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One of the raging debates in organization study concerns the use of “templates” in qualitative research. This curated debate brings together many of the players in that debate, who make statements of position relative to the issues involved and trade accusations and counter-accusations about statements they have made that in their view have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. Overall, it is quite a lively debate that reveals positions, points of tension and grounds for disagreement. Denny Gioia wrote the triggering essay that prompted other players to weigh in with their personal and professional views.

In this essay, we discuss how tables can be used to ensure—and reassure about—trustworthiness in qualitative research. We posit that in qualitative research, tables help not only increase transparency about data collection, analysis, and findings, but also—and no less importantly—organize and analyze data effectively. We present some of the tables most frequently used by qualitative researchers, explain their uses, discuss how they enhance trustworthiness, and provide illustrative examples to inspire readers in their use of tables in their own research.

In this study, we track long-term patterns of continuity and change in the organizational identities of four nonprofits. Our findings reveal two trajectories, explained by the different means–ends ...

The concept of craft has long lived in the margins of organizational research and has typically been equated with a primitive form of manufacturing. Craft, however, seems to have had a resurgence as of late, and is now increasingly being associated with alternative approaches to work and organization in contemporary society. Yet, in spite of a growing stream of research on the phenomenon, insights have remained fragmented thus far due to a lack of common theoretical infrastructure. In an effort to synthesize the disparate threads of research on craft, we conducted an interpretive review of the use of the concept in management and organizational literature over the past century. Based on this review, we propose a reconceptualization of craft as a timeless approach to work that prioritizes human engagement over machine control. We identify the distinct work skills and attitudes that are typically associated with craft and illustrate how these appear across two conventional configurations (traditional and industrialized craft) and three contemporaneous configurations (technical, pure, and creative craft) that are visible in the literature. Finally, we suggest how our framework could be used as a general theory for understanding alternative approaches to work against the backdrop of growing affordances of machine technology and sketch future research avenues for exploring specific craft-related tensions and evolutionary processes.

A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimize futur...

In this chapter, we build on research on the interplay between organizational culture and identity to propose a teleological model of culture change that acknowledges the multiple ways in which organizational identity may influence the process. Based on prior studies, we identify three change pathways. The first is characterized by the use of new identity claims to consolidate new and emerging practices, and incorporate them into the organizational culture. The second acknowledges how members may be pushed to alter established cultural practices by a severe misalignment between image and identity. The third draws attention to the role of new identity claims, articulating a new vision for the distant future, to stimulate the incorporation of new elements in the organizational culture.

When entering international markets, manufacturers of consumer products are expected to adapt their products in order to meet local consumption practices. Doing so is particularly challenging for producers of culturally-specific products—that is, products that are little known, understood, or valued outside their original cultural milieu—whose operations are often deeply embedded in local conventions and traditions. To examine how SMEs navigate tensions between the cultural specificity of products and the cultural embeddedness of operations when expanding internationally, we conducted a multiple case study of Japanese producers of heritage craft located in Kyoto. Our findings reveal three strategies available to address these tensions—namely, selective targeting, cultural adaptation, and cultural transposition—and highlight the pivotal role played by local distributors and foreign designers, serving as cultural intermediaries, in bridging systems of domestic and foreign cultural practices and meanings. Our findings portray product adaptation as an ongoing process that unfolds along with a firm’s international expansion, as producers and intermediaries explore ways to bridge cultural differences. They illuminate the lengthy processes of learning and unlearning, adjusting, and rethinking that underlie managers’ efforts to strike a balance between standardization and adaptation as they internationalize.

Privatization—defined here as the transfer of ownership of state-owned organizations to private parties—has attracted the attention of scholars across multiple fields. Privatization programs have been based on the assumption, grounded in microeconomic theory, that a shift from public to private ownership will incentivize more efficient management of available resources. However, failure to deliver the expected outcomes in some cases and the more nuanced perspective on state-ownership offered by recent research in management seem to challenge this assumption, calling for revisiting this literature. Our comparative review of existing studies suggests that the mixed results of privatization programs could be partly explained by what was privatized, how it was privatized, and the regulatory regime under which it was privatized. By doing so, our review provides conceptual clarity and structure to a rich but fragmented body of literature, making seemingly divergent findings more legible, outlining theoretical gaps, and identifying avenues for future exploration.

