Studies of institutional complexity have explored how multiple logics influence organizational pr... more Studies of institutional complexity have explored how multiple logics influence organizational practices. This article illustrates how a single logic is maintained through its heterogeneous enactments and practices, via strong identification, in this case, with the logic of humanitarianism. Using the case of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), we develop a theory around identity work and the heterogeneous enactment of institutional logic. We illustrate, via three historical examples, how MSF engaged in radically different practices across time and space, while adhering to a continuous yet polymorphous humanitarian logic. We explain this apparent paradox by referring to the internal contradictions within humanitarian logics, contradictions that do not lead to chaos because of the persistent cohesion effects of identity. We discuss implications for understanding organizational identity and institutional diversity.
Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulat... more Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulate aspects of aesthetic judgement as well as relational questions that are inherently power-laden. Particularly in situations where actors do not share background conditions or judgement criteria, aesthetic collaboration poses conceptual and practical challenges. Through an in-depth case study of a French haute cuisine programme in Shanghai, China, we propose a relational-epistemic approach to aesthetic collaboration, in which aesthetic judgement and relational positioning mutually shape how chef trainees come to understand their creative products. Specifically, aesthetic collaboration was shaped by whether participants understood their mutual relationships as antagonistic or integrative, and whether they considered aesthetics as a matter of objective knowledge, cultural tradition or co-construction. Based on our results, we explore the implications of the relationalepistemic approach in ...
Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the n... more Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the nature of entrepreneurial thinking. More specifically, we analyse entrepreneurs’ cognitive capacity to mitigate the risk inherent in an uncertain future and overcome low community expectations of entrepreneurial success. We introduce the notion of ‘magical thinking’, an emergent construct that refers to a cluster of beliefs that maintain the motivation and focus of entrepreneurs by transmuting agency from a rational-scientific context in which the entrepreneur imposes his or her will on the environment, to a spiritual context in which the entrepreneur perseveres by remaining true to trust in a wider cosmological belief system. We identify three key elements of magical thinking – finding one’s path, obtaining the answers and being at peace.
The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary ... more The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles in the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators (boundary subjects) and interfacing...
The spread of Lean management has fuelled debates over the changing nature of workplace dominatio... more The spread of Lean management has fuelled debates over the changing nature of workplace domination. While Lean discourses often espouse a ‘human relations’ approach, research has suggested the proliferation of coercion systems and questioned whether Lean is instead shorthand for cost‐cutting and new forms of domination. The varied interpretations of Lean have explained the heterogeneity of worker responses, including forms of resistance. Our ethnography explores this heterogeneity by examining the implementation of Lean in a printing factory and tracing the emergence of shopfloor opposition. Various tactics were devised by workers, ranging from tangible procedures such as sabotage and working‐to‐rule to more subtle forms reflecting irony and contempt. We argue that the distinctive manifestations of domination emerging during the Lean programme stimulated particular forms of worker reaction, which are explained through fieldwork illustrations. Overall, we produce a theoretical explan...
Ritual performance is well understood in organizational maintenance. Its role in leadership and p... more Ritual performance is well understood in organizational maintenance. Its role in leadership and processes of change, however, remains understudied. We argue that ritual addresses key challenges in institutionalizing leadership, particularly in fixing the relation between a charismatic leader and formal governance structures. Through a historical case study of the institutionalization of the emperor in Qing China (1636–1912), we argue that the shaping of collective understandings of the new emperor involved structural aspects of ritual that worked through analogical reasoning to internalize the figure of the leader through focusing attention, fixing memory, and emotionally investing members in the leader. We argue that data from the Qing dynasty Board of Rites show that ritual was explicitly designed to model the new institutional order, which Qing state-makers used to establish collective adherence to the emperorship. We further discuss the implications of this case for understandin...
PurposeThe current study aims to explore the role of stories in organizational sensemaking proces... more PurposeThe current study aims to explore the role of stories in organizational sensemaking processes. Rather than positioning stories as one among many different sensemaking mechanisms, it is argued that stories allow a particular kind of sensemaking that is inherently open‐ended, distinguishing it from theoretical and propositional explanations for organizational phenomena. Drawing on previous Foucaultian discussions of epistemes, the paper aims to introduce the notions of epistemic impasse and epistemic spillover, arguing that cross‐functional interaction can cause tensions between incompatible epistemic bases, and that stories can act as a mechanism to overcome such tensions.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative methodology is used to illustrate the above mechanism in an ethnographic, participant‐observer study of a university student‐support center.FindingsThe results show how storytelling led to an increasingly open and ultimately universalizing tendency with the center, thu...
The current study focuses on organizational bathroom graffiti in an urban coffee house, proposing... more The current study focuses on organizational bathroom graffiti in an urban coffee house, proposing that this form of communication forms constitutes an alternative public sphere for expressive and political voices. Public bathroom graffiti is interesting due to its unique spatial and textual affordances. In particular, anonymity of such spaces promotes voice and dialogue while insulating actors from social conformity pressures. This discursive relation to space produces dense and polyphonic communicative acts, allowing authors to tackle important social and organizational questions, engage in self-conscious reflection, and express taboo emotions. A 3-year study of organizational graffiti is presented, followed by a description of how the graffiti studies composed an expressive political space within the organization. Implications of the graffiti included the decentralized production of organizational voices, the problematizing of the notions of public and private, and the possibiliti...
