Journal of Management Inquiry

Research on institutional logics has exploded in the last decade. Much of this work has taken its inspiration from Friedland and Alford’s call to “bring society back in” to organizational analysis. Interestingly, when Friedland and Alford published their seminal piece, another body of work with similar focus emerged in France under the banner of French Pragmatist Sociology. In this article, we discuss how French Pragmatist Sociology complements institutional logics by helping it address its main limitations or blind spots. These include (a) microfoundations and recursiveness (how institutions are formed, maintained, or changed at a micro level), (b) legitimacy struggles (how struggles are resolved on a day-to-day basis), (c) morality (as an important element underscoring institutional logics), and (d) materiality (as physical and tangible instantiations of logics). We conclude by suggesting that a rapprochement between both approaches provides an elegant means of bridging the lingering divide between “old” and “new” institutionalism.

The “Reflections on Experience” section of the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Management Inquiry contained six articles examining the challenges associated with contemporary university governance and called for new theory and approaches. In this article, we respond by reporting one university’s innovative governance design that provides an imaginative alternative to the traditional bicameral model of the board of trustees (or governing board) and administration, and the faculty senate. Its collaborative model utilizes intermediate-sized, competency-based, and representative joint policy committees as the central means of formulating strategy. Outcomes of this alternative approach include greater trust, better and more timely decisions, and a reduction in intraorganizational conflict. We conclude that the approach merits attention as an alternative to the bicameral model and that management studies can help improve higher education governance research and practice.

Scientists and academics increasingly work on collaborative projects and write papers in international research teams. This trend is driven by greater publishing demands in terms of the quality and breadth of data and analysis methods, which tend to be difficult to achieve without collaborating across institutional and national boundaries. Yet, our understanding of the collaborative processes in an academic setting and the potential tensions associated with them remains limited. We use a reflexive, autoethnographic approach to explicitly investigate our own experiences of international collaborative research. We offer systematic insights into the social and intellectual processes of academic collaborative writing, identifying six lessons and two key tensions that influence the success of international research teams. Our findings may benefit the formation of future coauthor teams, the preparation of research proposals, and the development of PhD curricula.

This study argues that the rationality behind strategic decisions, which is characterized as expressive, social, or instrumental rational, has to be aligned with the argumentation field of the decision, which is characterized as subjective, intersubjective, or objective. A multiple case study illustrates this proposition while exploring rationality in the mainly instrumental rational debate on the expansion of Heathrow, the social rational debate on extension of Gurkha rights and the expressive rational debate on the hijab in Britain. Stakeholder arguments that realize good alignment with the related argumentation field have a substantial influence on strategic decisions. Managers and policy makers who do not realize this field fit well have to adapt their decisions, or cannot execute them. The cases illustrate the effects of this alignment strategy, in argumentation that mirrors the rationality of opponents, and in a strategy that reframes the assumed fit between the rationality and the related argumentation field.

In this article, the authors discuss critically the use of “anthropomorphic” metaphors in organization studies (e.g., organizational knowledge, learning, and memory). They argue that, although these metaphors are potentially powerful, because of frequent usage they are at risk of becoming taken for granted and contextually disconnected from their source domain, the human mind. To unleash the heuristic potential of such metaphors, it is necessary to take into account the inherent dynamics and bidirectionality of metaphorical language use. Therefore, the authors propose a methodology for the context-sensitive use of metaphors in organization studies. They illustrate this approach by developing the new metaphor of organizational insomnia, which is informed by recent neuroscientific research on human sleep and its disruptions. The insomnia metaphor provides an alternative way of explaining deficits in organizational knowledge, learning, and memory, which originate in a state of permanent restlessness.

This article reflects on the different ways in which the concept of power is treated in elite U.S. journals compared with European journals. Some observers have argued that critical researchers should not bother to try and publish their work in elite U.S. journals because of the compromises that have to be made in doing so. This essay argues that a “limited engagement” with these journals constitutes one way of trying to resist the power/knowledge relations that are so deeply embedded in them.