JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INQUIRY – JANUARY 2023 and OCTOBER 2022
Apologies for cross-postings. Articles from the January 2023 and October 2022 issues of the Journal of Management Inquiry are now available. Please enjoy free access through February 2023 by clicking on the URL for each article.
JANUARY 2023 – Volume 32, Issue 1
CURATED
Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion
Paul S. Adler, Amr Adly, Daniel Erian Armanios, Julie Battilana, Zlatko Bodrožić, Stewart Clegg, Gerald F. Davis, Claudine Gartenberg, Mary Ann Glynn, Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Heather A. Haveman, Paul Leonardi, Michael Lounsbury, Anita M. McGahan, Renate Meyer, Nelson Phillips, and Kara Sheppard-Jones
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221119395
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/V37SQIYSPZ4KTD37NQBA/full
To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated "end of history." In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the invasion of a democratic European country by an authoritarian regime. But why does authoritarianism continue to spread, not only as an alternative to liberal democracy, but also within many liberal democracies where authoritarian leaders continue to gain strength and popularity? In this curated piece, contributors discuss some of the potential contributions of management scholarship to understanding authoritarianism, as well as highlight a number of directions for management research in this area.
Keywords: institutional theory, business & society, ethics
ESSAY
Organizational Trust in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Shifts in the Form, Production, and Targets of Trust
Fabrice Lumineau, Oliver Schilke, and Wenqian Wang
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221127852
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/WYDRRDDVQHBNYGXRTVIB/full
In this essay, we argue that the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution calls for a reexamination of trust patterns within and across organizations. We identify fundamental changes in terms of (1) what form organizational trust takes, (2) how it is produced, and (3) who needs to be trusted. First, and most broadly, trust is likely to become more impersonal and systemic. Trust between actors is increasingly substituted by trust in a system based on digital technology. Second, in terms of trust production modes, characteristic- and institution-based trust production will gain in importance. Third, despite the move toward system trust, there will nonetheless be a need to trust certain individuals; however, these trustees are no longer the counterparts to the interaction but rather third parties in charge of the technological systems and data. Thus, the focal targets of interpersonal trust are changing.
Keywords: trust, digitalization, collaboration, technological innovation, research agenda
EMPIRICAL
Building Perspective-Taking as an Organizational Capability: A Change Intervention in a Health Care Setting
Thomas Calvard, Emily Cherlin, Amanda Brewster, and Leslie Curry
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926211039014
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/NFMVRKIWQNRSYX6MFWSQ/full
Perspective-taking, or engaging with the viewpoints of others, has been linked to a range of positive and negative interpersonal outcomes. However, it has only been researched infrequently in organizations, and questions remain about how it might be developed as a multidimensional cooperative process and problem-solving capability more widely. To better understand this, this article presents findings from a 2-year change intervention with 10 US hospitals. Interview data from three time points (393 interviews, 197 staff members) reveal dimensions and levels of understanding underpinning the development of organizational perspective-taking. Actors' accounts suggested several major interrelated dimensions of perspective-taking operating at local and system levels, through affective concern, cognitive understanding, and motivational efforts to improve the sharing and interpretation of diverse perspectives. The study has implications for how organizations can better foster perspective-taking by building ecological structures and processes that assemble perspectives supportively, holistically, and frequently.
Keywords: cooperation, empathy, health care, organizational change, perspective-taking, problem-solving
Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations
Fernando Pinto Santos
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926211050785
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/GWQK4E8PNJ4W7FNDC3PA/full
Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.
Keywords: legitimacy, entrepreneurship, communication
Assimilation, Integration or Inclusion? A Dialectical Perspective on the Organizational Socialization of Migrants
Vedran Omanović and Ann Langley
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926211063777
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/KWD2I6ZFBICSQGXRIXSA/full
Given the increasing importance of migrations around the world, and the challenges that migrants face in entering the labor market, the process of socialization of migrants into organizations deserves more attention from management scholars. Indeed, societal discourses promoting equality and diversity often appear to be in contradiction with the unequal power relations migrants experience on entering the workforce. Drawing on a dialectic perspective and a qualitative meta-synthesis methodology, we show how the practices engaged in by organizations to socialize migrant employees are deeply embedded in and influenced by macro-social contexts that may place migrants at a disadvantage, giving rise to emerging tensions. We examine a range of contingencies that can mitigate the inequalities that migrants experience, and we reveal a variety of dynamic dialectical pathways surrounding migrant socialization practices through which they may be reproduced or transformed depending on the mutual relationships between situated conditions, emerging tensions and human praxes.
