Family business as a longstanding hybrid organisation: Logic revision as a strategy for maintenance

Hybrid organisations, organisational forms that combine multiple institutional logics, have recently attracted substantial scholarly attention. Ongoing maintenance of hybridity has been identified as a key challenge for hybrid organisations. This paper puts forward family businesses that integrate family and business logics as the world’s oldest and the most pervasive form of hybrid organisation, and explores their organisational maintenance strategies for sustaining such hybridity. Based on an oral history study of longstanding family businesses in Scotland, we propose ‘logic revision’, i.e. a socially constructed and evolving reinterpretation of logics, as another strategy for organisational maintenance in the hybrid organisational context. As opposed to the known strategies of decoupling, compromising, structural separation and selective coupling that rely on the deterministic properties of institutional logics, this strategy draws on their socially constructed nature

Research note: Complying with frustration, the experience of equality and diversity practitioners

The Equality and Diversity (E&D) role in Higher Education (HE) in the UK ensures that universities are compliant with equalities legislation and that they fulfil their duty to promote equality as these relate to employees and the institution as a whole. Hunter and Swan (2007) call for more research to explore how equality and diversity practitioners handle these complex and contradictory (E&D) duties (Healy et al, 2010). We also argue that, as the UK university context itself faces severe financial challenges, understanding the experiences of HE E&D practitioners/managers becomes more urgent. The purpose of the research is to explain the experience of equality practitioners in the HE context, an under-explored area of equality practice. Meyerson and Scully’s concept (1995) of the ‘tempered radical’ has been used to give us greater insight into how the challenges of this role are played out in the HE context

Applying Bourdieu’s capital-field-habitus framework to migrant careers: Taking stock and adding a transnational perspective

HRM and Migration scholars increasingly employ Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals, fields and habitus to explain the interrelationships between migrant careers and context. Both literatures employ a Bourdieusean framework to examine devaluation of migrant capitals in host nations and migrant responses to such devaluation. However, their explanations are based on different assumptions of context. HRM literature regards migrants as confined to the host nation context, whereas Migration literature places them in a transnational context, spanning both originating and host nations. In this conceptual paper, we argue for integrating transnational perspectives into HRM literature to offer a more accurate portrayal of contemporary migrant lives, and to capture greater nuance in migrant career experiences. We seek to expand the conceptual lexicon to support new conceptualisations of transnational context, and to explore how locating a Bourdieusean framework in transnational contexts enhances its ability to explain migrant career experiences