The crisis of expertise can be acutely felt in healthcare, with new forms of expertise emerging that question the authority of incumbent medical and managerial experts. As part of a response to changing patterns of expertise, healthcare organizations have attempted to foster and include patient expertise as part of the healthcare process. Such initiatives have been touted as promoting epistemic justice, that is, the valuing of knowledge from groups that often have been given less voice. Promoting epistemic justice in healthcare has involved forms of boundary work between medical professionals, administrators and patients, to reconfigure how legitimate knowledge is attributed across diverse actors. Using data from a Patient Partners program of a hospital based in Lyon, we examined how patient knowledge was promoted in a hospital setting. Using the theoretical lens of boundary work and epistemic justice, we examined how groups of experts carried out boundary work that increased porosity of boundaries, augmenting the exchange of information, so that new experts were created-the professional patients, hired by hospitals to improve the emergency care of locals. We discuss the implications for understanding new forms of expertise through boundary work and epistemic justice.

Rhythms form an essential part of organizational life, involving embodied patterns of repetition and difference that structure work processes, against the ongoing background of wider organizational and environmental rhythms. Organizational literature increasingly recognizes the importance of rhythms; yet little methodological work exists, either at the level of theorization or practical guidance. The current study draws on Lefebvre's foundational work on rhythmanalysis to elaborate an organizational methodology for studying rhythms. We argue that rhythmanalysis provides a critically oriented approach to understanding social dynamics and advances theorizing about organizational environments by overcoming the dichotomy between entities and processes, stability and change. In this article, we propose methodological guidelines for developing the field of rhythmanalysis in organizational settings by illustrating how it can be conducted through the reanalysis of ethnographic material. We discuss the methodological contributions of rhythmanalysis for a critical exploration of organizational dynamics.

Business schools have introduced humanistic, spiritual, and religiously inspired programs to counter the organization-centered approach of neoliberal management education. Spirituality, in particular, has been integrated into business school curricula and valued for its humanistic and emancipatory potential. However, this integration has faced criticism. Several programs have been viewed as adopting a spirituality- for -management stance, merely transforming spirituality into a new tool of management rather than honoring its intrinsic value. Recently, more hybrid spirituality- and -management programs have emerged, attributing equal importance to the humanistic orientation of spirituality and the profit-driven focus of management. This study examines one such spirituality- and -management program at a business school in Italy. Using multisource, longitudinal research, we found that participants’ perceptions of the business school context shaped their experience of the program, making several participants favor management’s goals over spirituality ones. This article discusses how the business school environment can undermine the transformative potential of a spirituality- and -management program.

Internships are an increasingly ubiquitous temporary work category, positioned between educational and market spheres. Based on emerging discussions around the precarity and ambiguity of internships, we focus on how interns use provisional identifications to navigate this ambiguity. An in-depth qualitative study was conducted in the context of professional internships in the French business school context, examining how interns navigate the tensions between educational and workplace roles, making sense of their own identities alternatively as students and as precarious workers. Based on how the interns understood their intern positions, as that of organizational members, career-building entrepreneurs, or students-in-training, they built specific conceptions of themselves at work that oriented their coping behaviours, as well as their possibilities for engaging in workplace critique. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of understanding the heterogeneous identities of interns and their ramifications for workplace critique

This introduction to the Special Issue makes the political implications of boundaries in and around organizations the central locus of inquiry. It explores the experiences and interests of those who encounter marginalization and exclusion through processes of boundary drawing. Next to introducing the individual papers of the Special Issue and identifying overlapping themes across them, we highlight opportunities to inspire future research on the ambivalence of the enabling and constraining effects of boundaries, the role of different power positions for negotiating boundaries, how boundaries are brought in and out of consciousness and how boundaries are connected with (inter)national boundary drawing.

In this editorial essay we argue that contribution to business ethics theory and practice can be achieved through thick ethical conceptualization, that is, by working with concepts in a manner that is both deeply descriptive and normative. Rather than foreclose on what is ethical or unethical, good or bad, permissible or impermissible, we encourage all authors submitting to the Journal of Business Ethics to carefully and clearly explicate their ethical analysis of their study’s focal phenomena. For empirical papers this means they should “explain the ethics” within their descriptions of empirical phenomena, while for normative ethical papers it means that authors should embed their analysis in a thick understanding of the contexts in which these analyses are applied. Understanding concepts as both descriptive and normative provides stronger conceptualization and capacity to theorize. It also provides greater nuance to recognize and interpret novel and complex findings. Below, we offer some reflections about the varieties of ethical “thinning” and ideas about how authors can work with thick concepts to make an ethical contribution.

