The Street and Organization Studies

Work and organization increasingly happen in transit. People meet in coffee shops and write emails from their phones while waiting for buses or sitting outdoors on benches. Business meetings are held in airports and projects are run from laptops during travel. We take the street as a place where organizing in transit accumulates. While the organization studies field has been catching up with various related phenomena, including co-working, digital nomadism, and mobile and online communities, we argue that it has overlooked what has historically been the most important site for organizational activity outside of organizations. The street has been both location and inspiration for organizing, whether political, social, or governmental. It is a space of both planning and spontaneity, of silent co-existence and explicit conflict, and therefore offers abundant empirical and methodological opportunities. It is surprising that the street and the experiences it brings with it have remained largely outside the scope of organization studies. We suggest that organization scholars take to the street, and offer recommendations asto how to do so. Specifically, we explore the tensionsthat become apparent when organizing happens in and through the street

RESCUING PUBLICNESS FROM ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Does publicness still make sense as an issue for further research? Classic organizational sociology (or standard theory) has provided a breakthrough for understanding public administration and management, but has not fully explored the agenda. Publicness is analytically characterized by the ownership of two production functions: efficiency (outputs), effectiveness (societal outcomes). While similarities may exist between public and non-public entities on some aspects of their organizational models, the effectiveness function they are accountable for is quite specific. Such a perspective allows public administration and organizational scholars to explore new perspectives such as organizing and organized (or the agenda of extended theory).organizational analysis; publicness; organized; organizing; public administration

A Market Mediation Strategy:How Social Movements Seek to Change Firms’ Practices by Promoting New Principles of Product Valuation

Social movement theory has recently paid a lot of attention to the diversity of strategies used by social movements to pressurize companies, and has spawned an abundant literature on the combined perspective of social movement studies and market organization studies. This paper adopts a rather different perspective, drawing on market theories from the economic sociology of evaluation to assess a specific strategy developed by a number of groups within the environmental social movement, which relies on the market’s capacity to mediate their claims. The literature has widely considered why some environmental social movement organizations (SMOs) choose to address consumers, even though it is not in their tradition to do so and even though their objective is not directly related to consumption issues. I seek to contribute to this debate by analysing the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’, by highlighting a specific social movement strategy which is mediated by market mechanisms. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of a strategy consisting of attempts to change the most prevalent valuation criteria within the market by introducing principles of worth that rely on products’ environmental performance. This involves activist organizations suggesting new product valuation criteria, and then seeking to convince firms that consumers’ preferences are changing. Their assumption is that firms will see new business opportunities, which will prompt them to adopt more eco-friendly practices. This market mediation strategy is designed to encourage firms to shift towards more eco-friendly supply practices, by creating business opportunities for them. It shows how SMOs, in order to directly shape consumers’ preferences, urge them to introduce eco-friendly principles of worth into their valuation of products by providing them with market devices to help in their purchasing choices. By applying these strategies, SMOs seek to shape the market and create business opportunities for firms. Their intention is to make companies see the value of changing some of their practices by introducing new eco-friendly features in their products, because consumers have been convinced by SMOs of the value of such features. SMOs must then pursue two important objectives: one is to shape consumers’ preferences for that kind of valuation category on the market by convincing them of their responsibilities and their role as agents of change; and the other is to convince companies that a real shift in consumers’ preferences is taking place in the market, so that they see it as an interesting opportunity to benefit from the SMOs’ shaping of the market

Historical organization studies

Historical organization studies denotes organizational research that draws on historical sources, methods and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both theory and history. It thus aspires to dual integrity, whereby organization theory and history inform one another without either becoming dominant. By historicizing organizational research, the contexts and forces bearing upon organizations may be more fully recognized and analyses of organizational and institutional dynamics improved. This chapter explores, through three illustrative projects, different ways in which historical organization studies might be enacted: an archival-based exploration of the construction since 1945 of the global hotel industry; an oral-history project on corporate governance and executive remuneration; and a database-centric study of philanthropy in North East England between 1830 and 1939 drawing on diverse primary sources. The methodology’s main strength lies in explicating the processes at work in the emergence, institutionalization and maintenance of contemporary phenomena of substance and import

Fiction and Organization Studies

The topic of fiction is in itself not new to the domain of organization studies. However, prior research has often separated fiction from the reality of organizations and used fiction metaphorically or as a figurative source to describe and interpret organizations. In this article, we go beyond the classic use of fiction, and suggest that fiction should be a central concern in organization studies. We draw on the philosophy of fiction to offer an alternative account of the nature of fiction and its basic operation. We specifically import Searle’s work on speech acts, Walton’s pretense theory, Iser’s fictionalizing acts, and Ricoeur’s work on narrative fiction to theorize about organizations as fictions. In doing so, we hope that we not only offer an account of the “ontological status” of organizations but also provide a set of theoretical coordinates and lenses through which, separately or together, the notion of organizations as fictions can be approached and understood

Ruin and organization studies

In this paper we offer a preliminary study of the various ways in which 'ruin' has significance for organization studies. One important motif associated with both modern and romantic treatments of the ruin is the revelatory impressions ruins make. In this respect the traditions of ruin writing will talk of their ?beauty?, their ?strangeness? or their capacity to ?intimidate?. In order to attend to this elusive phenomenon we must necessarily breach some of the self-imposed boundaries of our ?discipline?. Central to our strategy is the use of ?contiguity? as both method and textual structuring device that allows us to drift across iconic ruin images, ruin theories, and our own ruinous research experiences. This helps us learn how to ?dwell? in ruins without any impatient reaching after fact or explaining away ruins in the terms of any established tradition of theorizing in organization. In this way we hope to be able to open up new analytic spaces and associations for organizational researchers. These concern specifically a) a distinctive approach to time, history and memory; b) an increased awareness of the multiplicity of forces impinging on organization, but from which we so easily retreat behind the cordon sanitaire of organization-studies-as-usual; and c) a cognizance of how the very way we write is a mode of doing organization that is crucial for our ability and willingness to look into 'all corners of reality' so that we might better grasp organizational phenomena

Conceptualizing historical organization studies

© 2016 Academy of Management Review. The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: The authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies-organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: History as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies-dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency-and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities

Questioning and organization studies

This essay identifies a cleavage in the organisation literature that separates ‘questions’ and ‘questioning’ at a very fundamental philosophical level. On the one hand, the objective notion of ‘questions’ has already been well addressed within organization studies, evident in how scholars have scrutinized questions as objects of analysis; for example, paying close attention to the forms and functions of questions as instruments of research. More recently, the linguistic turn within the social sciences has influenced how organization studies researchers have considered organizations as discursive entities, with debate extending to the discursive nature of ‘questions’. On the other hand, the process of ‘questioning’ remains under-researched. From one perspective, questioning the process of questioning is challenging, but, as we submit, this is precisely where American pragmatism can be helpful. As we explore in this essay, the forward-looking quality of pragmatist inquiry is what motors the process of questioning. Our pragmatist-inflected argument is that questioning does not have to always serve critique and position building in the organization studies field. Rather, questioning out of curiosity can build new dialogue and open up new methodological avenues. This may help change the habitual ways in which we explore ideas, problems and situations in organization studies as well as lead to more democratic forms of organizing. Crucially, in this essay we are not looking for ultimate ‘answers’; rather we hope to excite discussion about questioning by giving prominence to something that is so ubiquitous and taken-for-granted as to be invisible to many of us as an object of inquiry