Coping with Conundrums: Lower Ranked Pakistani Policewomen and Gender Inequity at the Workplace

Scholarship on gender and policing has frequently applied gendered organizational theory to understand how this type of organization and the men who run it produce gendered difference and inequity at the workplace. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research on lower ranked policewomen in Pakistan and contend that to fully fathom women’s marginalization at work, an analysis must not limit itself to the organization or the men who create the inequity but must also focus on women’s workplace behavior. My research sheds light on women’s anxieties about working with a large number of men and about people questioning their morality and character because they do so. I also demonstrate how their subsequent coping strategies can impede their professional development and reproduce their marginalization at their workplace. This woman-centric approach, which examines how policewomen navigate gendered landscapes in different patriarchal social spaces, therefore shows that workplace inequity is the collective result of the interplay between different actors and social structures, and leads to a more complex understanding of this phenomenon.

Ethnography in Organization Research

Classic organizational theory was built on ethnographic studies. These studies, which rely on immersion in everyday organizational life, adopting the native’s perspective, and an openness to emergent phenomena, have helped illuminate the complexities and nuances of organizations that were otherwise invisible to outsiders. Today, organizational scholarship boasts of drawing on a wide range of theoretical traditions and diverse methodologies, particularly in quantitative methods that lend generalizability and scientific precision to organizational theory. As such, the role of ethnography has also evolved over the years; its validity has been criticized and defended, its ontological and epistemological foundations reflected on, and its place among other traditions clarified. Besides its critical role in establishing organizational study as a discipline in its own right, ethnographic work is now generally recognized and appreciated in the scholarly community, in what has been termed its Golden Age, for its contributions to new intellectual territories across multiple subfields of organizational theory.

Toward an Organizational Theory of Resilience: An Interim Struggle

While organizational resilience is widely considered as critical to sustainability, gaps in both the scholarly and professional literature exist. First, stronger conceptualization of the term is needed. Second, little is known about how organizational resilience can be continuously accomplished via daily practices and processes. Finally, the ongoing organization theory development does not sufficiently address these gaps. Contributing to the literature by filling in these fundamental gaps, the present study integrates the disconnectedly growing literature into an organizational theory of resilience. Based on the General Systems Theory, the resulting theory comprises inputs of human resources, socio-cultural values, institutional settings, and social and environmental issues, enabling organizational structure, value and belief subsystem, resilience mindset, sustainability practices, adaptive and buffering capacities, and sustainability performance as the output. Their dynamic relationships are discussed and expressed via a model and propositions, followed by implications for researchers and practitioners.

Marketing the past over the long run: uses of the past in French accounting textbooks, 17th-19th c.

Purpose A growing share of the literature in the fields of marketing and organizational theory is focusing on the uses of the past. This paper aims to propose an analysis of these uses over the long run and concludes that these uses of the past may themselves be historicized. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses accounting textbooks published in French from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. This study uses historical and organizational literature to account for observed variations. Findings Two conceptualizations of the past can be found in the sources from the period studied, depending on the period one considers, each of them leading to a different marketing strategy. In the first one, the past is presented as providing most or even all the value of what is offered in the present, as past experience serves as a stepping stone to a better product. The second conception breaks with these mostly positive views and presents the past as a dangerous routine, from which one must be freed to innovate. Originality/value Studying marketing uses of the past over the long run allows us to identify a limited set of possible sales pitches using the past to promote work and to identify the constraints orienting these pitches at any given time.

Organizations, Social Problems, and System Change: Invigorating the Third Mandate of Organizational Research

Organizations across sectors appear to be shifting their ambitions from solving social problems to changing entire social systems. This phenomenon offers a timely opportunity to revisit what came to be known as the third mandate of organizational theory. In this paper we interrogate how organizational scholarship can productively explore and theorize the relationship between organizations and social systems in organized system change – an effort by organizations to alter the conditions that generate the characteristics of social problems and their dynamics of change. As a basis for theorizing organized system change, we develop an analytical scaffold that helps researchers to attend to fundamental aspects of the phenomenon and to achieve parsimony without blanking out complexity. Grounded in realist metatheory and principles, the scaffold reduces ambiguity, provides a backbone for empirical analysis, and favours mechanism-based explanation. We suggest that generating theoretically interesting and practically adequate knowledge on organized system change requires attention to three system realms: First, the subjectively constructed problem realm of systems concerned with processes of evaluating and problematizing situations. Second, the objectively constituted situational realm that attends to factual characteristics of situations and their dynamics of change. And third, the realm of causality understood as the mechanisms that generate both the objective characteristics of situations and the subjective criteria by which situations are evaluated as problems. In concluding, we reflect on the topics of boundaries and power as two promising areas for theorizing organized system change.