Organization Studies

Selecting which aspects of empirical phenomena to investigate is a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in qualitative research. This paper introduces an interactional sociolinguistic methodology to examine how a qualitative research team navigated this challenge during a three-year project. By analysing real-life team discussions, we identify four types of interactionally co-constructed commitments – straightforward, uncertain, repeated and withheld commitments – that enable teams to balance exploratory openness with the need to narrow their focus within the interplay between the observed empirical field and academic discourse. Building on these insights, we propose an interactional sociolinguistic model of collective commitments to ‘what is interesting’ in qualitative research. Our study contributes to methodological scholarship by revealing how linguistic interaction shapes shared direction and methodological decision-making in team-based qualitative inquiries.

How do actors overlook uncomfortable information? We add to the understanding of how potential problems can be ignored over long periods, in spite of recurrent warnings. Ignoring then becomes a dynamic process of responding to evolving ignoring ‘threats’ or triggers by combining knowledge-seeking and knowledge avoidance in ways that must be continuously legitimated, both in one’s own eyes and in those of relevant parts of the environment. Drawing on a longitudinal case study, we find that ambiguity-juggling – mutually supporting acts foregrounding and backgrounding ambiguity – constitute a key element of such ignoring work. Our study adds to the literatures on strategic or wilful ignorance and ambiguity management by providing a novel explanation for how actors dynamically mobilize motives for ignoring and thereby navigate uncomfortable information that evolves over time. As we show, sustained forms of ignoring involve interactions between shifting ignoring triggers, adaptive ignoring work and evolving states of organized ignorance. This conceptualization contributes to the ignoring literature by extending current accounts of the ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘how much’ and ‘who’ of ignoring, as well as its outcomes.

Empathy is widely celebrated as a leadership skill and moral virtue. We agree that empathy is central to social connection but argue that it is not inherently virtuous. To understand its impacts on organizations, we must move beyond individual-centric views of empathy and instead see it as a relational phenomenon embedded in power relations. Drawing on psychology, feminist theory, political science, and anthropology, we identify four often-repressed dark sides of empathy. Distress from somatic empathy exposes the embodied costs of engaging with others’ suffering. Disparity persists through the empathy tax, as the burden of emotional labour falls disproportionately on women. Division persists through preferential empathy, privileging those we identify with while excluding others. Deception arises from tactical empathy, using emotional insight manipulatively. Together, these dark sides expose empathy as an organizing force marked by uneven distributions, contested purposes, and ambivalent consequences. We bring attention to these fundamental tensions in empathy yet resist campaigns to discredit it. Instead, we propose relational empathy as a way of understanding its complex, power-laden nature.

Drawing on neo-institutional theories, this study explores how universities engage in internationalization as organizational actors embedded in national and global contexts. Using a mixed-method approach and based on a sample of 500 universities across 89 countries, we analyse how a country’s global competitiveness and liberal tendencies shape the ways its universities organize structures and activities around internationalization, particularly amid today’s intensified global competition among countries and universities and the resurgence of illiberalism. Our quantitative analyses show that national competitiveness is positively associated with internationalization activities, whereas national liberalism is positively associated with internationalization structures. Additionally, our qualitative analyses reveal variations in how universities motivate and emphasize different aspects of internationalization across the continuum of national competitiveness and liberalism. Together, our findings extend neo-institutionalist research by highlighting distinct aspects of organizational actorhood and the heterogeneity demonstrated across contexts.

This article advances empirical and conceptual understanding of how unlearning can help to sustain democratic organizing. While learning to confront persistent tensions is widely recognized as a central element of democratic organizing, there is surprisingly little research on its practice. In exploring this gap, unlearning emerged as a distinct yet integral aspect of individual and collective learning in democratic organizing – and to sustaining democratic organizing across time and scale. Our abductive analysis of qualitative research across four established (>20 years) and scaled (>50 members) UK-based worker cooperatives uncovered the centrality of relational processes of unlearning habitual beliefs, values and patterns of behaviour in interaction with others, the organization and the environment. Empirically, we discern three relational dynamics that create a need for unlearning and three relational practices for engaging in unlearning. We offer conceptual depth by formulating three analytical propositions for future research and practice.

