ORGANIZATION STUDIES

After the Crisis: Explaining stories of professional identity growth from collective action
Kent D and Dacin MT
Emergent forms of collaboration are central to societies' response to crises like natural disaster, refugee migration and pandemics. Even though individuals' participation in such collective action may be short-lived, recent studies propose it can inspire enduring professional role change as people return to their everyday work post-crisis. Yet, previous research does not focus on the divergent stories participants tell about the crisis years afterward and what it meant for them professionally. Through a grounded study of healthcare workers involved in the 2003 Toronto SARS outbreak, we examine varied narratives of professional identity growth following collective action in crisis. Years after SARS, participants told diverse stories about the crisis as an event that suspended, affirmed or even expanded their professional identities. Participants with narratives of identity suspension saw SARS as an event lacking professional relevance. Narratives of identity affirmation and expansion, however, emphasized growth and inspiration for participants' professional roles post-crisis. We theorize how interactions within collective responses can foster growth narratives, when they enhance meanings central to participants' professional identities and by affording follow-on interactions that translate these meanings into role change. We contribute new insight on how collective action in crisis can lead to professional role change post-crisis, how fragmented perspectives affect capacity for collective action in intermittent crises, and the role of follow-on interactions in professionals' narrative identity work.
Mobilising Affect for Public Art: Affective practices in voluntary organising
Lüthy C
Voluntary organising frequently relies on affective intensities to direct organisational efforts. However, it is not well understood how these intensities are cultivated across time and different contexts to engage and coordinate heterogeneous actors. By applying a practice approach to affect, this paper proposes the concept of affective practices to theorise how affect is mobilised in materially driven (inter)actions to shape actions and relationalities around organisational goals. The analysis of ethnographic data from a long-term public art project reveals that four affective practices - enticing, envisioning, attending and asserting - are pivotal to sustaining the distributed process of voluntary organising. The sense of fascination, enthusiasm, care and discomfort that these affective practices mobilise instigates participation, support, acceptance and compliance from diverse partners, volunteers and the local public. Contributing to the affective turn in practice theory, the paper theorises how affective processes are cultivated as situative accomplishments in an ongoing and translocal organisational process, highlighting the important role played by the vibrant presence of matter in affective practices. Additionally, the study expands our understanding of how an interplay of affective intensities engages and aligns diverse individuals and groups in voluntary organising by fostering coalitional moments in the organisational process.
Temporal Structuring as Self-Discipline: Managing time in the budgeting process
Kunzl F and Messner M
We examine how actors engage in so as to achieve entrainment of a practice to temporal norms. Temporal self-discipline is about imposing self-created temporal structures on one's future behaviour and goes along with the (re-)production of a time-conscious self. Based on our fieldwork, we show how such self-discipline materializes both in the form of a very detailed temporal plan and in spaces for coordination to ensure sticking to this plan. We demonstrate that practising temporal self-discipline provides accountants with a sense of control over the budgeting process - a way to achieve 'controlled' entrainment to the temporal norm. We also show how temporal disruptions may challenge controlled entrainment, forcing actors into a passive mode of reaction and potential deviation from their intended plan.
Indigenous Peoples and Organization Studies
Bastien F, Coraiola DM and Foster WM
This essay encourages scholars of management and organization studies (MOS) to critically reflect on how Indigenous peoples and their knowledges have been, and continue to be, systemically discriminated against. This discrimination is the result of colonization; it has deeply impacted and continues to affect which knowledges and practices are valued and embraced. The impact of colonization is mirrored in MOS via processes and actions within the academic setting and our business schools. The result is the continued marginalization of Indigenous peoples and their knowledges. We propose a shift in how MOS scholars approach research in relation to non-western societies to counter, and hopefully end, these continued practices of discrimination in our business schools. Specifically, we argue that demarginalizing Indigenous research in academia and going beyond 'cosmetic indigenization' in our business schools are new, collaborative ways of rethinking indigeneity and breaking down the current barriers in MOS that reinforce and perpetuate the systemic discrimination against Indigenous peoples, their knowledges and practices.
