In the wake of the Beirut blast, we use Lebanon as an empirical context to examine how a group of scholar-activists organized to support ongoing collective action in the context of creeping crisis. Using the lens of resourcing theory, we provide a process model of resourcing agency as a fractal and embodied form of critical action, augmented and transformed by critical reflection, and collective healing and striving. We make four contributions. First, we demonstrate why organizational scholarship needs to attend to the increasing relevance of creeping crises and we model an approach to understanding both the lived experience of creeping crises and the implications for the situated cultivation of agency. Second, we extend resourcing theory by uncovering resourcing agency as an integral, embodied process in the context of crisis, particularly creeping crises, and show how it is itself a vital instantiation of agency. Third, further extending resourcing and process theories, we identify two types of ampliative cycles (sustaining and transformative cycles) implicated in resourcing agency when organizing in support of collective action amid creeping crises. Finally, our findings demonstrate the benefits of using a processual approach that attends to the embodied and fractal nature of action in creeping crises and other extreme contexts. We close with a discussion of the implications for engaged scholarship as a framework for action.

We explain how and why people become motivated to participate in institutional processes. Responding to recent efforts to address the micro and meso in institutional analysis, we introduce two inte...

Following the August 2020 blast in Beirut, a national grassroots initiative, Khaddit Beirut, came together. KB’s efforts range from co-creating “community-led, evidence-based, and locally-driven” schools and community healthcare centers and rebuilding small and mediate enterprises damaged by the blast, to creating new models for civic activism and engagement and framing and enacting “expertise in action” as a process. All of which had to be done in situated ways commensurate with the constraints imposed by local history and the needs created by the shared experience of catastrophe. Building on Lawrence and Phillips (2019), we explore which forms of social-symbolic work (SSW) the KB undertook, and combined, as it built an ecosystem of cooperation, civic engagement, and organizational and institutional innovation in a geographically and historically bounded context characterized by endemic toxic institutional conditions, political corruption, societal division, and catastrophic economic collapse. We find that amidst crisis, SSW unfolds in each of three main domains, self, organization, and institutional work, but the capacity to perform one kind of work may be contingent on the ongoing engagement in another kind of work. Organization work enabled the self work of claiming expertise and working through trauma, which in turn enabled the organization work of putting that expertise in action. Without both, the institutional work social change appears out of the question. We make contributions regarding SSW, participatory action research, and the use of feminist geography and epistemology in enhancing organizational perspectives on the situatedness of SSW.

In this editorial for our Special Issue, we focus on ways to better understand the role of organizations, organizing, and the organized during social and institutional change in response to disruption, division, and displacement. The papers in this Special Issue provide important insights into the hardships and heartache arising from social disruption, division, and displacement; in addition, they provide glimpses into potential ways of moving forward. To set the stage, we develop a framework building on extant literature that highlights several analytic approaches to understanding the consequences of eroding, or inadequate, institutions, the challenges of building anew when the status quo is destroyed, and what such novel and complex realities entail for organizational analysis. We offer a temporal view of responses to disruption, division, and displacement that draws on the papers in this Special Issue to identify and explain potential risks and challenges that arise at different points in time. To conclude, we provide a short summary of each paper, and call for a reinvigorated research agenda that goes beyond the excellent work featured here by broadening and deepening our focus on approaches to organizing that expressly address disruption, division, and displacement.

Social movements are often regarded as the seedbeds of widescale organizational change in western economies. However, we know less about why and how actors take on the insurgent identities that motivate and enable them to play dramatic roles in the movements that facilitate such change. One argument is that actors become agents of change through some kind of common conversion experience. But such an explanation struggles to address the character and nature of the motive forces that embolden and stabilize oppositional insurgent identities that then reshape incumbent interests, systems and structures. Drawing on aspects of narrative and psychoanalytic traditions, which have both made compelling contributions to the European study of organizational change, our chapter suggests a pattern of unconscious drives, traumatic experiences and socialized narratives that aid the formation of insurgent organizational change agents.

The cognitive turn in institutional theory has led to the systematic neglect of people’s sensory capacities. In this paper we offer a cross-level theory of the role in institutional processes of sensory and evaluative forms of knowledge. Called here the aesthetic mode, this way of knowing combines humans’ innate sensory capacity to engage the world with their learned capacity to evaluate what they encounter. We argue that people evaluate the world’s natural, social, and spiritual phenomena through the lenses of a personal aesthetic, each person’s distinct internalization of the institutional aesthetic codes of the communities in which they are in embedded. A personal aesthetic informs and animates people’s internal conversations as they evaluate the social arrangements they encounter and deliberate over how they should participate in the institutional processes of maintaining, disrupting, or creating social arrangements. Attending to people’s aesthetic ways of knowing positions us to better understand when, why, and how people deliberate about institutional values and arrangements and choose to engage in purposive institutional work. It also offers a way of conceptualizing and examining the reflexivity said to be at the heart of embedded agency. We discuss the implications for understanding of institutional work, institutional biography, and of how people experience institutional disruption and re-creation.

