Management and Organizational Research: Structural Topic Modeling for a Better Understanding of Theory Application

In management and organization research, theory development is often linked with developing a new theory. However, regardless of the number of existing theories, most theories remain empirically untested, and the progress in understanding the application of theories has been scarce. This article discusses how theories are applied in existing management and organization research studies. This study applies the Structural Topic Model to 4636 research papers from the S2ORC dataset. The results reveal twelve research themes, establish correlations, and document the evolution of themes over time. The findings of this study reveal that the theoretical application is not consistent across research themes, theories are primarily used for descriptive and communicative properties, and most research themes in management and organization research are more concerned with discovering phenomena rather than with understanding and forecasting them.

EXPRESS: REPUTATION BELONGS IN MORE STRATEGIC DECISION MODELS (AND SOME DATA TO MEASURE IT)

Organizational reputation is compelling to layman audiences, it is critical for firm performance and myriad organizational phenomena, and recent theory articulates how it shapes the very managerial discretion underpinning strategic decisions. Yet, reputation is still excluded from much of mainstream strategic organization research. We make the case for reputation’s wider inclusion in studies of managerial discretion or strategic decision-making. We first demonstrate reputation’s potential theoretical importance in explaining nuances or non-findings in such studies, detail ways to measure reputation accurately, provide five sources of data for readers to facilitate the inclusion of reputation in their studies, and illustrate how scholars can use freelancers to collect their own archival data for their own, context-specific purposes. By shedding light on reputation’s unique role in shaping managerial discretion and, thereby, strategic decisions, we hope this essay helps scholars better account for decision-making patterns that might otherwise defy the predictions of other organizational theories.

Responding to stigmatization: How to resist and overcome the stigma of unemployment

Organization research on stigma has mostly focused on the stigmatized, limiting the scope for exploring what is possible and lacking recognition of the structural conditions and unequal power relations that create and sustain stigma. Consequently, it overlooks how actors can organize to resist and potentially overcome stigmatization altogether. Addressing this question empirically, we studied the long-term unemployed in Spain using a longitudinal qualitative research design. We develop a typology of responses to stigmatization—getting stuck, getting by, getting out, getting back at, and getting organized— that advances our understanding of stigma in several ways. First, our typology captures stigma as a multilevel phenomenon. Second, it makes explicit that stigma can only be understood in relation to its socio-historical contexts and unequal relations of power. Third, it captures how resisting stigma needs to be a collective enterprise and advances the importance of organizing to both challenge stigmatization and explore alternatives.

The role of the scientific and practical conference in the organization research activities of students

The features of training students and teachers for participation and holding a scientific and practical conference are considered. Participation in a scientific and practical conference is the result of a great work of a student and his supervisor, which is preceded by a complex research activity. It is important to give students not only a certain set of knowledge, teach them the basic methods and algorithms of activity, but also teach them to navigate in the flow of information, the ability to pose timely and relevant questions and independently receive substantiated answers to them.The conditions for the implementation of successful research activities in college are shown, organizational and methodological work in this direction, its stages, goals, objectives and results are described. Employer surveys indicate that the requirements for the level of professional training and personal qualities of college graduates are increasing. Research activities of students, as one of the areas of work, allows us to prepare modern specialists who are able to constantly improve their professional knowledge and successfully apply them in practice. The acquisition of skills in the preparation of reports, articles on conducted research, skills of public presentation of the results obtained and their justification at conferences, contributes to the formation of a reflective culture, strengthens pedagogical cooperation between teachers and students.

How Values Ground Value Creation: The practical inference framework

After more than two decades of searching, the holy grail of integrating norms into management and organization research remains elusive. Researchers still lack a clear framework that explains value creation in relation to normative values, and, in turn, a means to incorporate values into research methods and generate value-based practical insights. To fill that need, this article presents an epistemological framework for understanding value creation. The practical inference framework centers on the activity of practical reasoning, a kind of reasoning that is legitimized by intrinsic values. It turns the ordinary epistemic equation on its head by seeking reasons rather than causes, and justifications rather than descriptions. In doing so, it shows how both factor analytic and newer, divergent methods of research can integrate with a robust architecture of value creation in ways that offer relevant knowledge for managers and society.

Structural and dynamic features of self-organization of social systems: philosophical and methodological aspects

The article is devoted to studying the features of self-organization of social systems and its structural and dynamic characteristics in the context of the post-non-classical paradigm. Key attention is paid to the analysis of the openness of social systems as the most important prerequisite for their self-organization. In this regard, the phenomenon of vitality is proposed as a structural and dynamic component of self-organization, on the basis of which the role of a person in this process as an “observer-participant” is specified, due to the circumstances of human life. Further directions of social self-organization research are suggested.