Openness as Organizing Principle: Introduction to the Special Issue
Splitter V, Dobusch L, von Krogh G, Whittington R and Walgenbach P
'Openness' has become an organizational leitmotif of our time, spreading across a growing set of organizational domains. However, discussions within these specialized domains (e.g. open data, open government or open innovation) treat openness in isolation and specific to the particularities of those domains. The intention of this Special Issue therefore is to foster cross-domain conversations to exchange insights and build cumulative knowledge on openness. To do so, this Introduction to the Special Issue argues that openness should be investigated as a general organizing principle, which we refer to as . Across domains, we define Open Organizing as a . As such, Open Organizing raises an overarching problem of design, which results from more specific epistemic, normative and political challenges.
Research on Grand Challenges: Adopting an Abductive Experimentation Methodology
Kistruck GM and Slade Shantz A
There has been a growing interest among management scholars in conducting research on grand challenges. Despite recognizing that studying such highly complex and uncertain phenomena likely requires more unconventional approaches, there has been very little methodological guidance provided to interested scholars. Drawing upon our own grand challenge projects undertaken over the past decade, we put forward a methodological approach we term 'abductive experimentation'. Such an approach is an action-oriented process of inquiry that cycles between generating 'doubt' and generating 'belief'. More specifically, abductive experimentation iterates between induction, abduction, and deduction to both generate and reconcile 'surprising' findings and causal mechanisms. While we submit abductive experimentation as a methodological approach particularly well suited to the study of grand challenges, we believe that the process depicted also provides a general roadmap for scholars seeking to dismantle the artificial dualism between theory and practice.
From Automobile Capitalism to Platform Capitalism: Toyotism as a prehistory of digital platforms
Steinberg M
This article explores the automotive lineage and manufacturing origins of platforms. Challenging prevailing assumptions that the platform is a digital artefact, and platform capitalism a new era, this article traces crucial elements of platform capitalism to Toyotist automobile manufacture in order to rethink the relationship between technology and organization. Arguing that the very terminology and industry applications of the 'platform' emerge from the automobile industry over the course of the 20th century, this article cautions against the uncritical adoption of epochal paradigms, or assumptions that new technologies require new organizational forms. By parsing the platform into two types, the stack and the intermediary, this article demonstrates how the platform concept and data-driven production practice both develop out of the Toyota Production System in particular, and American and Japanese analyses of it. Toyotism, we show, is the unseen industrial and epistemological background against which the platform economy plays out. In making this case, this article highlights the crucial continuities between the data-intensive production of companies like Uber and Amazon - emblematic of digital platform capitalism - and the organizational paradigms of the automobile industry. At a moment when the automobile returns to prominence amit platforms such as Uber, Didi Chuxing, or Waymo, and as we find tech companies turning to automobile manufacturing, this automotive lineage of the platform offers a crucial reminder of the automotive origins of what we now call platform capitalism.
Expertise Diversity, Informal Leadership Hierarchy, and Team Knowledge Creation: A study of pharmaceutical research collaborations
He VF, von Krogh G and Sirén C
Knowledge creation increasingly requires experts from diverse domains to collaborate in teams, yet the effect of expertise diversity on team knowledge creation is inconclusive. We focus on task uncertainty and informal leadership hierarchies - the disparity in team members' engagement in leadership activities (task- and relationship-oriented) - to answer the questions when and why expertise diversity may hinder team knowledge creation. We develop a model in which informal leadership hierarchy mediates the conditional indirect effect of the team's expertise diversity on its knowledge creation under different levels of task uncertainty. We test this moderated mediation model using multi-source data from self-managing project teams comprising collaborators from a pharmaceutical company and its research partners. We find that when task uncertainty is low, the indirect effect of expertise diversity on team knowledge creation is positive, whereas when task uncertainty is high, it is negative. This conditional indirect effect occurs via task-oriented but not relationship-oriented leadership hierarchy. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms and boundary conditions for expertise diversity to hinder, rather than facilitate, knowledge creation in collaborations.