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By focusing on individual settlements rather than viewing them as part of a trajectory of change, prior research on institutional settlements has not fully captured the dynamics of longer-term institutional change; yet this would be important to better understand progressive legitimation dynamics—in other words, how successive settlements may increase legitimacy in a long-term trajectory of change. This is a crucial issue, especially for peripheral actors lacking the resources, status, or power of more central ones. Our historical analysis focuses on the long-term struggle of the Cree First Nation in Canada and explains how they succeeded in increasing their dispositional legitimacy in and through the settlements. This required work in three interrelated processes: expansive argumentation, including problematizing of the state of affairs and creating discursive resonance with the prevailing discourses and values; building momentum by generating attention and exerting pressure in networks of actors; and seizing opportunities to negotiate with the other side. Thus, we challenge previous research on settlements by showing how they should not merely be seen as endpoints but rather as stepping-stones in a trajectory of institutional change. More specifically, we develop a process model explaining how progressive legitimation unfolds in a series of settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elucidates the political dynamics of organizational identity breach and reconstruction. Drawing on the revealing case of UNICEF Germany, we develop a process model of four phases of identity breach and reconstruction: build-up of identity tensions, revelation of identity breach, identity reconstruction, and enactment of the reconstructed identity. Our analysis explains how each phase was characterized by specific political strategies employed by the managerialist and idealist organizational members, the effects of these strategies on the power balance and consensus or conflict over organizational identity, and how particular triggers explain shifts from one phase to another. By so doing, our analysis advances our understanding of organizational identity breach and reconstruction as political processes, and paves the way for new studies of political identity dynamics in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of an increasing interest in ambiguity, our knowledge of how organizations maintain strategic ambiguity to protect themselves from public scrutiny is still in its infancy. Through an in-depth historical study of the Sicilian Mafia between 1963 and 2018, we develop a model of strategic ambiguity maintenance. We focus on three struggles between the Mafia and state representatives, and show how these struggles centered on different types of ambiguity: ambiguity as opacity, equivocality, and absurdity. We elaborate on the strategies enacted by the Mafia and the responses by state representatives and their implications for ambiguity over time. The main contribution of our paper is that it advances understanding of the maintenance of strategic ambiguity by organizations that need to protect themselves from public scrutiny. More specifically, it enriches our knowledge of the key process dynamics, the types of struggles, and the discursive and nondiscursive strategies employed in the process. Our analysis also extends research on clandestine organizations and illuminates the relationship between (strategic) ambiguity and secrecy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics concerning big data including key questions such as: What does big data encompass? Does big data mean the end of theory? In what ways does big data research differ from conventional scientific methods of inquiry in management research? What does it take to publish a big data study in management journals?

This article presents an editorial in which the authors comment on the understanding and use of qualitative research. They discuss the importance of qualitative research in such fields as social sciences and the humanities and describe different types of such research, including case studies, process studies, and discourse studies.

The objective of this article is to elucidate how justice in general and distributive justice in particular are given sense to and made sense of in postmerger integration. Drawing on a longitudinal real-time analysis of a recent merger, we identify a pattern in which focus moved from equality to equity to less emphasis on distributive justice. To understand the dynamics involved, we develop a process model that explains how actors reconcile pressures of value creation and sociopolitical concerns in dialogical "sensegiving" and "sensemaking" processes that lead to the enactment of specific norms of justice. This analysis adds to research on mergers and acquisitions by facilitating understanding of the crucial role that norms of justice play in postmerger integration, of the way in which they change over time as integration processes unfold, and of the intergroup dynamics through which these norms of justice are enacted. By uncovering the microdynamics of dialogical sensegiving and sensemaking processes, we also contribute to research on organizational justice, sensemaking, and process studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]