Why and how does the use of large language models (LLMs) transform epistemic agency and epistemic governance in higher education (HE), and why can this transformation usher organized immaturity as a new organizing principle for HE? Asking these questions now matters because (i) the profound impact of LLMs on epistemic agency and governance in HE has not been adequately scrutinized by theorists of organizations and HE to date and (ii) LLMs represent an epistemic technology that fundamentally alters who produces knowledge, how knowledge is produced (through research), disseminated (through education), and what kind of knowledge is produced. This lack of scrutiny leaves us ill-equipped to understand why and how LLMs transform (via the activities of Big EdTech first, and institutional responses second) epistemic agency and epistemic governance in HE. Two aims follow from this broader concern. First, we interrogate how 'epistemic agency' undergoes transformation as more HE institutions (and related parties) adopt and legitimatize LLMs in research and education in ways that rewrites the rules concerning epistemic governance in favour of Big EdTech. In this process, epistemic agents transform into epistemic consumers over time. Building on this, our second aim is to show why the aforementioned transformation can usher in organized immaturity as a new organizing principle for HE. This development undermines the Humboldtian ideal of HE as a progressive cultural project of integrating research and education within a broader normative foundation of academic freedom. This ideal also emphasizes the intellectual development of reason and 'holistic knowledge' to enable social deliberation essential to the development and maintenance of democracies. We discuss the theoretical ramifications of our analysis, suggest avenues for future research, and offer an agenda for immediate corrective action to enlarge our control over epistemic agency and governance in HE.

The current paper examines the use of dreams as a methodological source of collective reflexivity among organizational scholars. Current organizational literature discusses the role of dreams in promoting reflexivity, drawing largely on psychoanalytical approaches of researcher self-understanding as an individual process. Recognizing in individualistic approaches a risk of egoistic projection and identification, we propose an alternative dream-based methodology inspired by Amerindian philosophy and practices of dreaming. Examining illustrations from literature on Amerindian knowledge practices, we argue that dreams inform ideas about collective relationality and cosmology, moving away from a focus on individual psychology. This alternative conception of dreams is particularly useful for organizational perspectives emphasizing researcher-participant collaboration, collective reflexivity, and action-oriented research. On this basis, we elaborate a dream-based approach as a form of inquiry. We contribute to a nascent literature on dreams in organizational scholarship, highlighting the diverse ways dreams can support collective reflexivity. Moreover, our approach recognizes the importance of Indigenous knowledge practices as sources for organizational scholarship, providing philosophical and practical pathways for relating to others in a non-colonial way.

Wellbeing research has proliferated in recent years, both in terms of affirmative, largely psychological research on its antecedents and consequences, and in terms of critical research that decries the ideological aspects of corporate wellbeing as a symptom of neoliberal workplaces. These literatures take special importance in time of social and economic turmoil, marked by global health crises, climate and environmental crises, and geopolitical crises. The current thematic issue collects diverse contributions around wellbeing in unsettled times, examining how wellbeing and its discourses shape how we think about work and life in the current conjuncture. We briefly summarize our motivation and background literature around wellbeing, after which we present and synthesize the works in the current collection. Finally, in a more speculative vein, we imagine a series of questions and topics that characterize the possibilities for wellbeing research in a future that is likely marked by ongoing social, cultural and economic transformations.

Periodization, or the division of perceived time, pervades organizational life. While scholars have explored many ways in which actors relate to the past, present, and future for various purposes, periodization as an expression of temporality is often taken for granted. With a fundamental capacity to inform cognition and action, periodization carries high stakes for involved actors and groups, which necessitates addressing this lacuna. Specifically, we investigate the intersubjective instances of periodization that foreground human agency, which lends itself to developing a critical perspective on periodization with emphasis on its relation to power and agency and theorizing its often-covert presence and use in organizational life. Periodization, we contend, centralizes some organizational actors or events while marginalizing others. This insight is amenable to two theoretical contributions. First, we offer a new lens for understanding, theorizing, and leveraging the power of temporality and the temporality of power. Second, we set the stage for examining periodization as an actionable yet often overlooked temporal tool at the disposition of organizational actors. By systematically unearthing and challenging the underlying assumptions of periodization, we invite scholars and practitioners to scrutinize and challenge why and how organizational actors can temporally interpret, frame, and contest the social reality.

