How do actors cope when their repeated efforts to bring change seem futile? In this qualitative study, we consider sustainable development initiatives within a U.S. higher education institution where repeated efforts by actors led to nominal change. We focus on understanding how actors sought to enact sustainable development initiatives in the face of an unresponsive context, that is, in a context characterized by pressures to maintain the status quo. We show how actors’ attempts to embed sustainable development practices into the university represent a dynamic process, characterized by periods of persistence and suspension. Our theorizing reveals that actors used three coping mechanisms to maintain focus on their sustainability goals: community building, resourcefulness, and vision. By emphasizing these dimensions of their initiatives, actors’ emotional response is focused on encouragement and hope to persist in a context that is largely unresponsive to sustainable development. Our study contributes to the sustainability literature by explicating how actors develop resilience in their efforts to pursue sustainable development in unresponsive contexts.

While multi-stakeholder partnerships are emerging as an increasingly popular approach to address grand challenges, they are not well studied or understood. Such partnerships are rife with difficulties arising from the fact that actors in the partnership have different understandings of the grand challenge based on meaning systems which have distinct and often opposing assumptions, values, and practices. Each partnership actor brings with them their individual values as well as the values and work practices of their home organization’s culture, alongside the wider meaning systems present within the sectoral spaces in which each organization is situated—public, private, or nonprofit. Yet, there is little understanding of how actors in multi-stakeholder partnerships negotiate multi-level meaning systems to reach partnership goals. In this 16-month ethnographic study, we take up a negotiated culture perspective to holistically examine the negotiation of multi-level meaning related to a focal grand challenge in a multi-stakeholder partnership established to end homelessness in Western Canada. Based on our findings, we contribute a process model to explain the ongoing negotiation of multi-level meanings in multi-stakeholder partnerships working to address grand challenges.

We examine how popular religion portrays human labor by analyzing work themes in Christian hymns published over five centuries, from 1500 to 2000. Utilizing an emergent qualitative approach, we identify eight themes:Reward follows Work;Work with Dedication;God Provides;Work is Difficult;Work is Holy;Work is Duty;Work in Solidarity; andWitness at Work. A quantitative examination indicates that the themes ofReward follows Work,Work with Dedication, andGod Providesoccur most frequently.Reward follows WorkandWork with Dedicationdecline in the second half of the twentieth century whileWork in Solidarityrises, suggesting increased attention to global labor justice. Historically, hymns broadcast the Protestant Work Ethic. Today, they herald several underexplored dimensions of workplace religion.

While there is a large body of management education literature focused on conducting service-learning projects for students in support of addressing today’s sustainable development challenges, the majority of articles in this area focus on the graduate student population. What’s more, there is a lack of emphasis on the importance of incorporating cultural context when designing and implementing service-learning projects on a global scale. Based on our experiences creating and carrying out a semester-long consulting class where US-based undergraduate students worked with Costa Rican rural entrepreneurs in support of building their sustainable livelihoods, we examine the benefits, challenges, and outcomes related to conducting service-learning projects for undergraduate students in a global context. We focus, in particular, on projects designed to address sustainable development challenges. In doing so, we identify critical success factors related to designing and implementing global service-learning projects for this student population. When these critical success factors are utilized, we argue that such global service-learning projects can be beneficial for undergraduate students and partners alike.

Sustainability has become a popular teaching topic in business schools around the world. Yet, there has been very little mention of the role of culture in relation to embedding sustainability in business education. This lacuna is surprising given that researchers have noted the crucial role that culture plays in variation in sustainability adoption across contexts. In response, this 2021 symposium is designed to begin to explore the role that culture plays in sustainability-focused management pedagogies by bringing together academics that teach sustainability in a variety of different contexts. Rather than trying to determine universal or aggregate dimensions of culture that can be generalized without significant regard for differentiated contexts, we take the view that culture can best be understood in respect to specific settings, and, therefore, a high level of contextualization is imperative. Thus, our desire is to begin a conversation to understand sustainability-focused pedagogical practices in a grounded manner and how they may vary across differentiated contexts.

This paper adds to literature on engaged scholarship by exploring how previous experience, study expectations, and multiple identities are key factors that shape how management researchers perceive and experience the research-practice divide in sustainable development research. Highlighting ways to navigate tensions in engaged scholarship, the authors identify five major strategies: remembering the purpose of the research, emphasizing relationships, engaging in self-learning, practicing reflexivity, and framing emerging results. To do so, the authors draw on findings from three management research projects which sought to use engaged scholarship to address the sustainable development challenges of homelessness, Indigenous approaches to economics and development, and sustainability reporting in higher education. Taking a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach to analyzing their experiences as researchers, the authors demonstrate the potential for future management researchers to utilize a similar methodology to improve engaged scholarship research focused on sustainable development challenges.

Viewing life through a spiritual lens has been shown to enhance resilience and meaningfulness in work. But exactly what messages do spiritual and religious systems communicate regarding labor? To better understand how religion frames work, we analyze 315 Christian hymns containing work-related phrases. We identify eight themes which address a worker’s self, role, and job and we estimate the relative prominence of these themes from 1750 to 2000. We discuss the findings’ relevance for meaning making and workplace spirituality research.