This article explores the case of Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau (DWH)—a furniture and interior manufacturer founded in 1898—through state socialism after 1945 and reprivatization in the 1990s. Our analysis suggests that the firm's survival through multiple systemic disruptions was partly due to the preservation of a unique identity despite heavy institutional pressures for conformity. DWH adopted a “mixed conformity” strategy that attempted to pitch multiple concerns (cultural-aesthetic, ideological, economic) of political authorities against one another to buffer sociopolitical pressures, thus ultimately conforming to some (identity-consistent) demands, while violating other (identity-threatening) ones. This allowed DWH to successfully navigate tensions between sociopolitical expectations and the need to preserve a collective sense of distinctiveness and continuity over time.

Research on innovation networks has highlighted the pivotal role that actors with more prominence and power, such as hub firms, may play in orchestrating the activities of other network members along a collective innovation effort. Our study examined the under-theorized, but no less important, type of orchestration that characterizes other organizations, such as business incubators and venture associations, who seek to support the dispersed entrepreneurial efforts of network members. We refer to this type as 'open-system' orchestration, as opposed to the commonly studied 'closed-system' type performed by hub firms. Our findings reveal how the processes of open-system orchestration differ markedly from those of closed-system orchestration, and detail how these processes influence the micro-foundations of network members' sensing capabilities. By doing so, we also offer empirical substantiation and theoretical elaboration to the idea that dynamic capabilities might not reside exclusively inside firms, but could be co-created relationally with other parties in the business ecosystem.

In this chapter, the authors discuss how visual artifacts may support the analysis and interpretation of qualitative data in organization studies. They draws on their own experience as well as other scholars’ published work to explore the distinctive affordances of visual forms. In particular, the authors identify four roles – namely “mapping,” “analyzing,” “conceptualizing,” and “communicating” – that visual artifacts play to help us move from raw qualitative data to a compelling conceptual product.Specifically, the use of visuals for “mapping” involves directly coding data into visual forms such as cognitive maps, flow charts or relational diagrams, an approach that may offer a useful complement to traditional verbal coding. Using visuals for “analyzing” implies either comparing, aggregating or decomposing previously constructed visual maps, or drawing directly on verbal data to develop visuals such as analytical flow charts, process replication maps, and trend charts. Using visuals for “conceptualizing” involves rising above the data to develop more abstract representations of concepts and relationships, while maintaining recognizable connections to empirical phenomena. While conceptual models can take a wide variety of forms, the authors illustrate, in particular, the use of visuals to represent linear, dialectic and multi-level process theories. Finally, the authors consider the importance of visualizations for “communicating” insights as well as for developing them, and the inextricable linkages between the two.The authors conclude by discussing some of the strengths and weaknesses of visualization and by considering how new technologies may offer further possibilities for useful and insightful visual representations of qualitative data that can enhance theory-building.

Our study investigated how multi-centenary family firms in the area of Kyoto – collectively known as shinise – maintain a high social status in the community. Our analysis unpacks the socio-cultural practices through which the ongoing interaction among these actors re-enacts and reproduces the social order that ascribes shinise a distinct social standing in exchange for their continued commitment to practices and structures that help the community preserve its cultural integrity and collective identity. By doing so, our findings trace a connection between status maintenance and the expressive function that a category of firms performs within a community. At the same time, our study reveals a dark side of high status, by showing how their commitments lock shinise in a position of ‘benign entrapment’ that may impose sacrifices on family members and severe limitations to their personal freedom.