Studies of institutional complexity have explored how multiple logics influence organizational pr... more Studies of institutional complexity have explored how multiple logics influence organizational practices. This article illustrates how a single logic is maintained through its heterogeneous enactments and practices, via strong identification, in this case, with the logic of humanitarianism. Using the case of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), we develop a theory around identity work and the heterogeneous enactment of institutional logic. We illustrate, via three historical examples, how MSF engaged in radically different practices across time and space, while adhering to a continuous yet polymorphous humanitarian logic. We explain this apparent paradox by referring to the internal contradictions within humanitarian logics, contradictions that do not lead to chaos because of the persistent cohesion effects of identity. We discuss implications for understanding organizational identity and institutional diversity.
Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulat... more Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulate aspects of aesthetic judgement as well as relational questions that are inherently power-laden. Particularly in situations where actors do not share background conditions or judgement criteria, aesthetic collaboration poses conceptual and practical challenges. Through an in-depth case study of a French haute cuisine programme in Shanghai, China, we propose a relational-epistemic approach to aesthetic collaboration, in which aesthetic judgement and relational positioning mutually shape how chef trainees come to understand their creative products. Specifically, aesthetic collaboration was shaped by whether participants understood their mutual relationships as antagonistic or integrative, and whether they considered aesthetics as a matter of objective knowledge, cultural tradition or co-construction. Based on our results, we explore the implications of the relationalepistemic approach in ...
Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the n... more Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the nature of entrepreneurial thinking. More specifically, we analyse entrepreneurs’ cognitive capacity to mitigate the risk inherent in an uncertain future and overcome low community expectations of entrepreneurial success. We introduce the notion of ‘magical thinking’, an emergent construct that refers to a cluster of beliefs that maintain the motivation and focus of entrepreneurs by transmuting agency from a rational-scientific context in which the entrepreneur imposes his or her will on the environment, to a spiritual context in which the entrepreneur perseveres by remaining true to trust in a wider cosmological belief system. We identify three key elements of magical thinking – finding one’s path, obtaining the answers and being at peace.
The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary ... more The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles in the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators (boundary subjects) and interfacing...
The spread of Lean management has fuelled debates over the changing nature of workplace dominatio... more The spread of Lean management has fuelled debates over the changing nature of workplace domination. While Lean discourses often espouse a ‘human relations’ approach, research has suggested the proliferation of coercion systems and questioned whether Lean is instead shorthand for cost‐cutting and new forms of domination. The varied interpretations of Lean have explained the heterogeneity of worker responses, including forms of resistance. Our ethnography explores this heterogeneity by examining the implementation of Lean in a printing factory and tracing the emergence of shopfloor opposition. Various tactics were devised by workers, ranging from tangible procedures such as sabotage and working‐to‐rule to more subtle forms reflecting irony and contempt. We argue that the distinctive manifestations of domination emerging during the Lean programme stimulated particular forms of worker reaction, which are explained through fieldwork illustrations. Overall, we produce a theoretical explan...
Ritual performance is well understood in organizational maintenance. Its role in leadership and p... more Ritual performance is well understood in organizational maintenance. Its role in leadership and processes of change, however, remains understudied. We argue that ritual addresses key challenges in institutionalizing leadership, particularly in fixing the relation between a charismatic leader and formal governance structures. Through a historical case study of the institutionalization of the emperor in Qing China (1636–1912), we argue that the shaping of collective understandings of the new emperor involved structural aspects of ritual that worked through analogical reasoning to internalize the figure of the leader through focusing attention, fixing memory, and emotionally investing members in the leader. We argue that data from the Qing dynasty Board of Rites show that ritual was explicitly designed to model the new institutional order, which Qing state-makers used to establish collective adherence to the emperorship. We further discuss the implications of this case for understandin...
PurposeThe current study aims to explore the role of stories in organizational sensemaking proces... more PurposeThe current study aims to explore the role of stories in organizational sensemaking processes. Rather than positioning stories as one among many different sensemaking mechanisms, it is argued that stories allow a particular kind of sensemaking that is inherently open‐ended, distinguishing it from theoretical and propositional explanations for organizational phenomena. Drawing on previous Foucaultian discussions of epistemes, the paper aims to introduce the notions of epistemic impasse and epistemic spillover, arguing that cross‐functional interaction can cause tensions between incompatible epistemic bases, and that stories can act as a mechanism to overcome such tensions.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative methodology is used to illustrate the above mechanism in an ethnographic, participant‐observer study of a university student‐support center.FindingsThe results show how storytelling led to an increasingly open and ultimately universalizing tendency with the center, thu...
The current study focuses on organizational bathroom graffiti in an urban coffee house, proposing... more The current study focuses on organizational bathroom graffiti in an urban coffee house, proposing that this form of communication forms constitutes an alternative public sphere for expressive and political voices. Public bathroom graffiti is interesting due to its unique spatial and textual affordances. In particular, anonymity of such spaces promotes voice and dialogue while insulating actors from social conformity pressures. This discursive relation to space produces dense and polyphonic communicative acts, allowing authors to tackle important social and organizational questions, engage in self-conscious reflection, and express taboo emotions. A 3-year study of organizational graffiti is presented, followed by a description of how the graffiti studies composed an expressive political space within the organization. Implications of the graffiti included the decentralized production of organizational voices, the problematizing of the notions of public and private, and the possibiliti...
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