Two research streams examine how social movements operate both “in and around” organizations. We probe the empirical spaces between these streams, asking how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts contributes to transformative social change. By exploring activities in the mid-1990s related to advocacy for domestic partner benefits at 24 organizations in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, we develop the concept of inhabited ecosystems to explore the relational processes by which employee activists advance change. These activists faced a variety of structural opportunities and restraints, and we identify five mechanisms that sustained their efforts during protracted contestation: learning even from thwarted activism, borrowing from one another’s more or less radical approaches, helping one another avoid the traps of stagnation, fostering solidarity and ecosystem capabilities, and collaboratively expanding the social movement domain. We thus reveal how activism situated in multi-organizational contexts animates an inhabited ecosystem of challengers that propels change efforts “between and through” organizations. These efforts, even when exploratory or incomplete, generate an ecosystem’s capacity to sustain, resource, and even reshape the larger transformative social change effort.

Over the past few decades, research on stigma has taken on a lively life within the academy and the broader community of organizational researchers beyond the disciplines of social psychology and sociology. However, its evolution over the years has yielded a body of literature that is siloed within different levels of research, despite common groundings in the seminal work of Goffman (1963). To begin to redress this issue and build a more coherent body of literature on stigma, we have invited leading stigma scholars from across different levels of analysis to participate in this symposium as panelists and discussants. Each of the scholars has demonstrated an interest in advancing our collective knowledge of stigma through increased cross-level dialogue and research, and will be coming together to discuss three thought-provoking questions designed to stimulate new ideas and avenues for research: (1) How might stigma at the different levels of analysis be similar or related? (2) In what ways, can we benefit from obtaining a more micro understanding of macro stigma and a more macro understanding of micro stigma? (3) What stigma research questions warrant cross-level considerations? Overall, by bringing together leading stigma scholars from across levels to address and discuss these questions, our objective is to facilitate a lively and interactive symposium that will attract researchers from across divisions interested in stigma.

Scholars have devoted extensive effort over the years to examining how the characteristics, values, norms, and logics of communities influence organizational and individual behaviors and outcomes. Yet, despite the plethora of research examining this community-organization linkage, this work remains largely fragmented and siloed within various sub-disciplines (e.g., institutional logics, occupational research, diversity research) as well as restricted to specific levels of analysis. The purpose of this symposium, therefore, is to bring together scholars from organizational behavior and organizational theory to present their work at the community-organization interface with the goal of building a shared agenda on community research. We hope to offer a more dynamic, ongoing, recursive, and multi-level view of communities and organizations as well as present an opportunity for a vibrant discussion among our presenters, discussant, and audience members in order to stimulate future work in this area. Profiting from Lack of Cohesion: Bank Profitability in Fractured Communities Presenter: Horacio Enrique Rousseau; Florida State U. Community Embeddedness as an Opportunity Structure for Employee Activism: The Take a Knee Movement Presenter: Alexandra Rheinhardt; Pennsylvania State U. Not Just Small Potatoes: Community Collaborations, Social Movements, and Organizational Change Presenter: Leanne Mara Hedberg; U. of Alberta School of Management Presenter: Michael Lounsbury; U. of Alberta Space Oddity: How Online Community Spaces Frustrate Possible Moments of Foment and Collective Action Presenter: Anna Elise Roberts; Pennsylvania State U.

Institutions and identity are two of the most popular domains of scholarship within the academy, perhaps because they have such varied and important consequences for societies, organizations, and individuals. Though these streams of work have developed largely independently, there have been recent efforts to bridge these domains, and to explore how identity and institutions co- evolve. The central challenge of such work is connecting the two literatures empirically and theoretically in a way that does justice to the complexity of each literature and phenomenon. In this symposium we are keen to explore the different ways in which scholars are combining – or could combine – the concepts of identity and institution in internally consistent and externally generative ways. Accordingly, we ask several leading scholars working at the interface of identity and institutions to help us chart out this novel terrain.

Much academic research is inspired in one way or another by scholars' personal interest or involvement in a particular issue or context. And yet being “too close&x201D; to a research setting or question can expose scholars and their work to scrutiny. This symposium seeks to shed light on both the benefits and the challenges of conducting research in familiar settings – that is, with a group to which researchers belong or in which they have a personal interest, or on a question that holds personal significance for them – and to offer insights to help scholars navigate these challenges and opportunities.

In this chapter we propose that organizational identities—particularly organizational selves (Pratt and Kraatz, 2011)—are socially constructed in the service of personal identity projects. Building on institutional theory, we propose institutional inhabitants facing the myriad pressures associated with institutional pluralism respond with agency, socially constructing selves for organizations and appropriating them, through affiliation, as a resource in resolving those pressures in their personal identity projects. We then interrogate how and when this perspective may effect change in organizational identities and selves. We close the chapter by showing how this perspective applies in the comparison of three organizations existing in the same institutional environment and discussing implications of this perspective for future research on organizational identity.

