From the Margins to the Core of Haute Couture: The Entrepreneurial Journey of Coco Chanel

We trace the history of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s entrepreneurial journey as a fashion designer from her early years as an outsider (early 1900s) to her rise to success and consecration as an icon within the French haute couture field (early 1930s)—a field controlled by powerful insiders. Our study sheds light on the social forces and historical circumstances underlying an outsider’s journey from the margins of an established field to its core. Drawing on unique historical material, we develop a novel process view that highlights the shifting influence of forces operating at different levels in the accumulation, deployment, and conversion of various forms of capital (i.e., human, social, economic, and symbolic) that outsiders need to promote their ideas. In particular, our multilevel perspective accounts simultaneously for the individual’s efforts to push forward these ideas (micro-level), as well as the audience dynamics (meso-level) and exogenous forces (macro-level) that shape their recognition. Chanel’s historical case analysis also affords a window into one of the first female entrepreneurs with global impact in business history, with the added challenge of establishing herself in what at the time was a male-dominated and mature field.

Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness From a Multilevel Perspective

For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.

Performance, job crafting and work context: practical implications from a multilevel perspective

Purpose Effort by managers and academics have been applied to understand elements that improving organizational performance and results. This study aims to analyze the relationship among job performance, job crafting, work complexity and learning support. The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey in a study with a regression hierarchical (i.e. multilevel) design. Design/methodology/approach Sample included 530 respondents of both sexes with ages ranging from 17 to 68 (M = 33.9; SD = 9.75). Participants were employees from 53 public and private organizations located in the Southeast of Brazil. They answered the scales: General Self-Assessment Scale of Job Performance, Job Crafting Behaviors, Learning Support and Subjective Task Complexity. Findings The results indicated that variance in job performance due to the differences among the organizations and learning support can explain 22% of variance at this level. Job crafting explained 22% of the job performance variance at level 1 (worker). It is concluded that the development of actions concerning job crafting and the relationship with the work context predict performance at work. Thus, the authors highlight the importance of maintaining individual-focused management practices, meaning that focusing on workers development promotes good results at the organization. Originality/value Results revealed practical implications through individual performance considered in a multilevel perspective both in Levels 1 and 2, which is not the most common for this variable. They could be especially important in scenarios that will demand adaptability and work modification, as the actual ones were observed in the contemporary world of work.

Relations and Influences in the Process of Conventionalization of Organic Markets in the Southern Region of Brazil: A Multilevel Perspective Analysis

The organic markets from all around the world are changing fast. An example is the proliferation of standards and the entrance of new actors in the organic market, as the processors. In this paper, organic farmers, agro industries, retailers, consumers, and rural extension agents were consulted through qualitative research methods to better understand these changes and to assess the conventionalization-bifurcation process of organic markets in the Southern Region of Brazil. The relations and influences that exist between these actors were identified and analyzed. The theoretical approach used in this study comes from the Multilevel Perspective. This approach sustains that a novelty, like organic farming, can produce radical or incremental changes in a socio-technical regime, as the dominant agro-food regime, while connections between both are built. We observed that these relations and influences are of three main types: outsourcing and elongation of supply chains; restrictions in the commercialization of the farmer’s production; and the consequences, adjustments and commercial conditions established through contracts with retail chains besides commercialization in alternative networks. Through these findings, we identified a bifurcation in the organic markets where some actors demonstrate practices similar to agrifood dominant regime. In this process, the regime is changing, but so are the alternative networks. It indicates that once again the alternative agriculture is capable of reaffirmation by some ways.

The promise of endogenous potential in times of crisis

The measures against the spread of the Covid-19 virus have massive effects on local economies. By means of an explorative qualitative case study in deprived neighbourhoods in the Middle Lower Rhine region of Germany, this paper explicitly aims at examining the Corona pandemic’s impact on their endogenous potential. In this context, the focus is on organisations whose main contribution lies in the fulfilment of the function of integration and communication. The analysis is based on theoretical concepts of the local economy, but it also refers to crisis as well as transition research, especially the multilevel perspective framework. By means of desktop research, a focus group with multipliers involved in local economic contexts as well as thirteen guideline-based interviews with the heads of local organisations, the subsequent analysis reveals the partially counteracting effects of the Corona pandemic on the organisations’ socio-economic embeddedness. On the one hand, they are threatened by economic bottlenecks, by pending social consequences of a longer period without or with minimized offerings as well as by fear of contagion and exhaustion. While the organisation’s perceived level of urgency varies greatly, their level of uncertainty is generally high. On the other hand, organisations of the local economy benefit from a positive push in the areas of digitization and new life and working environments (home-based work), as well as from a strengthening of local solidarity and cohesion.

On the Emergence of Sociotechnical Regimes of Electric Urban Water Transit Systems

Urban activities, including urban mobility, play a crucial role in climate change mitigation. Urban mobility is currently at a crossroads. In a business as usual scenario, CO2 emissions from urban transportation will grow by one fourth by 2050. Nevertheless, during this period, it may drop by about one third. To make the drop happen, we need to introduce comprehensive policies and measures. Electrifying urban transit is one feasible solution. This study investigates whether and how urban water transit systems have been electrified—a means of transport which has not been well researched in this respect. A multilevel perspective and the comparative case study method were employed to answer the research questions. The comprehensive study focussed on 24 cities representing the current experience in planning and operating water transport, based mainly on secondary, primarily qualitative, data, such as industry reports, feasibility studies, urban policies, and scientific papers. The primary outcome is that urban electric passenger ferries left their market niches and triggered a radical innovation, diffusing into mainstream markets. However, urban diversity results in various paths to electrification, due to the system’s physical characteristics, local climate and transport policies, manufacturing capacity, green city branding, and the innovativeness of international ferry operators. Three dominant transition pathways were identified—a comprehensive carbon neutral policy, a transport sector policy, and a research and development policy. From a multilevel perspective, cities can be considered a bridge between niches and regimes that provide the actual conditions for implementing sociotechnical configurations.