We explore the interdependence between stakeholder controversies and shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues and how it affects corporate financial performance. Viewing shareholder impact as a distributed and dynamic process, we theorize that shareholder dialogue can affect investors’ risk perceptions. As an ambivalent signal, its impact may be negative or positive, contingent on media-covered stakeholder controversies. In the absence of those controversies, shareholder dialogue may highlight the existence of environmental and social liabilities in targeted companies. In the presence of stakeholder controversies, however, shareholder dialogue may reassure the investment community about shareholders’ commitment to and confidence about improving environmental and social policies and practices. We test our hypotheses on a proprietary dataset of 771 S&P 500 companies between 2007 and 2019 that covers 176 environmental and social shareholder dialogues. We find that, in the wake of stakeholder controversies, shareholder dialogue moderates the negative effects of controversies on targeted companies’ financial performance, consistent with our theory that shareholder dialogue may mitigate investors’ perceptions of risk. Our findings contribute to the understanding of shareholder engagement and, more broadly, of stakeholder–shareholder dynamics.

We respond to calls for a greater focus on discursive arenas, their rules, and how these enable or constrain discursive legitimation. Our abductive study explores the case of a new cystic fibrosis drug, Orkambi, and the legitimation contests that surround the Irish government’s decision as to whether it should be funded by the public purse. Our dataset consists of tweets, newspaper articles, and parliamentary debate transcripts. We define a discursive arena, suggesting it is a location for micro-level discursive interactions that is bounded in time and place, observed by an audience, and underpinned by a set of rules that shape discursive positions and foundations. We identify three nonexhaustive and continuum-based characteristics of discursive arenas: one structural (how open it is) and two bases of legitimacy (whether it eclipses or evokes emotion, and whether it values lay or professional expertise). We build on this to suggest a typology of discursive arenas ranging from hot (where legitimacy commonly overflows into and out of other arenas) to cold (where such overflows are rare). We theorize a relationship between bases of legitimacy and arena type. In doing so, we focus attention on the nature of the arenas in which social issues are debated and how this affects the way that social issues travel from arena to arena. We believe that such a focus is vital in current climates where the rise of social media, the decline of traditional media, and the challenge of echo chambers all change the nature of democratic debate. How arenas shape and propagate or constrain such debate is vital to the design of a sustainable democratic society.

In contemporary art, the question of organization, and of how to organize differently, has become a key concern, leading to a wide range of organizational experiments as material of art itself. In this paper, we investigate contemporary art’s organizational aesthetics by turning to the exhibition documenta fifteen as the hitherto most visible forum of art’s turn to alternative organization. We identify four modes of organizing – diagramming, hanging out, infrastructuring and archiving – performed and exhibited at the exhibition, and we develop the notion of pre-enactment as aesthetic register of reimagining and rehearsing organization. We then outline an understanding of organizational eutopianism as atmospheric, chronopolitical and resistant to assumptions of frictionless scaling and circulation

In spite of national and corporate commitments to carbon neutrality, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase worsening climate change impacts. Within this context, climate protesters around the world are demanding a different future. In this paper, we are interested in how the fossil fuel industry and its political supporters have responded to these challenges and maintained fossil fuel hegemony. Based on interviews with influential informants from the political, lobbying and fossil fuel sectors as well as texts from media, speeches and press releases, our analysis shows how hegemony is defended by critiquing protesters’ imaginaries as utopian (impossible) or dystopian (undesirable) and by constructing a conservative counter-utopia that is linked to the status quo of fossil fuel dominance. The findings explain how utopian politics is employed to defend hegemony by (i) spatially fragmenting opponents and incorporating protesters’ future imaginaries within a conservative counter-utopia, and (ii) temporally constructing a pathway from the status quo to this conservative counter-utopia. Our discussion of utopian politics contributes to the literature on imaginaries by understanding how constructed futures are politically navigated, and to discussions on hegemony by explaining the expansive (spatially and temporally) discursive strategies of maintaining hegemony. We conclude by arguing for the importance of utopian thinking in addressing climate change.

This study examines the role of social cohesion in fostering communities’ economic resilience, defined as their ability to positively adjust and maintain economic functioning while facing adversity. Covid-19 caused worldwide disruptions, forcing firms to close overnight as a measure to stop the virus from spreading. However, considerable within-country regional heterogeneity manifested in the impact of the various applied measures. Focusing on organization exits across 379 Dutch municipalities and applying a mixed methods approach, we argue and find that social cohesion – conceptualized as involving kinship and residential stability – increases communities’ economic resilience and that family firms are a conduit through which social cohesion affects economic resilience. Kinship creates the willingness to help other members, even if this means suffering some losses. Residential stability fosters a social infrastructure that is necessary for the quick mobilization of a community’s resources. Family firms mediate the relationship between social cohesion and economic resilience, by leveraging their long-term orientation, strong, community-embedded relationships and internal resources.