring their expertise and resources together to achieve an economically and technically superior product than a single firm could produce. PPNs also have benefits over purely market-based contracting relationships as participants often recombine to work on projects serially allowing knowledge and relationships to develop in ways that support production outcomes. The growth in the use of PPNs has led to a number of studies describing the structural characteristics and benefits of this organizing strategy as compared to firms and markets. Relatively little analysis has been done of the ways in which PPNs govern themselves, however. We report here on PPN governance in commercial construction focusing on the role that social heuristics as sh...

Both neoclassical and Keynesian economists have widely favored the use of equilibrium models to understand economic activity, but dramatic periods of change such as the current global economic downturn are poorly understood by assuming equilibrium. The economist Joseph Schumpeter tried to inject dynamism and disequilibrium into economic models by arguing for the role of entrepreneurs in creating microeconomic change, and for examining long-term macroeconomic change as represented in business cycles. No economist, including Schumpeter, has ever connected these two approaches to change and these approaches are not typically used as alternative and complementary ways of viewing transformation over time. We suggest that these theories can be connected in a “mesoeconomic” institutional analysis rooted in economic sociology; we demonstrate this connection by examining the US commercial building industry. This industry has changed in qualitatively distinct ways over the past two centuries in what we call market orders, economic orders sometimes lasting for decades or more. In each market order, entrepreneurs of different sorts are able to flourish and push forward institutional changes that result in long-term economic shifts. Credit and finance have been pivotal influences in each market order, a factor supporting Schumpeter's focus on entrepreneurial action and speculation and one not largely discussed today. We view the recent disruption of financial markets as a signal of the destruction of a reigning market order.

In a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry we find that social heuristics - collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision making frames - influence economic decision making practices and material outcomes. Social heuristics are widely institutionalized and commonly relied upon to reduce uncertainty in decision making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational. In the commercial construction industry, social heuristics sustain market order but also discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically or structurally reductionist.

The rebirth of economic sociology in the last decades of the 20th century was largely about intellectual identity formation and developing theoretical foundations. The authors argue that economic sociology is poised to make a contribution to the understanding and solution of social problems. They use the example of energy inefficiency in the commercial buildings industry to suggest that economic sociology offers useful alternatives to current economic-based policy analyses.

Все разнообразные теории экономического развития (модернизации, зависимости, миросистемного анализа, а также теория рыночных реформ) в качестве ключевого объяснения предлагают некий «решающий фактор». Сторонники каждой из этих теорий утверждают, что развитию стран мешает некое препятствие, затрудняющее их экономический рост. Мы же полагаем, что экономическое развитие не обусловлено неким решающим фактором и не привязано жестко к единственно возможной траектории, – успешных путей может быть несколько. Экономический рост зависит от того, насколько успешно той или иной стране удается связать свои исторически сложившиеся модели социальной организации с возможностями, которые предоставляют ей мировые рынки. И в данной работе мы представим социологическую теорию межстрановых сравнительных преимуществ, в которой учитывается воздействие не только экономических факторов, но также институционализированных моделей властных отношений и организационных форм. Такие модели легитимируют определенных акторов и специфические отношения между ними, что в одних сферах деятельности способствует успешному развитию, а в других – нет. Представленный подход иллюстрируется сравнительным анализом непростых процессов развития отраслей сборки автомобилей и производства автомобильных комплектующих в Южной Корее, Тайване, Испании и Аргентине.

Abstract The economy is the collective production and distribution of resources, that is, the generation and allocation of material goods and services produced by a society in order to sustain it. Work concerns activities that people engage in to support themselves materially and socially within this larger system of production and exchange. To oversimplify, individuals work, and economies are the result. Economies in turn put individuals to work.

We develop a classification scheme of systems of exchange using concepts from network analysis, economics, and cultural sociology. This classification illustrates that the "free market" is but one possible type of economy and that other types are not best understood as imperfections. This classification helps to distinguish analytically among qualitatively different types of exchange arrangements and suggests bases from which to develop theories about the organization of markets and exchange systems of various types.

▪ Abstract Economic sociology and economics have tried to explain the organization and stability of market capitalism mostly by arguing for the effects of social structure on the patterning of relations, or for the role of the price system in balancing the demands of individual economic actors. In North America, the primary alternative to structural and individualist theories of market order has been network theory, a meso-level attempt to bridge over- and undersocialized views of actors. In Europe, the primary attempt to develop more realistic economics has centered on the role of conventions in shaping economic activity. We describe theories of market order, show how convention theory and related approaches represent a novel alternative, and suggest how convention theory can supplement network theory and institutional approaches to understanding market order.