Sensemaking from the body: an enactive ethnography of rowing the Amazon

Drawing on real-time video, an audio journal, interviews and field notes from the first-ever attempt to scull the navigable Amazon, we explore the promise of carnal sociology to enrich our understanding of embodied organizational sensemaking. We investigate the body’s role in sensemaking from two vantage points: “of the body” and “from the body”. Using methodological and conceptual anchors provided in Wacquant’s carnal sociology, we contrast what each approach tells us about the nature and process of sensemaking. Doing so helps us outline a complementary approach to embodied sensemaking that attends to (1) how a “new way of seeing” the body as sentient, sedimented, situated, and capable of suffering enables a more holistic understanding of the role of embodiment in sensemaking; (2) the importance this then places on the “who” of sensemaking; and (3) carnal sociology’s broader methodological implications for organizational sensemaking

"If chemists don’t do it, who is going to?" Peer-driven occupational change and the emergence of green chemistry

Occupational membership guides what people do, how they think of themselves, and how they interact in organizations and with society. While a rich literature explains how occupations adapt in response to external triggers for change, we have limited insight into how occupational incumbents, absent external triggers, work to influence how their peers do their work. We investigate the emergence and growth of “green chemistry,” an effort by chemists to encourage other chemists to reduce the health, safety, and environmental impacts of chemical products and processes. We find that advocates simultaneously advanced normalizing, moralizing, and pragmatizing frames for green chemistry and that each frame resonated differently with chemists in their various occupational roles. While this pluralistic approach generated broad acceptance of the change effort, it also exposed tensions, which threatened the coherence of the change. Divergent responses of advocates to these tensions contribute to a persistent state of pluralism and dynamism in the change effort. We discuss implications for theory on occupational change arising from our attention to internally-generated peer-driven change, heterogeneity within occupations, and change efforts that moralize occupational work.Meyer Fund for Sustainability grant (University of Oregon

Family routines and next-generation engagement in family firms

By focusing on the impact of different types of family routines and how they change, this commentary builds on concepts regarding the influence of perceived parental support and psychological control on next-generation engagement in family firms. Drawing on the organizational routines literature and the family studies literature, I propose that attention to family routines, and how these routines change (or not) over time can reveal additional insights regarding next-generation engagement in the family business

A multilevel neo-institutional analysis of infection prevention and control in English hospitals: coerced safety culture change?

Despite committed policy, regulative and professional efforts on healthcare safety, little is known about how such macro-interventions permeate organisations and shape culture over time. Informed by neo-institutional theory, we examined how inter-organisational influences shaped safety practices and inter-subjective meanings following efforts for coerced culture change. We traced macro-influences from 2000 to 2015 in infection prevention and control (IPC). Safety perceptions and meanings were inductively analysed from 130 in-depth qualitative interviews with senior- and middle-level managers from 30 English hospitals. A total of 869 institutional interventions were identified; 69% had a regulative component. In this context of forced implementation of safety practices, staff experienced inherent tensions concerning the scope of safety, their ability to be open and prioritisation of external mandates over local need. These tensions stemmed from conflicts among three co-existing institutional logics prevalent in the NHS. In response to requests for change, staff flexibly drew from a repertoire of cognitive, material and symbolic resources within and outside their organisations. They crafted 'strategies of action', guided by a situated assessment of first-hand practice experiences complementing collective evaluations of interventions such as 'pragmatic', 'sensible' and also 'legitimate'. Macro-institutional forces exerted influence either directly on individuals or indirectly by enriching the organisational cultural repertoire

Resist or Comply:The Power Dynamics of Organizational Routines during Mergers

The role of power and agency in the development of organizational routines is under-theorized. In this paper, we draw on an in-depth qualitative case study of a merger between two academic institutions, a college of art and a university, and examine the diverging responses of two organizational routines (admissions and budgeting) during the course of the merger to understand how power dynamics contribute to resistance/compliance of routines. Our findings suggest that the differences in routines’ responses to a merger initiative can be explained by applying Bourdieu's theory of practice and by employing the concepts of field and symbolic capital to unpack power relations in the context of organizational routines, and to disclose why some routine participants can exercise their agency while others cannot. We find that (a) the field within which a routine operates and (b) the actors’ symbolic capital and position-taking during change implementation shape routines’ responses to organizational change initiatives

Career Resourcing and the Process of Professional Emergence

We theorize a career resourcing process that explains how individuals can create a new profession. Using historical archives, we trace the emergence of health services research as a new research profession through the career actions of early practitioners. We find that career resourcing can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession by: 1) a process of accretion, where people pursuing fulfilling careers generate resources that contribute to institutionalization, or 2) institutional work to deliberately build the professional community and infrastructure. We contribute to research on institutional change by specifying career actions that can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession, and by developing theory that accounts for the motivations and the means of individuals to act in ways that result in the institutionalization of a new profession

Managing Carbon Aspirations: The Influence of Corporate Climate Change Targets on Environmental Performance

Addressing climate change is among the most challenging ethical issues facing contemporary business and society. Unsustainable business activities are causing significant distributional and procedural injustices in areas such as public health and vulnerability to extreme weather events, primarily because of a distinction between primary emitters and those already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Business, as a significant contributor to climate change and beneficiary of externalizing environmental costs, has an obligation to address its environmental impacts. In this paper, we explore the role of firms’ climate change targets in shaping their emissions trends in the context of a large multi-country sample of companies. We contrast two intentions for setting emissions reductions targets: symbolic attempts to manage external stakeholder perceptions via “greenwashing” and substantive commitments to reducing environmental impacts. We argue that the attributes of firms’ climate change targets (their extent, form, and time horizon) are diagnostic of firms’ underlying intentions. Consistent with our hypotheses, while we find no overall effect of setting climate change targets on emissions, we show that targets characterized by a commitment to more ambitious emissions reductions, a longer target time frame, and absolute reductions in emissions are associated with significant reductions in firms’ emissions. Our evidence suggests the need for vigilance among policy-makers and environmental campaigners regarding the underlying intentions that accompany environmental management practices and shows that these can to some extent be diagnosed analytically