Organization Studies

Markets have sometimes been described as vastly different from and even opposite to formal organizations. But markets and organizations share a similarity as well. Both are organized – by the use of decisions on membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions or hierarchy. Market organization creates differences among markets, and specific dynamics, which can be explained by the actions and interactions of market organizers: profiteers, ‘others’, sellers and buyers. The concept of market organization is an analytical tool, which can be used for analysing why and how markets are created, why they get their specific form and how they change.

Brand scholarship traditionally resides within the marketing literature and focuses on organizations’ external relationships with customers. However, increasing critical attention in organization studies has focused on the brand in order to understand its impact on the internal dynamics of employment relations in contemporary organizations. Drawing on an ethnography of frontline service work in an IT consultancy call centre, we explore the brand as an internal organizational resource sustaining the process of employee meaning-making activities. Documenting the ‘work of the brand’, we outline what the brand offers both employees and employers and, in doing so, we theorize the brand at work as a connecting mechanism between processes of identity formation/re-formation and regulation. While employees are encouraged to internalize particular brand meanings (in this case prestige, success and quality), we found that they often willingly buy into these intended brand meanings as a palliative to ‘cope’ with mundane work. In this way brand meanings are central to producing a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity.

Labyrinths and mazes have constituted significant spaces for tales of transformation, from prehistoric designs through the myth of the Minotaur and the pilgrimage design in Chartres cathedral to contemporary novels and pictorial representations. Labyrinths and labyrinthine designs can also commonly be found in present-day organizations. This text, based on an ethnographic study as well as on an analysis of academic discourse, explores their significance as symbol and as physical structure. Drawing upon the notion of transitional space, it presents labyrinths as an indelible part of human experience, an archetype, and a sensemaking tool for understanding and explaining organizational complexity. The unavoidable presence of labyrinthine structures is presented as a counterpoise to the reductionist tendency towards simplification, streamlining and staying on-message, allowing or demanding space for reflection, doubt and uncertainty.

Institutional theory’s understanding of unplanned change in fragmented and complex environments has made the connection between institutional work at the micro level and institutional logics at the macro level a central issue. Change that is not planned is contingent on events. In practice an event, as a single occurrence of an unexpected, unanticipated or unacknowledged process, connects these levels, as the event is selected for attention, enacted in meaning, and organizationally coded. Not all events are selected, enacted and coded, of course. The recognition, attributes and potential of events depend on selections made from and meaning given to past events and those conceived as coming into being in the future perfect. The concept of recursive contingency describes how unique occurrences become connected in an evolving process over time; in doing so, it stresses the important role of the unexpected in regard to institutional change. Using a theoretical framework derived from Luhmann’s work, in which institutions are seen as relatively autonomous self-closed subsystems generating contingency, we define an event as such by the fact that what it means and what is to be done with it cannot be decided by the application of a rule: choice is demanded that requires coding it as a specific type of event. A recursive view of contingency can be connected to an institutional theory of change in which the central role of institutional codes and networks of communication is stressed, producing a new theoretical approach to the explanation of institutional change. To illustrate the argument we make reference to one of the most significant counterfactual cases for questioning the solidity of institutions: the collapse of the key organization of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party.

In this paper we combine work on rhetorical strategies with that of organizational identity theory. We highlight the relationship between organizational identity and the deployment of discursive resources at the societal level by organizations seeking to influence such identities. We analyse the way in which an extreme right political organization, the Vlaams Belang, has used rhetorical framing and strategies to construct a collective identity. This framing is aimed at persuading potential supporters of the organization to identify themselves with it. We argue that these frames derive their characteristic form and power from broader social and political processes that are given insufficient attention in published work on identity in organizations. We discuss the implications of our study for organizational theory, particularly the political and ethical questions raised by the use of potentially manipulative strategies. We conclude with a discussion of the ethical problems that arise when an organization’s managers attempt to direct identity formation by exploiting a persistent desire for stability and continuity in a world where it becomes ever more elusive.

The ability of individuals to accommodate the emotional transition into roles requiring the construction of a leader identity is an under-researched phenomenon. To address this research gap we consider the experience of 32 nurse managers undergoing a leadership development programme, exploring how an emotional attachment to their professional group identity may cause identity conflict during the construction of a managerial leader identity. We consider how competing desired identities can result in negative emotional experiences, calling into question existing work, which assumes that desired group identities are congruent with leader identities. Our work suggests that identity work can mitigate identity conflict at the individual level, enabling nurse managers to function in their role, but emotional distress will continue due to a perceived loss of professional identity and group influence. We contend it is only by eschewing an emotional attachment to a professional group identity that nurse managers will be able to overcome this negative emotional experience.