Keywords: qualitative research, socialization/orienting new employees, diversity
PROVOCATIONS & PROVOCATEURS
Editor's Anonymous: A Safe Place to Think About Journal Provocations
Kevin W. Rockmann
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221134444
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/ZIP7TCSGQCD4AYBXSRBE/full
Since taking the helm of the Academy of Management Discoveries in 2020, I have been struck by many interesting and thoughtful discussions with other editors as to the purpose of our journals, the importance of writing, and translating the science of management and organizations to appeal to a wider readership. In the spirit of playful yet engaging discourse, I thought I would lay these issues out, along with some ideas that we've already enacted at AMD and some that may be a bit more provocative in nature.
OCTOBER – Volume 31, Issue 4
CURATED
We Are Boiling: Management Scholars Speaking Out on COVID-19 and Social Justice
Ana María Peredo, Samer Abdelnour, Paul Adler, Bobby Banerjee, Hari Bapuji, Marta Calas, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rick Colbourne, Alessia Contu, Andrew Crane, Michelle Evans, Paul Hirsch, Arturo E. Osorio, Banu Ozkazanc-Pan, Linda Smircich, and Gabriel Weber
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221103480
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/42NWXHFPMU8SFJKFMT3P/full
COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deeply-rooted matters of social injustice in our societies. Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our crises are laying bare. Contributors to this article draw attention to the way that the pandemic has highlighted long-standing examples of injustice, from inequality to racism, gender, and social discrimination through environmental injustice to migratory workers and modern slaves. They consider the fact that few management scholars have raised their voices in protest, at least partly because of the ideological underpinnings of the discipline, and the fact these need to be challenged.
Keywords: environment, gender, justice/fairness, sustainability, business & society
EMPIRICAL
Women Entrepreneur Journeys from Poverty to Emancipation
Smita K. Trivedi and Antoaneta P. Petkova
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926211017667
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/8TRKNDF9RZIFR3ATM9YG/full
This study examines the processes and mechanisms through which entrepreneurship leads to the empowerment and emancipation of women living in poverty. Drawing on the entrepreneuring as emancipation perspective, we identify specific activities through which emancipatory entrepreneuring manifests itself in the context of women's entrepreneurship in India. We observe that the activities of a social entrepreneur-the SEWA trade union-complement the activities of individual entrepreneurs and lead to economic, personal, and cultural empowerment. Further, we find evidence of emancipation at the collective level, expressed in changes of sociocultural norms about women's entrepreneurship. Our study extends the entrepreneuring as emancipation perspective and contributes to research on empowerment and emancipation, women's entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship in developing countries.
Keywords: women entrepreneurs, entrepreneuring as emancipation, developing countries
Historical Narratives and the Defense of Stigmatized Industries
Andrew Smith, Nicholas D. Wong, Anders Ravn Sørensen, Ian Jones and Diego M. Coraiola
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926211019481
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/3UXXEDD3PCBXPS9WUSJK/full
This study examines how managers and entrepreneurs in stigmatized industries use historical narratives to combat stigma. We examine two industries, the private military contractors (PMC) industry in the United States and the cannabis industry in Canada. In recent decades, the representatives of these industries have worked to reduce the level of stigmatization faced by the industries. We show that historical narratives were used rhetorically by the representatives of both industries. In both cases, these historical narratives were targeted at just one subset of the population. Our research contributes to debates about stigmatization in ideologically diverse societies, an important issue that have been overlooked by the existing literature on stigmatized industries, which tends to assume the existence of homogeneous audiences when researching the efforts of industry representatives to destigmatize their industries.
Keywords: stigma, business & government, business & society, attitudes
Flexible Use of Referents in the Construction of Organizational Identity: A Longitudinal Case Study
Juha Laurila and Anni Paalumäki
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926211031288
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/FZFEFWFPCQKXTWEGGFAC/full
Rapid growth, acquisitions, and diversification are examples of major changes that often result in the need to redefine the distinctive characteristics of the organization in question thereafter. However, a sudden identity presentation that significantly differs from the past lacks credibility among both the organizational members and the organization's external constituents. We contribute to previous research by showing the previously neglected potential that lies in the flexible selection, valuation, and spatio-temporal positioning of referents, and how this enables the construction of an identity that is simultaneously sufficiently congruent with the organization's present activities and continuous with its previous identity. Moreover, we also reveal how this use of referents changes across the phases of organizational evolution. Empirically, our findings are grounded on an intensive case study of an organization over a 20-year time frame that evolved from a minor spin-off to a prominent and eventually to a major diversified company.
Keywords: organizational identity, organization development, impression management, reputation, grounded theory
PROVOCATIONS & PROVOCATEURS
An Intersectional Viewpoint: Being Black and Queer in Academia
Victoria Whooper
https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221114600
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/UE4FI3TB24SZTJYAHTCQ/full
Keywords: academia, BIPOC, diversity, equity, inclusion
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Richard Stackman
Professor
University of San Francisco
San Francisco CA
(415) 422-2148
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