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This symposium showcases four papers that draw on a diverse array of theoretical perspectives to examine the rise of disruptive technologies such as cell-cultivated meat, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), artificial intelligence, and digital platforms. Collectively, the presentations in this symposium shed light on a variety of phenomena—including questions of how technologies that disrupt existing markets become legitimated over time; how technological advancements redefine the relationships between individuals, organizations, and the idea of what constitutes expertise; and how striving for 'better futures' drives the emergence of novel technological ideas and practices. The symposium integrates both macro- and micro-level perspectives to better understand the implications of novel technologies for organizations, markets, and fields. Taken together, the symposium aims to bring together scholars from various backgrounds to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the pervasive implications of technological disruption for organizing. From NFT Hype to Legitimation: An Institutional Perspective Author: Timothy Hannigan; Telfer School of Management, U. of Ottawa Author: Michael Lounsbury; U. of Alberta Author: Rodrigo Valadao; NEOMA Business School Morality and Technological Evolution in the Emergent Field for Cell-Cultivated Meat Author: Magdalena Winkler; WU Vienna U. of Economics and Business Author: Elona Marku; U. of Cagliari Author: Giuseppe Delmestri; WU Vienna U. of Economics and Business Author: Maria Chiara Di Guardo; U. of Cagliari Monsters of Our Own Creation: AI, Occupational Cannibalization, and the Future of Work Author: Kevin Woojin Lee; U. of British Columbia The Public Evaluation of Physicians by Laypersons and Consequences for Professional Autonomy Author: Siddhant Ritwick; Doctoral Researcher Author: Johanna K. Moisander; Aalto U. Author: Kushagra Bhatnagar; Aalto U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As political, economic, and natural environments change, institutions need to be adapted to maintain their relevance and legitimacy. Such adaptations can, however, be especially difficult when they involve the incorporation of ideas or practices previously conceived of as inconsistent with the moral standards and value commitments of the institution--a situation we refer to as "transgressive institutional reform". Drawing on an inductive longitudinal analysis of political, legal, and historical documents, we examine the work of the Chinese government to reintroduce the private sector into the Chinese economy after decades of strident and violent suppression. We find that this protracted process depended significantly on boundary work that helped make highly controversial changes less threatening. We develop a model that shows that boundary work in transgressive institutional reform unfolds through nested cycles of concretization and abstraction, where an institutional boundary is made and remade more specific and explicit and then more abstract and implicit. These cycles of boundary work transform what appears from a distance to be a solid boundary into a multi-dimensional arrangement of distinctions that are "yoked" together to sort ideas, practices, and people "into" and "out of" institutions. By exploring the role of boundary work in effecting transgressive institutional reform, we aim to extend understanding of how actors work to negotiate and construct the meanings of an institution by virtue of distinctions between what is "in" and what is "out". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic warrants increased scholarly attention to grand challenges, such as inequality, poverty, climate change, ecological imbalances, socioeconomic and political crises along with their extended impacts (Davis, 2020; Ferraro, Etzio, & Gehman, 2015; George et al., 2016; Munir, 2020; Pio & Waddock, 2020). Whereas mainstream organizational theorizing brings those challenges in as part of our empirical contexts, or in our managerial implications, this symposium will discuss how we can address head-on the importance of grand challenges, make them a core aspect of our research, and accordingly develop theoretical and empirical approaches that may be seen as a 'grand challenges turn' in our field. Some recent examples include work on the patriarchy of microfinance (Zhao & Wry, 2016) and providing toilets in Indian villages (Mair, Wolf, & Seelos, 2016). Nevertheless, even scholars working on grand challenges tend to focus on a particular problem and may lose sight of the broader systemic challenges of these issues (Munir, 2019).. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate emergency - "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it" (Oxford University Press, 2019) - has been described by many, including scientists, politicians, and increasingly also business leaders, as of one the biggest threats facing humanity today (Ripple et al., 2019). Radical actions to counter this emergency are required on all fronts. Yet, such organizational and institutional efforts have been slow to emerge, often given a fear of negative social evaluations of such actions from salient stakeholder groups (Slawinski, et al., 2017). As such, we contend that scholars of social evaluations (Bitektine et al., 2020; Haack & Sieweke, 2020; Roulet, 2020) focusing on topics around legitimacy, reputation, or stigma (Devers et al., 2009), are well positioned to question, examine, and provide potential solutions for some of the challenges organizational and institutional actors will face when engaging to battle the climate emergency. To reflect on and discuss how scholars of social evaluations can contribute to the study of tackling the climate emergency, we have organized a panel symposium featuring leading organizational theorists interested in both social evaluations and climate-related issues. Next to a lively debate, it is our ambition to identify promising avenues for future research in this space as well as ask how we can bring both theory and practice closer together to generate impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been renewed attention to values in both business and politics. Organizations are making claims of their commitment to societally-relevant values, and using them to define and explain organizational actions (Grimes, Gehman, & Cao, 2018; Kraatz & Block, 2017). Corporations are increasingly pursuing purpose beyond profits, seeking to establish genuine values that they enact through their choices (Business-Roundtable, 2019; Finanacial-Times, 2019; Grimes et al., 2018). Political parties and movements have likewise shown renewed interest in embracing strong shared values to create emotional energy and foster a shared identity that attract potential supporters (Berezin, 2002; Jasper, 2011). These developments have been mirrored in academic research, with burgeoning work on how values underpin organizational action and identification. Investigating values in organizations can help direct our attention to moral concerns and help generate contributions with greater societal impact (Bansal, 2003; Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015). This symposium contributes to the growing stream of institutional literature on values in organizations. We focus