Cultural molding, shielding, and shoring at Oilco: the role of culture in the integration of routines

We explore how organizational culture shapes an organization’s integration and enactment of an external routine that is not a cultural fit. Attending to employees’ use of culture as a repertoire of strategies of action, we found that the use of familiar cultural strategies of action shaped the routine’s artifacts and expectations even before it was performed, a process we call cultural molding. Subsequently, employees drew differently on cultural strategies of action as they performed the routine, generating patterns of workarounds or hindered performances. In response to these patterns, they undertook additional cultural work to either shield their workarounds and protect them from scrutiny or shore up hindered performances. We contribute to the routine dynamics literature by highlighting the effortful cultural work involved in integrating coveted routines, furthering our understanding of routines as truces and the embeddedness of routines.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant 430-2012-195

"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

Understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research

“Grand challenges” are formulations of global problems that can be plausibly addressed through coordinated and collaborative effort. In this Special Research Forum, we showcase management research that examines societal problems that individuals, organizations, communities, and nations face around the world. We develop a framework to guide future research to provide systematic empirical evidence on the formulation, articulation, and implementation of grand challenges. We highlight several factors that likely enhance or suppress the attainment of collective goals, and identify representative research questions for future empirical work. In so doing, we aspire to encourage management scholars to engage in tackling broader societal challenges through their collaborative research and collective insight

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

Interrogating Microfinance Performance beyond Products, Clients and the Environment. Insights from the work of BRAC in Tanzania

The performance of microfinance organisations can depend upon many factors. Current research emphasizes factors pertaining to clients, products, or broader environments. But researchers have paid less attention to the workings and internal systems of microfinance organisations. We explore how variation in performance within an organisation can alter the consequences of loans and their popularity among clients and potential clients. We illustrate with data from BRAC in Tanzania, where the arrival and rapid expansion of BRAC’s microfinance programme provides an apposite case study