Research Summary This paper examines how strategy‐makers attempt to reconcile change initiatives with organizational values and principles laid out long before, still encased in strategic identity statements such as corporate mottos and philosophies. It reveals three discursive strategies that strategy‐makers use to establish a sense of continuity in time of change: elaborating (transferring part of the content of the historical statement into a new one), recovering (forging a new statement based on the retrieval and re‐use of historical references), and decoupling (allowing the co‐existence of the historical statement and a contemporary one). By so doing, our study advances research on uses of the past, establishes important linkages between identity and strategy research, and enhances our understanding of the intergenerational transfer of values in family firms. Managerial Summary Crafting a new corporate philosophy or mission statement can help implement strategic change, but can also be experienced as a disruption in people's sense of “who we are” as an organization. This paper reveals a variety of strategies that managers can use to deal with the tension between promoting change and maintaining a sense of continuity with a distant, revered past. By doing so, it helps managers confronting these issues deal with the enabling and constraining effects of the past. While this is a more general challenge for organizations with historical legacies, it is a particularly delicate issue for family firms grappling with the need to transfer values from one generation to the next, while retaining flexibility to change and adapt over time.

The rise of social media is changing how evaluative judgments about organizations are produced, disseminated, and accessed in the public domain. In this article, we discuss how these changes question traditional assumptions that research on media reputation rests upon, and offer an alternative framework that begins to account for how the more active role of organizational audiences, the changing ways in which they express their evaluations, and the increasing plurality and dynamism that characterizes media reputation influence the formation of organizational reputations.

Visualization is fundamental to how we experience and understand the world. Although we make ample use of visual tools in our role of educators, we tend to overlook the potential use of visualization techniques in our research. In this essay, I illustrate how visualization can be fundamental to analyzing and making sense of qualitative data.

To understand how organizations combine conflicting institutional logics strategically to create and pursue new market opportunities, we conducted an in-depth longitudinal study of the multiple efforts of the Italian manufacturer of household goods Alessi to combine the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production. Over three decades, Alessi developed three different strategies to combine normative elements of the two logics, using each strategy to envision and pursue different market opportunities. By combining the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production, Alessi was able to envision new possibilities for value creation and to enact them through innovation in product design. The three strategies triggered a common set of mechanisms through which the purposeful combining of logics enabled the pursuit of opportunity, while each strategy structured the process differently. We develop a theoretical model linking the development of recombinant strategies to the dynamic restructuring of organizational agency and the related capacity to create and pursue new market opportunities. Our findings and theoretical insights advance understanding of the processes through which organizations challenge taken-for-granted beliefs and practices to create new market opportunities, use logics as resources to enable embedded agency, and design hybrid organizational arrangements.

The symposium establishes a discussion that unfolds the role of temporality in managing and organizing for innovations. Innovations cannot be defined by a clear beginning or an end but are rather p...

In this symposium, we collectively explore the interplay between craft and various forms of hardship, including isolation, poverty, displacement, mental illness, and gender-based marginalization. T...

Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a design consultancy revealed a range of multimodal and cross-modal ways in which members of a design team compensate their imperfect capacity of articulating verbally their aesthetic knowledge in order to gradually construct a common knowledge base enabling creative collaboration. In so doing, our study offers two main contributions. It illuminates the interplay between designers’ aesthetic experiences, visceral responses, and intuitive cognitive processes that enable designers to draw upon their aesthetic knowledge to support the collective accomplishment of their task, and provides an interpretation of the design process as a form of ‘creative’ intuition driven by emotional reactions to environmental stimuli and emerging formal solutions.

We examine the unique challenges of entrepreneurs and organizations in nascent craft markets in which normative expectations are negotiated, navigated, and sometimes defied. In this collection of p...

As many researchers have experienced, building theory from qualitative data is not only exciting, but also fraught with challenges and uncertainties. In our experience, researchers often find insig...

This symposium focuses on the notion of ‘organizational ghosts’, that is, revered founders and other historical figures who still ‘haunt’ their organizations, even long after they have passed away....

Data we collect and use in organization and management studies look like “cold cases”. We want to offer more conversations, interpretations, arguments, even disputes. The Interpreters is a nexus where academics invite colleagues and friends to analyze and discuss freely an argument, raw data, cases, qualitative materials.

