The Legitimacy of Sustainability Standards: A Paradox Perspective

Sustainability standards have proliferated widely in recent years but their legitimacy remains contested. This paper suggests that sustainability standards need to cope with an important but unexplored paradox to gain legitimacy. While standard setters create low entry barriers and requirements for adopters so that standards can diffuse quickly and achieve a status of cognitive legitimacy, standards also need to ensure that adopters create high levels of impact, thereby acquiring moral legitimacy. While the need for diffusion and impact occurs at the same time, they cannot be achieved simultaneously. We unpack this paradox and show that its salience for standard setters differs depending on (a) the growth trajectory of a standard and (b) the perceived intensity of the demands for diffusion and impact. We outline five response strategies that standard setters can use to tackle the diffusion–impact paradox and illustrate our theoretical considerations through a detailed case study of the UN Global Compact. Our paper advances scholarly understandings on how sustainability standards gain legitimacy and sheds light on the complex and inherently paradoxical nature of legitimacy. We derive implications for the literatures on sustainability standards, legitimacy, and paradox management.

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.

‘Open Purpose’: Embracing Organizations as Expressive Systems

The concept of purpose gained prominence in organization theory in recent years but there are discrepant views of its meaning, which we review as evolving and different perspectives: economic theories of the firm; stakeholder approaches; integrative social contracts; and social mission. We elaborate these perspectives in terms of the ebb and flow of ideas and eras. Against these instrumental views, we revisit the work of Robert Cooper, namely the ever-open purpose of expressive organizations, and contrast this with fixist views of purpose in instrumental organizations. We engage with the logic of open purpose and sketch a way of rethinking purpose as a general orientation that constantly evolves and changes over time in interaction with its ecosystem.

Repositioning Organizational Failure Through Active Acceptance

This paper considers the way organizations respond to failure by actively repositioning the failed outcome as success. When an organization fails to meet planned goals, they do not necessarily learn from the experience, automatically terminate the plan, or persist with the failing course of action. Instead, another response is to shift original aspirations by recasting what was achieved, acting as if the ensuing failure is positive, despite indicators suggesting otherwise. As a mode of organizational interpretation, this repositioning reformats the criteria for what is success in order to move forward, enabling organizations to continue failed outcomes and their tasks that are well past their use-by date. After detailing this adjustment, we model an active-acceptance protocol on failure, discussing whether organizational effectiveness is predictable from how firms respond to failure in this way. The paper fills a gap in dialogue specific to failing by opening an alternative path to understand how organizations frame failure differently.

Celebrating the End of Enlightenment: Organization Theory in the Age of the Anthropocene and Gaia (and why neither is the solution to our ecological crisis)

This article aims to change the terms of the conversation about the ecological crisis. We argue that the human–nature dualism, a product of Enlightenment thought and primarily responsible for the ecological crisis, cannot be the basis for any meaningful solutions. We show how more recent Western imaginaries like the Anthropocene and Gaia proposed to overcome the separation of nature from culture are also based on exclusions that reflect Enlightenment rationality and legacies of colonialism. In sharp contrast, we show that Indigenous philosophies that preceded the Enlightenment by thousands of years have developed systems of knowledge based on a relational ontology that reflects profound connections between humans and nature. We demonstrate that such forms of knowledge have been systematically subjugated by Western scholarship based on arguments inspired by Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. A decolonial imagination will be able to generate new insights into understanding and addressing the ecological crisis. We therefore call for organization and management scholars to challenge the anthropomorphic biases and the economism that dominates our field through a respectful engagement with Indigenous worldviews.

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.