on values-driven organizing as processes and practices of organizations that leverage values to inform their choices, motivate membership, and create active stakeholder engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how emotion rules, that are core to an institution, change. We do so through an inductive longitudinal analysis of China's transition away from a Soviet-style planned economy. Not only did the transition entail the dismantling and replacement of political and regulatory institutions, it necessitated fundamental changes to the value systems underpinning economic activity. By tracing how emotion rules were altered as the Chinese government rolled out its economic reforms, this study seeks to advance research on emotions and institutions by elaborating discursive emotion work strategies. Our findings suggest that discursive emotion work at the societal level is likely to differ from those operating at other levels of analysis -- not just because of the scale, but because the discursive strategies need to have appeal to or 'persuade' a very diverse and heterogeneous audience. Moreover, the top-down approach adopted by the Chinese Communist Party stands in stark contrast to the more bottom-up strategies that have been advanced in the literature to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the heated debate surrounding the cruise ships, 'grandi navi,' in Venice, Italy. Drawing upon multiple data sources, we trace how the social exchanges among different field actors are able to neutralize the threat to the status quo and alter the natural course of the issue settlement that actors' public framing would predict. Specifically, we show how the cruise industry indirectly targets regulators with the provision of resources and these actions decouple regulators' public framing from their private decision to settle a contested issue. This work contributes to the literature on issue fields and issue settlements by providing a general theory of issue settlements that includes social exchanges. We advance propositions on the conditions in which social exchanges are likely to occur and on identify potential targets for exchanges from their statements in the public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in psychology, sociology and the humanities has found that ethical vegans are stigmatized and subject to discrimination for their endorsement of animal rights and the refusal of speciesism. Speciesism, analogically derived from racism, denotes the dominant ideology that it is morally justifiable to consider humans as more significant than non-humans on the only ground of species membership. Stigmatization of vegans has been found to be higher than that of other marginalized minority groups. Yet, the discrimination of vegans has largely been overlooked in diversity management and critical management discourse both in academia and in practice. This is unfortunate not only for vegans, whose emancipation this text is aimed to contribute, but also because the legitimation of veganism could contribute to reducing excessive meat consumption, which is considered harmful for both human health and environmental sustainability. Theoretically, vegaphobia is an intersectional problem connected to masculinity, gender, race and gender identity issues. Due to its intersectional and deeply institutionalized nature, and the extreme widespread stigmatization of veganism, the issues posed by vegaphobia offer important avenues for developing both the literature on the construction and reproduction of identity categories, and, through thought experiments, knowledge on symbolic and material institutional work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our qualitative and longitudinal study depicts the successful post-acquisition integration of a German company within an Italian MNC as a sequence of both cooperative and conflictual power games. Building on longitudinal empirical evidence, the process of post-acquisition integration is conceptualized as the merger between two different institutional power fields each of them organized around a specific logic. The cognitive and practical role of relational metaphors - i.e. 'honeymoon' and 'duel' - in managing ambiguity along the integration process is taken into account. Our research contributes to the current debate between organizational studies and international management literatures and proposes a theoretical model connecting different power games and relational metaphors in processes of post-acquisition integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While deprofessionalization is a contemporary common phenomenon, the case of the pharmacy profession in many European countries (e.g., France, Germany and Italy) is different. Comparing historically the USA and Italy, where the profession faced similar institutional and sociotechnical challenges, we ground a theoretical explanation of why its status persisted in Italy and not in the US. Background institutions in the US and Italy, respectively the market and the State, set the burden of proof differentially on the professional and corporate logics in the 1910'-1920'. Corporate pharmacy became dominant in the US while the profession in Italy. Exclusive attention to foreground conflicts between two logics would leave this unexplained. Later in the 1960', the membership of the organizational category of pharmacy in different classes (retail business vs. health care) determined the different reactions to the challenge of pharmacists being turned into shopkeepers. In the US, due to insufficient category contrast, the organizational category 'pharmacy' dissolved within the retail business class (the meaning of pharmacy becoming restricted to an employed occupation). In Italy, increasing category contrast, i.e. pharmacy looking increasingly different from the rest of health care, elicited the State to validate pharmacists' status by reserving them ownership (the meaning of pharmacy extending also to an organizational category). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the issue of how different fields are navigated, and in the process changed, by actors subject to multiple status hierarchies. Criteria defining status hierarchies are constituted according to specific institutional logics, creating a situation of institutional complexity for entering firms. We show how high- status firms gain access in a new field characterized by different status criteria. Through multiple longitudinal case studies we investigated the failed and the successful attempts of the five Hollywood majors to co-produce and distribute Italian movies in face of relational discrimination. The latter was spurred by the majors' carrying of a 'cinema as business' logic threatening the incumbent 'public good' logic. We find that new entrants leveraging different audiences (i.e., moviegoers, artistic talent and incumbent firms as potential partners) were those that succeeded in gaining the necessary resources and in progressively increasing their status. Market category conformity, combination and affirmation were used, in different stages, to address market audiences, while avoidance and, later, promotion of claims related to collective identities was used vis-à-vis the professional audiences participating in the institutional field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]