We share the world we live and die in with others, in ways that are organized and disorganized. The authors of this special issue address life-and-death as a compound term, foregrounding the vital and deadly outcomes of (dis)organization and their (business) ethics implications as they play out in the context of growing inequalities and ongoing health, geopolitical, environmental, refugee crises and egregious war crimes. Organizations and organizing can shape such contexts by engaging in the ethics of care and politics of inclusivity, redefining "essential" or "front line" work, managing relationships between bodily health and work, or ethically relating to non-human forms of life. Considering the roles of organizations in terms of life-and-death can help scholars redefine organizations and/in/for/with the world by stressing the ethical dimensions of organizing for life which involves human and other-than-human relatedness and the obligation of care for all forms of life.

Self-managing organizations (SMO) constitute a radical attempt to avoid hierarchical control and manager–subordinate authority relationships by suppressing them outright. For existing organizations, transiting to SMO poses significant challenges, especially for middle managers who became ‘architects of their own demise’. Combining 38 interviews, direct observation over 4 years, and secondary data we show in this paper that SMO transitions expose middle managers to a paradoxical situation that led them to engage in an escalation process of resistance that culminated in the subversion of the SMO experiment. These results contribute to SMO studies by documenting transition difficulties and the middle management paradox. Our study enriches knowledge on middle managers resistance in post-bureaucratic organizational forms by documenting the boundary conditions that allow the transition from individual to collective hidden and then collective, overt, and transformative forms of managerial resistance.

The Journal of Business Ethics has always emphasized a broad and pluralistic remit, embracing the multiplicity and dynamism of business ethics research. However, recent years have brought exponential growth in a manner never seen. And we are not alone. The acceleration of journal publishing, and academic life more generally, has pushed the academic knowledge machine towards a breaking point. In this respect academic publishing serves as a bellwether for the acceleration of contemporary social and economic life. In this essay, we attempt to make sense of the rapid force of acceleration we are experiencing. Drawing on ideas about acceleration as pathology and acceleration as transformation, we reflect on how acceleration can produce both a fascination with growth for its own sake and, conversely, a nostalgia for simpler times. Resisting both temptations, we argue that by focusing on articulating knowledge from past to future (rather than merely accumulating knowledge) and moving with variable rhythm (rather than sheer speed), we might create possibilities at the Journal of Business Ethics to avoid the pathologies of acceleration while speeding up the search for knowledge about ethical and social challenges.

The current conceptual paper examines the role of quantification in work and organizational psychology (psychologie du travail et des organisations; PTO), based on a view of metrics as performative and as linked to the social construction of knowledge. Understanding the social effects of metrics is part of an overall attempt to understand PTO in its responsibility for workplace experience and wellbeing. Quantitative metrics are usually seen as apolitical and linked to positivist epistemological approaches, but recent work in the sociology of quantification has examined the role of numbers as supports for practice. This literature, which tends to be social constructionist in its onto-epistemology, focuses on how numbers are used within organizations to understand persons, to manage interpersonal relations, and to govern organizations. Thus, quantitative measures are both epistemic tools and mechanisms of power. We argue that because of its focus on quantitative measurement, PTO is uniquely positioned to benefit from recent insights into the social uses of measures, and that bringing these uses to the forefront of PTO research contribute to the social impact of the field. Specifically, the tendency to view measures as transparent and judged solely on psychometric validity tends to draw attention away from the social impacts of measures, even when measures shape how people understand themselves, their work colleagues, and their organizations. Thus, the epistemological positivism of psychometrics relates to the negligence of the social effects of metrics. By contrast, a performative view of numbers allows their epistemic and social-practical dimensions to remain together in view, mixing descriptive and pragmatic aspects of measures. We argue that these effects happen at multiple levels of quantification. First, the level of capture, actors make decisions when and whether to quantify a given psychological phenomenon. Second, at the level of specification, the question of how to quantify brings in issues of construct specification and theorization, but also of social inclusion and exclusion. Finally, at the level of appropriation, questions about the ownership and use of quantified data involve social and ethical stakes that are exacerbated in the context of digitalization. By examining the performativity of metrics at these levels, in the context of PTO, we contribute to the social impact of epistemology by examining how reconfiguring normally epistemological tools as performative reveals the influence of those tools over individuals and organizations.

In this editorial essay, we argue that Generative Artificial Intelligence programs (GenAI) draw on what we term a “hypercommons”, involving collectively produced inputs and labour that are largely invisible or untraceable. We argue that automatizing the exploitation of common inputs, in ways that remix and reconfigure them, can lead to a crisis of academic authorship in which the moral agency involved in scholarly production is increasingly eroded. We discuss the relationship between the hypercommons and authorship in terms of moral agency and the ethics of academic production, speculating on different responses to the crisis of authorship as posed by GenAI.