Administrative Science Quarterly

The places in which organizational life occurs can have profound impacts on actors, actions, and outcomes but are largely ignored in organizational research. Drawing on ideas from social geography, we explore the roles that places play in institutional work. The context for our study is the domain of housing for the hard-to-house, within which we conducted two qualitative case studies: the establishment of Canada’s first residential and day-care facility for people living with HIV/AIDS, and the creation of a municipal program to provide temporary overnight accommodation for homeless people in local churches. In examining these cases, we found that places played three key roles: places contained, mediated, and complicated institutional work. Each of these roles was associated with a distinct ontology of place: places as social enclosures, as signifiers, and as practical objects. Our findings have significant implications for how we understand the relationship between location and organizations and allow us to develop a process model of places, institutions, and institutional work.

This paper questions a key assumption in the organizations literature that the dynamism of institutional logics and practice variations is the result of rivalry among logics and actors, of tensions and institutional shifts, and of the agency of institutional entrepreneurs. This study examines in rich historical detail the development of accounting in the Jesuit Order, illustrating how Jesuit accounting started from a rationality that did not presuppose an external ordering principle; instead, Jesuit rationality was unfolding—founded in continuous interrogations informed by common, purposeful procedural logics stemming from rhetorical practices used to classify, recall, and invent knowledge. I examine this concept of unfolding rationality in two areas of Jesuit practices: spiritual self-accountability and administrative accounting and recordkeeping. In this Jesuit rationality, the relationships between means and ends, and how and why behaviors take place, were not anchored permanently in a substantive logic. Instead, procedural logics left individual Jesuits and the community to imagine modes of action in the specific social and organizational contexts in which their missions operated. Jesuit rationality was thus unfolding, a persistent and recursive mode of governing social behavior and searching for organizational order that generated large-scale administrative routines and institutional dynamism while never fully achieving that order. The analysis brings into question our understanding of the historical and institutional genealogies of modern rationality and its taken-for-granted link with Protestant ethics.

Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, such as education, urban location, and regional and demographic differences, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States for the period 2008–2010. Gay men are more likely to be in female-majority occupations than are heterosexual men, and lesbians are more represented in male-majority occupations than are heterosexual women, but even after accounting for this tendency, common to both gay men and lesbians is a propensity to concentrate in occupations that provide task independence or require social perceptiveness, or both. This study offers a theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets.

We explore the relationship between status and reputation, examining how its dynamics change over time as these two intangible assets coevolve and how reputation and status are influenced by participation in highly visible events. Using a sample of more than 400 newly founded venture capital (VC) firms, we find that reputation and status positively influence each other but that reputation has a greater effect on status, particularly when firms are older. We also find that the effect of past status on current status weakens as VC firms age, but the relationship between past and current reputation remains consistent with age. Furthermore, our findings show that participating in big hits—blockbuster initial public offerings—has a positive relationship with status when firms are young and a positive relationship with reputation when firms are older, and it helps low-status and low-reputation firms more than it helps high-status and high-reputation firms. This study helps differentiate status and reputation, shows how they coevolve, and provides insight into how new firms build these important intangible assets.

Through a qualitative study of BP executives during and after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and spill, I examine whether and how the relationship between an organization and its members can be repaired once damaged. I found that the incident destabilized executives’ organizational identification, leading them to doubt the alignment between their own identity and BP’s, and generated feelings of ambivalence toward the organization and their role in it. This marked the onset of a process through which members reassessed their identification, leading them either to reidentify and repair their relationship with BP or to deidentify and sever that relationship. Executives resolved their ambivalence and strongly reidentified only when they had organizationally sanctioned opportunities, through working on BPs’ response to the incident, to enact the identity attributes of technical excellence and environmental consciousness that were threatened by the Gulf events, suggesting that full relationship repair requires active co-creation by the member and the organization. Absent co-created repair, social information that supported or undermined executives’ identification with BP was key to resolving ambivalence and destabilized identification. Building on these findings, I develop a model of repairing damaged relationships after a transgression, with the concepts of destabilized identification and co-created repair, and the mechanism of ambivalence resolution at its center.