Resisting the Tide: The Roles of Ideology in Sustaining Alternative Organizing at a Self-managed Cooperative

This paper examines how organizational ideology can be collectively mobilized to sustain an alternative organizational form—a self-managed cooperative—in resistance to institutional prescriptions perceived as hostile. Based on an ethnographic study of the Venezuelan cooperative Cecosesola, we identify three roles through which ideology enables the reproduction of the alternative form over time: ideology as a mobilizing normative framework to justify resistance; as a cultural-cognitive framework to engage members and integrate them into the resistance project; and as a regulatory framework ensuring member compliance. However, we find that in parallel with sustaining self-management as an alternative form, mobilizing ideology may also paradoxically entail costs in terms of individual sacrifices, exclusion of members and reduction of group heterogeneity, leading to the creation of an authoritarian system. These findings shed light on the ideological drivers of institutional resistance and bring new insights to understand the challenge of sustaining self-management and other alternative organizational forms within a hostile institutional context.

Tactics of Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Ways of Operating in the Contested Terrain of Green Architecture

This study explores the various tactics sustainable entrepreneurs use to meet the challenges associated with creating social and environmental solutions. Although often theorized as market imperfections, in this study, opportunities are considered as situations that allow things to be done differently within social settings. This approach opens up for research into the everyday practice of sustainable entrepreneurship and how sustainable entrepreneurs strive to find new solutions to counteract ecological degradation. To develop this view, I analyze the different entrepreneurial tactics actors employ to advance green architecture in the Danish construction industry. Rather than place an analytic emphasis on the end result of sustainable entrepreneurship, I suggest that the processes of developing solutions aimed at generating simultaneous economic, social and environmental value might warrant greater attention.

Assimilation, Integration or Inclusion? A Dialectical Perspective on the Organizational Socialization of Migrants

Given the increasing importance of migrations around the world, and the challenges that migrants face in entering the labor market, the process of socialization of migrants into organizations deserves more attention from management scholars. Indeed, societal discourses promoting equality and diversity often appear to be in contradiction with the unequal power relations migrants experience on entering the workforce. Drawing on a dialectic perspective and a qualitative meta-synthesis methodology, we show how the practices engaged in by organizations to socialize migrant employees are deeply embedded in and influenced by macro-social contexts that may place migrants at a disadvantage, giving rise to emerging tensions. We examine a range of contingencies that can mitigate the inequalities that migrants experience, and we reveal a variety of dynamic dialectical pathways surrounding migrant socialization practices through which they may be reproduced or transformed depending on the mutual relationships between situated conditions, emerging tensions and human praxes.

A Reflective Entrepreneur: Ashok Vasudevan and the Journey of Tastybite

The literature on entrepreneurship acknowledges that entrepreneurs are both thinkers and doers. While scholars have previously explored entrepreneurs’ cognitions and actions, research on entrepreneurs’ reflective practices remains limited. To stimulate greater scholarly attention on exploring entrepreneurs as reflective practitioners, in this ‘Meet the Person’ article we build on two interviews with the celebrated entrepreneur Ashok Vasudevan. From buying the venture off Unilever and eventually selling it to Mars, Ashok’s journey reflects an entrepreneur’s struggles in growing a venture from an emerging economy (India of the 90s). Tearing down entrepreneurship literature’s stereotypical and mythological lore, Ashok’s journey with Tasty Bite is also a case of why “the” theory of entrepreneurship continues to remain elusive. Three key themes from Ashok’s journey (failure, sustainability, and exit) help highlight the rich possibilities that reflective practice offers to entrepreneurship literature. Implications for the advancement of reflective practice in entrepreneurship research, education, and practice are presented.

Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.

Odyssey of a Socialist in the Business School World

This is an edited version of my remarks at the 2020 Academy of Management on receiving the Organization and Management Theory Division's Distinguished Scholar award. I review the main steps of my intellectual trajectory, aiming to show how it has been enriched both by my engagement with “classic” scholars in our field–most notably Marx, Gouldner, Weber, Schumpeter, and Polanyi—and by my commitment to socialist values. I offer my case, with its strengths and weaknesses, in the hope of inspiring reflection on the role in our scholarship of such classics and our personal values, whatever they may be.

Entrepreneurship Education at the Crossroads: Challenging Taken-for-Granted Assumptions and Opening New Perspectives

This work presents a synthesis of a debate regarding taken-for-granted assumptions and challenges in entrepreneurship education, matured after a developmental workshop organized to increase the research salience of the field. From the five contributions selected, three challenges emerge. The first is recognizing that participants’ representations about entrepreneurship play a crucial role in defining goals and impact of entrepreneurship education; second, integrating new perspectives of conceiving entrepreneurship into the current models of teaching entrepreneurship; and, lastly, facilitating the integration of entrepreneurship knowledge into practice. These challenges opened up to a conception of entrepreneurship education as a dynamic concept reflecting personal values, societal changes, and cultural differences. As a result, learning places of entrepreneurship education promotes exploration and not adaptation to existing schemes, where personal models for practicing entrepreneurship have room to emerge. Defining knowledge priorities, instead of targeting knowledge exhaustiveness, becomes of greatest importance to make entrepreneurship education‘s impact more relevant.

That's Interesting! A Flawed Article Has Influenced Generations of Management Researchers

Davis's (1971) article “That's interesting! Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology” is regarded by many management researchers as a classic work and a basis for guiding management studies; in the wake of its publication, an interesting research advocacy gradually emerged. However, from the perspective of scientific research, Davis's core argument that great theories have to be interesting is seriously flawed. Interestingness is not regarded as a virtue of a good scientific theory and thus has little value in science. Moreover, obsession with interestingness can lead to at least five detrimental outcomes, namely promoting an improper way of doing science, encouraging post hoc hypothesis development, discouraging replication studies, ignoring the proper duties of a researcher, and undermining doctoral education.