In a recent article, Kamal Munir (2015) added his voice to the calls for a greater awareness and integration of power into institutional theory (Lawrence, 2008). Munir calls for institutional theorists to address issues of market failure, inequality, and oppression directly through a critical lens that includes an explicit examination of power in institutional processes. We applaud his voicing of this important concern and wish to add our voices to this call as well. We see these concerns as part of a broader set of social concerns, which have also been the subject of recent calls in organization and institutional theory (Greenwood, 2014). Three articles related to Munir’s call, also published in this journal, have sought to address Munir’s cri de coeur. Hirsch and Lounsbury (2015) applaud Munir and go on to claim that the institutional logics perspective (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012) is well suited to address the issues of power in institutional configurations. They state that a contested logics approach focuses attention on alternative and often competing institutional orders, which necessarily foreground issues of power and dominance in that contestation. Concurrently, Suddaby (2015) also laments the exclusion by institutitonal theorists of issues of power and dominance that is the central domain of critical management theory. He goes on to trace the foundations and trajectories of both streams in the organizations literature to specify the initially (and ostensibly) shared concerns of institutional theory and critical management but suggests that as each theory has progressed, the divergence between them may have become too great for any meaningful integration. Conversely, in his response to Munir, Willmott (2015) also compares institutional theory with critical management theory and finds that the two are inherently incompatible, though he does recognize that some forms of institutional theory can be critical. He does, however, note that any attempt by institutional theorists to address issues of power and dominance will remain superficial and peripheral. In this essay, we wish to add to this conversation by specifically addressing some of the barriers that institutional theorists concerned with power and domination face in this intellectual pursuit. We also want to suggest some of the opportunities that may enhance our ability to incorporate conceptions of power within the institutional framework. We first address what we have elsewhere called structural barriers to the translation of knowledge across fields (Hudson & Okhuysen, 2014). We then elaborate on the recent call for including social emotions within institutional theory (Creed, DeJordy, Lok, Cebon, et al., 2010b; Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014; Lok & De Rond, 2012; Voronov, 2014; Voronov & Vince, 2012).

This article investigates the ways in which government activity, or demand-side forces, influence interest mobilization and formal inclusion in the policy-making process in the European Union. Drawing on an original dataset of nearly 700 civil society groups active in the European Union, the paper provides empirical evidence of three routes by which the EU institutions influence interest group activity: (1) direct interest group subsidy; (2) manipulation of the establishment and composition of formal arenas of political debate; and (3) broader, system-wide expansion of competencies and selective development of chosen policy areas.

In this article we consider how cultural resources rooted in religion help to constitute and animate people working in industrialized societies across both religious and nonreligious domains. We argue that redemptive self-narratives figure prominently in the symbolic constructions people attach to their experiences across the many domains of human experience; such redemptive narratives not only can shape their identities and sense of life purpose, they inform their practices and choices and animate their capacity for action. To consider how redemptive self-narratives can provide a basis for agency in organizations, we analyze and compare the career narratives of a retired Episcopal Bishop and a celebrated CEO.

In this article, we use the case of religious research universities to explore the presence of multiple institutional logics with the potential for contradiction and conflict. In particular, building on existing research on conflicting institutional logics, we assess the most common forms of resolution (replacement, dominant logic, decoupling, compartmentalization, and coexistence) and identify the potential for a new form of resolution – a transformative outcome that resolves the conflicts through adoption of a superordinate logic. Drawing on the history of Baylor University, we illustrate different forms of resolution, proposing its most recent efforts may represent a transformative outcome. We close by presenting a model for resolving institutional contradictions which suggest some resolutions may trigger cycles of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization when they are inherently unstable because they mitigate rather than resolve the conflict between institutional logics.

We theorize the role in institutional processes of what we call the "shame nexus," a set of shame-related constructs: felt shame, systemic shame, sense of shame, and episodic shaming. As a discrete emotion, felt shame signals to a person that a social bond is at risk, and it catalyzes a fundamental motivation to preserve valued bonds. Systemic shame we conceptualize as a form of disciplinary power, animated by persons' sense of shame a mechanism of ongoing intersubjective surveillance and self-regulation. We theorize how the duo of systemic shame and sense of shame drives the self-regulation that underpins persons' conformity to institutional prescriptions and institutional reproduction. We conceptualize episodic shaming as a form of juridical power used by institutional guardians to elicit renewed conformity and reassert institutional prescriptions, and also explain how episodic shaming may have unintended effects, including institutional disruption and recreation, when it triggers sensemaking among targets and observers that can lead to the reassessment of the appropriateness of institutional prescriptions or the value of social bonds. We link the shame nexus to three broad categories of institutional work.