Bridging the research-practice gap is significant, particularly where it concerns addressing the world’s grand challenges. In this article, we build on the engaged scholarship approach by illuminating some of the day-to-day tensions that researchers face in attempting to bridge the research-practice gap in actuality. Our findings highlight key factors that affect how researchers experience and manage the research-practice divide while investigating grand challenges. Autobiographical examples from our PhD dissertations are utilized to highlight these research-practice tensions faced and how we sought to overcome them. In doing so, we broaden the conceptual and methodological scholarship of this approach and offer implications for other researchers working to navigate the research-practice divide in their own research.

We examine how individuals work to alleviate tensions among multiple and often diverse assumptions about work and associated practices, what we refer to as meaning systems, in complex organizational settings designed to tackle grand societal challenges. By carrying out a longitudinal, multi-site ethnographic study of a cross sector partnership in Western Canada, we capture the role performances and everyday activities through which boundary work is accomplished by individuals in multi-faceted organizational settings where multiple boundaries intersect. Our study contributes to the literature by identifying the roles and everyday activities that boundary spanners in general and individuals in cross sector partnerships in particular enact in order to traverse multiple meaning systems over time for the purpose of addressing society’s grand challenges.

In spite of the growing importance of cross sector partnerships to address societal challenges, the extant organizational studies literature has tended to hone in on identity in organizational fields, single organizations and teams. Recognizing this significant lacuna, we present an ethnographic, grounded theory study of the processes by which organizations involved in a cross sector partnership continuously negotiate the partnership’s identity in attempts to tackle the issue of homelessness. Our findings highlight how the identity of a partnership involving actors from public, private and non-profit sectors is negotiated and re- negotiated and, in turn, the strategies that actors enact in order to influence what the partnership is in the process of becoming. Specifically, we capture how actors, who are representative of both the partnership and their own organizations and thus insider- outsiders, enact four core influencing resources – finances, research, on the ground experiences and communications – in their everyday interactions to continuously maintain, shape and alter the partnership’s identity; we refer to these processes as “partnership identity-as-negotiation”. We contribute to the emerging stream of literature on identity involving multiple organizations by explicating identity-work processes in cross sector partnerships characterized by the presence of multiple understandings of identity and ongoing interfaces with permeable boundaries.

Showcasing a sixteen‐month ethnographic study of a coalition to end homelessness in Western Canada, we show how the integration of two theoretical perspectives—institutional logics and negotiated culture—can be used as complementary, yet distinct lenses to better inform the practice of cross sector partnerships which tackle the world's wicked problems. In doing so, we highlight how we were able to holistically capture the meaning systems at work in such multi‐faceted partnerships resulting in a better understanding of how partnerships can work across difference to affect positive social change. In particular, we capture how multiple stakeholders make sense of a partnership's identity in a variety of different ways based upon meaning systems with which they identify at multiple levels as well as how they enact bridging skills across meaning‐related boundaries to promote more effective partner interface.

We document the process of organizational renewal at Tesco Plc, the world’s third largest food retailer, in the wake of a historically unprecedented downturn in performance in its home market. The findings are based on an action research project in which an academic team trained Asian subsidiary managers to become in- house ethnographers of Tesco UK. The objective of the study was twofold: 1) to surface and evaluate the core values and strategic practices that comprised the essence of Tesco, 2) to identify sources of learning from Tesco’s foreign subsidiaries to promote organizational renewal in light of increasing competition in its home market. The study contributes to theory on boundary spanning in MNCs utilizing an innovative method we term ‘strategic ethnography’-a dynamic, holistic method of inquiry that leverages knowledge from the periphery by the effective use of ethnographic techniques for the purpose of sustainable organizational renewal in MNCs. We develop a process model of this method delineating the key role subsidiary managers can play drawing upon their insider- outsider knowledge-bases functioning as conduits in boundary spanning across complex organizational and geographic boundaries.

Social enterprises that seek to operate across multiple contexts to achieve desired outcomes require substantial reliance upon social capital. This study examines social capital within a social enterprise by addressing how complex institutional and cultural contexts contribute to unique development and leverage of social capital in such organizations. Based upon a one-year ethnographic study involving a Vietnamese social enterprise, the research provides a nuanced perspective of the focal social enterprise and the social capital tensions it encountered in operating across multiple contexts to meet social goals. It also offers a theoretical model detailing the key organizational strategies and associated internal dynamics utilized by social enterprises that will affect their potential to effectively navigate social ties across national and cultural borders.

Even with an increased research focus on competing demands, we still understand little about how institutional logics play out at the organizational level. As such, this paper explores conditions, influenced by both field level and micro level factors, which affect how organizations respond to competing institutional demands. By incorporating significant cross-cultural management literature, particularly biculturalism, this analysis presents a process model that speaks to the complexity and dynamism of institutional logics at the organizational level and sheds new light on the contextual conditions that affect the ways in which organizations handle competing logics.