The concept of organizational identity is often confused with similar concepts such as organizational culture or organizational image. This confusion depends in part on the inconsistent use that scholars have made of these terms in the past. This chapter reviews the literature that has discussed how these concepts differ and how they are interrelated, and proposes an integrative framework that summarizes the most widely accepted definitions. It focuses in particular on research on dynamic interrelations between organizational identity and culture. It argues that apparently contradictory perspectives—conceiving of culture as a referent for identity vs. identity as facilitating contextual understanding for cultural norms—can be reconciled by acknowledging the dual nature of organizational identity as being constituted by social categories and organization-specific features, and the temporal dynamism that characterizes the relationship between culture and identity.

In the Conclusion of the Handbook, we acknowledge the diversity of perspectives represented in its various chapters, but at the same time outline converging patterns and trace some paths for moving forward. We observe how the “definitional war” that affected the field in its early years seems to have finally settled around a core set of often-complimentary perspectives (e.g. social actor, social constructionist, institutional, discursive, etc.) that investigate different research questions. Scholars also seem to be shifting their attention to the way that organizational identity—as a “work in progress” rather than a stable state—is constantly constructed and reconstructed and is thus permanently “becoming.” This focus on time and process not only opens interesting avenues for the study of change and stability in organizational identity, but also carries important ontological and methodological implications about the study of identities. We also observe how the adoption of new perspectives (e.g. institutional, political) may improve our understanding of the nature and causes of plurality and complexity in organizational identities, and may highlight important multilevel linkages between individuals, organizations, and external forces. Finally, we note a variety of contemporary trends affecting organizations and speculate on how they may impact the very nature of identity in and of organizations.

Since its formal entry to organization studies in 1985, the concept of organizational identity (OI) has had a long and fruitful development. We suggest OI is particularly appealing because it: 1) addresses fundamental questions of social existence about how we are both similar to and different from others; 2) is fundamentally a relational construct connecting apparent oppositions, such as “us” and “them”; 3) is a nexus concept forging relations with other theoretical constructs; and 4) is inherently useful to organizations. In the seven sections of this handbook, we trace conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges of theorizing and utilizing OI in organizations, including issues of the construct’s nomological net, its multi-level dynamics, the role time in OI (e.g., OI change), as well as its pluralistic manifestations (e.g., hybrid and multiple organizational identities).

This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research are identified and discussed, and the authors argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enriching research on design and effectively pursuing lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities.

Our study was motivated by the growing influence in cultural sociology and organizational research of the view of culture as a “toolkit,” from which individuals draw resources flexibly to develop strategies of action that address different circumstances. To investigate if and how organizations can also use new and diverse cultural resources, we undertook a historical case study of the incorporation of new cultural resources in the cultural repertoire of the Italian manufacturer of household products Alessi. Through in-depth analysis of four rounds of incorporation of new cultural resources, we develop a robust theoretical model that relates the use of new cultural resources to the development of unconventional strategies and strategic versatility. We find that cultural repertoire enrichment and organizational identity redefinition are two core mechanisms that facilitate this process. The model contributes novel theoretical understanding regarding the use of cultural resources in strategy formation and change.

This paper reports a longitudinal field study on the effects of positive media coverage on the reconstruction of organizational identity. The study highlights how intense positive coverage – to the point of turning an organization into a ‘celebrity’– influences both the way members understand their organization (sensemaking effect) and the gratification they derive from its positive representation (self-enhancement effect). Our findings suggest that positive media representations foster members' alignment around an emergent new understanding of what their organization is. Over time, however, celebrity may ‘captivate’ members' organizational identity beliefs and understandings, and impede further identity work as media persist in the replication of representations that differ from members' experienced reality, but are too appealing to them to be publicly contradicted.

Prospection or forward-looking behavior is central to many core organizational activities (strategic management, entrepreneurship, and innovation). A key hurdle to the practice and study of such fo...

Modern society is experiencing a revival of craft, yet our understanding of the role of craft in society remains very sparse. Craft appears to be an important component of the new economy and may p...

