Between Creed, Rhetoric Façade, and Disregard

Applying the theoretical lens of organizational institutionalism, this study analyzes the spread of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Austrian corporate world. The objectives are threefold: First, to explore the institutional framework in place; second, to explain the dissemination of CSR in terms of adopters’ characteristics and field-level pressures; and third, to understand the structuring dimensions of meaning within the CSR discourse. The findings demonstrate that a specific sub-population is more inclined to espouse commitment to CSR policies. Against the background of an ambiguous nature and definition of CSR, this study also shows how actor categories and divergent thematic embeddings serve as a basis for the concept’s theorization, and elaborates on a distinct constellation of empirical sub-discourses

Rethinking the sharing economy:The nature and organization of sharing in the 2015 refugee crisis

Our paper focuses on a non-standard sharing example that harbors the potential to disrupt received wisdom on the sharing economy. While originally entering the field to analyze, broadly from a governance perspective, how the 2015 refugee crisis was handled in Vienna, Austria, we found that the non-governmental organization Train of Hope - labeled as a "citizen start-up" by City of Vienna officials - played an outstanding role in mastering the crisis. In a blog post during his visit in Vienna at the time, and experiencing the refugee crisis first-hand, it was actually Henry Mintzberg who suggested reading the phenomenon as part of the "sharing economy". Continuing this innovative line of thought, we argue that our unusual case is in fact an excellent opportunity to discover important aspects about both the nature and organization of sharing. First, we uncover an additional dimension of sharing beyond the material sharing of resources (i.e., the economic dimension): the sharing of a distinct concern (i.e., the moral dimension of sharing). Our discovery exemplifies such a moral dimension that is rather different from the status quo materialistic treatments focusing on economic transactions and property rights arguments. Second, we hold that a particular form of organizing facilitates the sharing economy: the sharing economy organization. This particular organizational form is distinctive - at the same time selectively borrowing and skillfully combining features from platform organizations (e.g., use of technology as an intermediary for exchange and effective coordination, ability to tap into external resources) and social movements (e.g., mobilization, shared identity, collective action). It is a key quality of this form of organization to enable the balancing of the two dimensions inherent in the nature of sharing: economic and moral. Our paper contributes to this Special Issue of the Academy of Management Discoveries by highlighting and explaining the two-fold economic and moral nature of sharing and the organization of sharing between movement and platform

Beyond the Visible, the Material and the Performative: Shifting Perspectives on the Visual in Organization Studies

From SAGE Publishing via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: epub 2021-07-28Publication status: PublishedVisual organizational research has burgeoned over the past decade. Despite an initially hesitant engagement with visuality in organization and management studies, it is now only proper to speak of a ‘visual turn’ in this domain of scholarly inquiry. We wish to take the opportunity provided by the Perspectives format to engage with prominent work published in Organization Studies, in appreciation of the diversity of approaches to the visual in organizational research, and highlight some generative tensions across this body of work. In particular, we have scrutinized six articles based on their treatment of signification (how the visual mode enables meaning-making and meaning-sharing in and around organizations), manifestation (how visual organizational artefacts and their properties relate to affordances) and implication (how visualization practices produce organizational outcomes). Inspired by the frictions and gaps across these articles, we developed three distinct perspective shifts that highlight the importance of the invisible, the immaterial and the performance within visualization. We conclude with a comparative matrix that maps different conceptualizations of visualization, and suggest opportunities for future research based on how we see the field of visual organizational studies evolving

When bureaucracy meets the crowd:Studying ‘Open Government’ in the Vienna city administration

International audienceOpen Government is en vogue, yet vague: while practitioners, policy-makers, and others praise its virtues, little is known about how Open Government relates to bureaucratic organization. This paper presents insights from a qualitative investigation into the City of Vienna, Austria. It demonstrates how the encounter between the city administration and “the open” juxtaposes the decentralizing principles of the crowd, such as transparency, participation, and distributed cognition, with the centralizing principles of bureaucracy, such as secrecy, expert knowledge, written files, and rules. The paper explores how this theoretical conundrum is played out and how senior city managers perceive Open Government in relation to the bureaucratic nature of their administration. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to empirically trace the complexities of the encounter between bureaucracy and Open Government; and second, to critically theorize the ongoing rationalization of public administration in spite of constant challenges to its bureaucratic principles. In so doing, the paper advances our understanding of modern bureaucratic organizations under the condition of increased openness, transparency, and interaction with their environments.<br/

Between Creed, Rhetoric Façade, and Disregard

Applying the theoretical lens of organizational institutionalism, this study analyzes the spread of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Austrian corporate world. The objectives are threefold: First, to explore the institutional framework in place; second, to explain the dissemination of CSR in terms of adopters’ characteristics and field-level pressures; and third, to understand the structuring dimensions of meaning within the CSR discourse. The findings demonstrate that a specific sub-population is more inclined to espouse commitment to CSR policies. Against the background of an ambiguous nature and definition of CSR, this study also shows how actor categories and divergent thematic embeddings serve as a basis for the concept’s theorization, and elaborates on a distinct constellation of empirical sub-discourses

Does Institutional Theory Need Redirecting?

ABSTRACT Greenwood, Hinings and Whetten (2014) present two major criticisms of current institutional scholarship, and see need for a broad redirection: institutional organization theory, they argue, has lost sight of the claim to study organizations and, with its overwhelming focus on isomorphism and similarity, has fallen short on adequately theorizing differences across organizations. In our article, we offer support as well as a riposte. First, while we agree that the organizing of collective efforts needs to be at the core of organization research, we warn that focusing on formal organization -a rationalized cultural product itself -may direct attention away from studying alternative modes of organizing, and underestimates the dynamic developments that have transformed contemporary organizations into increasingly complex objects of inquiry. Second, we are concerned that, by abandoning the analysis of similarities in favour of differences, institutional theory may eventually lose sight of its pivotal quest: to study institutions

What theory is and can be: Forms of theorizing in organizational scholarship

Theory is at the very heart of organizational scholarship and a key criterion for evaluating the quality and contribution of our research. Focusing on conceptual rather than empirical work, this editorial essay highlights the wide range of forms that theorizing might take – and how it, in consequence, materializes in different types of theory papers. Next to the propositional form of theory building, which has so far dominated reflections in the literature, we discuss the particularities of process, configurational, perspectival, and meta-theorizing, as well as various forms of critique. We demonstrate how these forms of theorizing differ in terms of their aims, style of reasoning, their contributions, and the way in which they are written up as papers. In view of the rather different roles that each of these forms of theorizing serve, we propagate, in line with the ethos of Organization Theory, a pluralistic stance when it comes to advancing theory in organization studies