‘Leadership’ as a Project: Neoliberalism and the Proliferation of ‘Leaders’

It is increasingly common for anyone with formal, hierarchical status at work to be called a ‘leader’. Though widespread, this relatively recent change in day-to-day discourse is largely passing by unnoticed. We argue that using ‘leader’ in this way is not simply fashion or empty rhetoric; rather it can be understood in relation to neoliberalism. We argue that the language of ‘leadership’ represents a particularly subtle but powerful opportunity for the pursuit of individual elite interests to be disguised so that it looks as if it is for the benefit of all. This opportunity has arisen because using ‘leader’ has tangible effects that reinforce implied values and assumptions about human relationships at work. In terms of implied values, the label ‘leader’ is celebratory and predisposes us to see elites in overly positive ways. In terms of implied assumptions, referring to executives as ‘leaders’ draws a veil over the structured antagonism at the heart of the employment relationship and wider sources of inequality by celebrating market values. Making ‘leadership’ recognizable as a political project is not intended primarily to suggest intentionality, but to help challenge representational practices that are becoming dominant. ‘Project-ing’ leadership also helps us to emphasize the risks inherent in taking this label for granted; which, we argue, is an important contribution because the language of leadership is increasingly used but is hardly questioned within much contemporary organizational life as well as organization theory.

It’s Practice. But is it Strategy? Reinvigorating strategy-as-practice by rethinking consequentiality

In this essay we revisit the radical agenda proposed by strategy-as-practice scholars to study strategy as it emerges within people’s practices. We show that, while much progress has been made, there is still a dominant focus on articulated strategies, which has implications for what is seen as strategic. We anchor our argument in the notion of consequentiality – a guiding yet, ironically, constraining principle of the strategy-as-practice agenda. Our paper proposes a deeper understanding of the notion of strategy as ‘consequential’ in terms of both what is important to a wider range of actors and also following the consequences of these actors’ practices through the patterns of action that they construct. In doing so, we offer a conceptual and an empirical approach to reinvigorating the strategy-as-practice agenda by inviting scholars to take a more active role in field sites, in deciding and explaining what practices are strategic.

Remembering Materiality: A Material–Relational Approach to Organizational Memory

In this paper, we develop a material–relational approach to understanding organizational memory. We focus on the inherent materiality of mnemonic devices—material artifacts that anchor shared memories of the past. Mnemonic devices work to constitute social groups of organizational stakeholders bound together by mutual affinities to these devices, known as mnemonic communities. While we know that the materiality of mnemonic devices represents information about the past that is interpreted by members of the mnemonic community as a narrative that is important in the present, our approach focuses on how engagement with the material aspects of mnemonic devices can create relationships of affinity among people remembering together. To develop our conceptualization, we first apply insights from the literature on materiality and its emphasis on how materiality is the basis for non-verbal and relational communication. From this, we theorize four material attributes that affect how mnemonic devices constitute relational connections that create embodied, cartographic, and temporal boundaries for organizational mnemonic communities. We then conceptualize how these distinct material attributes accumulate, intersect, and interact with each other and with the narrative representations of mnemonic devices and how in turn these interactions may bind stakeholders together. By emphasizing the material–relational aspect of mnemonic devices, our paper theorizes a broader and potentially more powerful set of affinities between stakeholders and organizations and, on this basis, enhances extant research by articulating different paths to the emergence of mnemonic communities.

Anticipation and Organization: Seeing, knowing and governing futures

Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures by engaging insights from Foucauldian scholarship that highlight the intersection between what we can see, know and govern. We highlight the importance of processes of knowledge production in governance efforts, and articulate how anticipatory governance is crafted through intricate combinations of resources such as narratives, numbers and digital traces. The main contribution is a conceptual typology outlining four different templates for anticipatory governance in organizational settings that we term ‘indicative snapshots’, ‘prognostic correlations’, ‘projected transformations’ and ‘phantasmagoric fictions’. We posit anticipatory governance as a knowledge-based, performative phenomenon that addresses potential and desirable futures in and between organizations. Such anticipatory activities gauge and guide organizational processes and modes of thinking and acting along different temporal orientations, and have governance effects that makes anticipation performative by its very nature. This understanding of anticipatory governance, we suggest, offers both conceptual contributions and empirical avenues for research in organization and management studies.