Bøger i Elements in Organization Theory serien

This Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational social networks from its early foundations to contemporary debates. It highlights the characteristics that make the social network perspective distinctive in the organizational research landscape, including its emphasis on structure and outcomes. It covers the main theoretical developments and summarizes the research design questions that organizational researchers face when collecting and analyzing network data. Then, it discusses current debates ranging from agency and structure to network volatility and personality. Finally, the Element envisages future research directions on the role of brokerage for individuals and communities, network cognition, and the importance of past ties. Overall, the Element provides an innovative angle for understanding organizational social networks, engaging in empirical network research, and nurturing further theoretical development on the role of social interactions and connectedness in modern organizations.

Paradoxes, contrary propositions that are not contestable separately but that are inconsistent when conjoined, constitute a pervasive feature of contemporary organizational life. When contradictory elements are constituted as equally important in day-to-day work, organizational actors frequently experience acute tensions in engaging with these contradictions. This Element discusses the presence of paradoxes in the life of organizations, introduces the reader to the notion of paradox in theory and practice, and distinguishes paradox and adjacent conceptualizations such as trade-off, dilemma, dialectics, ambiguity, etc. This Element also covers what triggers paradoxes and how they come into being whereby the Element distinguishes latent and salient paradoxes and how salient paradoxes are managed. This Element discusses key methodological challenges and possibilities of studying, teaching, and applying paradoxes and concludes by considering some future research questions left unexplored in the field.

This Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational learning from performance feedback and develops a new perspective that deals with the influence of multiple goals. An agenda is laid out for new empirical research on the interconnections of decision-makers, organizations, and the environment that influences performance.

This Element presents and discusses the main trajectories in the evolution of the concept of ambiguity and the most relevant theoretical contributions developed around it. It specifically elaborates on both the intrinsic perspectives on ambiguity as an inherent part of organizational decision-making processes and the more recent strategic perspectives on discursively constructed strategic ambiguity. It helps illuminate the path ahead of organizational scholars and offers new avenues for future research. This is important given the ever more pervasive presence of ambiguity in and around organizations and societies.

This Element reinvigorates calls to explore avenues to further integrate the research fields of Organization Theory (OT) and Family Business (FB). It presents the family business literature in management journals and categorizes these papers based on four types of theoretical contribution: Embedded, Integrative, Challenger and Generalized. It discusses opportunities for dialogue between FB and OT for each type in three research domains: (i) managing hybridity, (ii) mastering tensions, dualities, and paradoxes, and (iii) modelling time and temporality.

In this Element, we examine how organizational researchers have published articles contributing to organization theory in high quality organizational journals, and we examine how healthcare researchers have drawn on organization theory in healthcare management journals.

This Element situates the corporation - its culture, governance, responsibility, and accountability - within a broader discourse of duty. In doing so, it addresses the problem of virtue and corporations for society and the corporation's problem in aligning its governance to changing community expectations of obligation.

This Element engages with fundamental questions concerning the future trajectory of professions as a distinct occupational category and of the formal organizations, which represent, employ or host professionals. Starting with a literature review, it then covers challenges and explore developments facing professions and organizations.

Emotions are central to social life and thus they should be central to organization theory. However, emotions have been treated implicitly rather than theorized directly in much of organization theory, and in some literatures, have been ignored altogether. This Element focuses on emotions as intersubjective, collective and relational, and reviews structuralist, people-centered and strategic approaches to emotions in different research streams to provide one of the first broad examinations of emotions in organization theory. Charlene Zietsma, Maxim Voronov, Madeline Toubiana and Anna Roberts provide suggestions for future research within each literature and look across the literatures to identify theoretical and methodological considerations.

This Element describes child sexual abuse and the formal organizations in which it can occur, reviews extant perspectives on child abuse, and explains how an organization theory approach can advance understanding of this phenomenon. It then elaborates the main paths through which organizational structures can influence child sexual abuse in organizations and analyze how these structures operate through these paths to impact the perpetration, detection, and response to abuse. The analysis is illustrated throughout with reports of child sexual abuse published in a variety of sources. The Element concludes with a brief discussion of the policy implications of this analysis.

The stakeholder perspective is an alternative way of understanding how companies and people create value and trade with each other. This Element discusses the foundation and implementation of stakeholder management as well as the advantages of this approach. It presents a number of tools that managers can use to implement stakeholder thinking.

Provides an overview of cultural entrepreneurship scholarship and lays the foundation for a broader and more integrative research agenda. Develops novel theoretical arguments and discusses the implications for mainstream entrepreneurship research.

Applies organization theory to the challenge of the Anthropocene era, a period of human impact on climate change, chemical waste, habitat destruction, and despeciation. Uses institutional theory to help analysts understand the framing of scientific facts, the counter-mobilization of skeptics, and the creation of archetypes as new social orders.

This Element is for all those interested in the development of organization theory and its relevance to today. It is particularly aimed at graduate students and advanced undergraduates but it is relevant to all of those who wish to understand the trajectory of this important subject.