Organization

This article uses a Bourdieuian notion of organizational field and social movement’s frame analysis to understand the successful legitimation project of the socially responsible (SR) mutual fund industry. We show how institutional entrepreneurs, as both insiders and outsiders of the dominant organizational field, compete with existing mutual fund logics and become a legitimate presence in the mutual fund industry. The SR mutual fund industry has grown exponentially since its introduction in the 1970s, even though the product it sells is ambiguous in nature (Wood, 2000). Thus, while the product could be perceived as subversive, as the SR industry is arguing that companies should act ‘responsible’ in their efforts to make money, the reality is that industry innovators do not disrupt the existing mutual fund logic of ‘fiduciary responsibility’ in order to legitimate themselves. Rather, SR institutional entrepreneurs use their social location in multiple organizational fields to argue that consumers can ‘make money while doing good’. Such a frame is not completely subversive nor completely compliant with the existing logic, yet it successfully appeals to both mutual fund insiders and social movement outsiders.

Even leadership prescriptions that claim facilitative, democratic or participative credentials struggle to break away from the depiction of leadership as a fundamentally impositional undertaking; a feature which may put many academics and practitioners off the subject altogether. This article therefore calls for more attention to the question of how people who find themselves in leadership roles might lead in a less impositional manner. It also offers a contribution to that agenda. After highlighting some limitations of potential sources of reassurance against leadership’s impositional connotations, the article draws on Jürgen Habermas’ discussion of ideal speech, along with some commentaries on Habermas’ work, to propose an outline for a model of leadership as the facilitation of ideal speech. It also considers the practical feasibility, in contemporary organizations, of leadership that facilitates ideal speech, identifying some aspects of organizational theory and practice that may offer nourishment to such an approach.

This article connects to and extends the attempts to bring space back into critical organizational theory, which, we argue, has mainly been based on the socio-spatial perspective as pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. Taking issue with the various ways in which Lefebvre’s work can be interpreted, we develop an alternative route. Adopting a mode of non-representational theorizing as outlined in human geography, we propose the concept of ‘spacing’, which orients the understanding of organizational space towards its material, embodied, affective and minor configurations. In discussing the consequences of such a performative approach to space for the practice and craft of organizational scholarship, we argue that our conceptual opening entails a move from representational strategies of extracting representations of the (organizational) world from the world to embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of organizational space. What can be termed the enactment of organizational geographies in slow motion is inspired and illustrated by the video ‘The Raft’ conceived by the artist Bill Viola.

In this theoretical article we propose an approach to the spatial implications of homeworking derived from the work of social theorist Henri Lefebvre. By highlighting the processes involved in the inherently contested and (re)constructed nature of space in the demarcated home/work environment we draw on Lefebvre to suggest a collapse of this demarcation. We consider the impact of such a collapse on questions relating to the rewards and challenges of home-based work for both workers and their co-residents. In contrast to our approach to the spatial implications of home-based work derived from Lefebvre, we argue that a traditional, Euclidean conception of space risks ignoring the important, symbolic nature of social space to the detriment of both the effective research and practice of homeworking.

The interest in organizational play is growing, both in popular business discourse and organization studies. As the presumption that play is dysfunctional for organizations is increasingly discarded, the existing positions may be divided into two camps; one proposes ‘serious play’ as an engine for business and the other insists that work and play are largely indistinguishable in the postindustrial organization. Our field study of a design and communications company in Denmark shows that organizational play can be much more than just functional to the organization. We identify three ways in which workplaces engage in play: play as a (serious) continuation of work, play as a (critical) intervention into work and play as an (uninvited) usurpation of work.

Throughout our adult lives we have both been haunted by a certain sense of doubleness—a feeling of dislocation, of being in the wrong place, of playing a role. Inspired by Stevenson’s novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we explore this doubleness through evocative, dual, autoethnographic accounts of academic conferences. By analysing our stories in an iterative process of writing, reading, rewriting and rereading, we seek to extend the reach of much recent autoethnographic research. Presenting ourselves as objects of research, we show how, for us, contemporary academic identity is problematic in that it necessarily involves being (at least) ‘both’ Jekyll and Hyde. In providing readings of our stories, we show how autoethnography can make two contributions to the study of identity in organizations. The first is that autoethnographic accounts may provide scholars with new forms of empirical material—case studies in identity work. The second contribution highlights the value of experimenting with unorthodox approaches—such as explicitly using novels and other literary sources to study identity.