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Scholars have turned their attention to the notion of 'radical sustainability', which entails reorganizing organizations around sustainable values rather than treating sustainability as an add-on to 'business as usual'. Calls for radical sustainability are seen as urgent in the turbulent world affected by grand challenges and wicked problems. However, the implementation of sustainability strategies is obstructed by tensions with mainstream strategies traditionally concerned with efficiency and profitability. We argue that these tensions can be unpacked and understood better by investigating sustainability professionals' courage as everyday experience, which they must have and employ to carry on with their strategy work. Building on MacIntyre's virtue ethics, we present courage as a 'virtue' requiring delicate balancing acts through practical judgements and fine sensing of the situations for the right moment to push the sustainability agenda forward incrementally. Such practical judgments, we argue, are affected by the multi-stakeholder interests and pressures as well as internal mainstream business priorities that complexify sustainability professionals' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how space and spatial practices are central to organizing complex nomadic festivals, particularly how they enable a small number of organizers to coordinate changing actor multiplicity and place-based temporality. We draw on insights from a longitudinal and inductive study of a moving food festival whereby a multiplicity of parties and growing membership transpired. Our analysis reveals that spatial and material practices of envisioning the overarching space, constructing idiosyncratic spaces, enacting distinctive spatial performances, and cultivating unique place-based experiences enable organizers to address core challenges associated with the diverse multiplicity of actors and the temporality of events. Building on the spatial turn in organization studies, we contribute new insights to the study of festivals, temporary organizing and collective meta-level identities." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social ventures are increasingly lauded as catalysts for social change by the media, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers, yet our understanding of the processes and mechanisms of how exactly they catalyze social change is underdeveloped. This symposium combines five empirical and theoretical research projects that explore how social ventures contribute to the betterment of society in multiple ways through elevating the health and well-being of those inside and outside organizations, including vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities. Using a variety of theoretical perspectives and research methods in diverse institutional contexts related to disability, poverty, natural disasters, exclusion, and environmental degradation, these projects differentiate forms of social change and paint a nuanced picture of how social entrepreneurs, employees, and social ventures catalyze social change through different practices, processes, and capacities. By combining these projects into one symposium, we hope to expand the application of insights from social entrepreneurship research into new and exciting theoretical and practical realms toward better lives. Entrepreneurial Well-being: Lessons from Entrepreneurs with Disabilities Presenter: Maija Renko; U. of Illinois at Chicago Presenter: Sarah Parker Harris; U. of Illinois at Chicago Presenter: Katherine Caldwell; U. of Illinois at Chicago Negotiating the Challenges of Microfinance Work: The Neglected Role of Religion Presenter: Sandrine Tunezerwe; Aston U. Presenter: Gary Thomas Burke; Aston U. Presenter: Ute Stephan; Aston Business School Shades and Degrees of Emergent Hybridity? An Inductive Model of Hybrid Organizing Following Disast Presenter: Trenton A. Williams; Indiana U. - Kelley School of Business Presenter: Dean Shepherd; U. of Notre Dame Social Inclusion in and around Social Ventures: A Paradox Perspective Presenter: Andreana Drencheva; U. of Sheffield Social Enterprises Collaborating for Varieties of Impacts across Regions Presenter: Emma Catharina Folmer; Aston Business School Presenter: Inna Kozlinska; U. of Turku, School of Economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frontline employees are the critical link translating microfinance institutions (MFIs)'s missions to alleviate poverty into everyday work with poor clients. Existing research views frontline employees' work from an individualistic perspective. Informed by 'Western' mainstream management models and theories of efficient organizing (e.g., goal setting and agency theory), frontline employees are held individually accountable and are expected to rely on their own discretion to carry out their work. Drawing on in-depth research of four MFIs and their frontline employees in Ghana, our paper provides new insights into microfinance frontline employees' everyday work. Specifically, our findings provide unique insights how an individualistic view of frontline work poses critical challenges including to the very safety of the frontline workers and the microfinance's mission of poverty alleviation when applied to deeply socially embedded and collective cultural settings. To deal with the significant challenges of their everyday work, frontline employees leverage an extensive 'cultural toolkit' of relational practices. This practice-based account complements and enriches work on hybrid organizations as social change agents, specifically drawing attention to the often overlooked role of these frontline employees and how these employees enact relational agency in their daily work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We focus attention to the neglected question of collective identity endurance. Drawing on a yearlong study of reinsurance trading practices in Lloyd's of London, we demonstrate how established organisational communities confront countervailing pressures for collectivity and organisational identity distinctiveness. Our findings demonstrate how these tensions generate multiplicity challenges that are managed through a set of spatial, relational and material practices. We integrate these practices in a theoretical model that explains how actors dynamically weave salient identity distinctiveness together to materialize, (re)produce and strengthen a collective identity. The findings contribute to a burgeoning stream of research on collective identity in interorganisational communities by detailing how spatial arrangements, everyday practices and material production undergird collective identity persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on an in-depth longitudinal investigation of organizational identity change within a business firm that became increasingly embedded in long-term partnerships with UK hospitals, education authorities and schools over a 12-year period. The study illustrates how becoming embedded in a new institutional environment can lead a business firm to develop a more complex hybrid organisational identity wherein utilitarian and normative self conceptions begin to co-exist. The grounded model of identity change presented in this paper illustrates how this process of identity change unfolded along two interrelated paths which encompass purposeful leader-led identity work at the centre of the organization - e.g. institutional bricolage, identity claiming, symbolic acts - and naturalistic changes at the boundaries of the organization - e.g. identification with public service partners' goals and processes of institutionalization. When combined, these mutually reinforcing process encouraged a radical shift in members' collective self conceptions. The findings advance our understanding of organizational identity by delineating how organizational identity change can occur in more complex institutional environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study of reinsurance trading in Lloyd's of London, this paper makes three contributions to current discussions of institutional complexity. First, we extend existing dichotomous views of co-existing institutional logics by offering a more nuanced view on constellations of logics that are conflicting yet complementary. Second, we outline a set of four activities, labelled segmenting, switching, bridging, and demarcating, through which individuals balance conflicting yet complementary institutional demands in practice. Third, we show how competent actors perform such balancing continuously, and not necessarily consciously, as part of their everyday practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]