This article investigates how employees respond to hybrid organizing, that is, organizational settings that are characterized by multiple institutional logics. We examine individuals’ propensity to either hybridize or compartmentalize multiple logics in such settings. Our empirical setting is that of a French energy corporation that engages in research partnerships with multiple public and private actors to further energy transition. Their hybrid organizing is informed by a logic of science and a logic of market, which tend to conflict with one another. Our findings suggest that three types of capital—scientific, social and cultural—shape individual responses to multiple logics. In addition, we found that individuals gain capital from three elements of their structural position: a) their professional training, b) the type of organizational position they occupy, and c) the length and the variety of their work experience in a hybrid organizational setting. These insights shed new light on how individuals respond to multiple logics, insight that can be useful for addressing the tensions that arise in hybrid organizing and that impact on organizational performance.

In this chapter, we argue that combining different qualitative research methods can facilitate the study of collective cognition in organizations, thus compensating the limitations of more traditional approaches. Using our own research experience in studying how designers develop new ideas, we explain how the combined use of ethnography, grounded theory and visual narrative analysis allowed us to gain a deep understanding of how material practices influence collective cognitive sensemaking in organizations. In particular, we show (1) how ethnography allowed us to map and unpack the material practices designers engage in when developing new ideas, (2) how interviews and grounded theory helped us articulate informants’ interpretations of these practices and reveal the underlying cognitive processes, and, finally, (3) how visual narrative analysis was useful to systematically track changes in the evolving collective interpretations, and by doing so to link together practices and processes in a longitudinal fashion.

We report on a multilevel study investigating the diffusion of robotic surgery in the Italian health care system between 1999 and 2010. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods allowed...

Research on cultural change has produced mixed results. Some studies celebrate the capacity of charismatic and visionary leaders to carry out rapid transformations in organizational norms and values. Other studies warn us that these changes may be short-lived: organizations tend to resist cultural change, and when coercive pressure from the top is relaxed, they often revert to traditional patterns of behavior.\ud \ud Our longitudinal study of the implementation of Six Sigma at 3M suggests that organizational cultures may be simultaneously more and less receptive to long-lasting changes that currently believed. When asked to behave in ways that conflict with the usual “way we do things around here” employees may accept to revise their beliefs and habits if they experience changes as offering superior solutions to their problems. They will do so, however, only to the extent that changes are not perceived as threatening deeply-held, emotionally-laden “core” values, that they perceive as foundational, enduring and distinctive for the organization. \ud \ud Our observations suggest a multi-layered conceptualization of organizational culture according to their relative malleability of its elements. They remind organizational leaders about the importance of assessing whether the changes that they envision will simply enrich the cultural repertoire of the organization or will require modifications in the widely-accepted, but not deeply-held beliefs and norms of behavior, or may challenge the core values that define the very identity of the organization and its members.

In this paper, we present a longitudinal study of organizational responses to environmental changes that induce members to question aspects of their organization’s identity. Our findings highlight the role of organizational culture as a source of cues supporting “sensemaking” action carried out by leaders as they reevaluate their conceptualization of their organization, and as a platform for “sensegiving” actions aimed at affecting internal perceptions. Building on evidence from our research, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding how the interplay of construed images and organizational culture shapes changes in institutional claims and shared understandings about the identity of an organization.

Past research on initial public offerings suggests that the reputation of a company positively affects the success of the offering. Success is usually measured in financial terms as if the essence of the operation lay only in the short-term inflow of money. In this paper, we investigate important albeit often neglected implications of going public by combining evidence from a series of preliminary case studies taken from the results of a survey of 57 Italian initial public offerings. Evidence from our research suggests that, besides providing an important inflow of capital, going public may actually improve the reputational and social capital of a company, by increasing its visibility, prestige and perceived trustworthiness. Therefore, going public may be an important way to support entrepreneurial activity, as it may expand and reinforce the network of relationships that offer access to external resources, complementary skills and investment opportunities.

This study analyses the perceived reputation of large Italian companies by the general public in Italy. The study identifies those companies which are most ‘visible’ before going on to note which receive the most positive nominations and which are perceived as the poorest performers. The study concludes that researching corporate reputation in Europe is more complex than in the USA. For a number of reasons the same company may enjoy very different reputations in different European states. Initial evidence from this study also seems to support the idea of a sticky, inertial nature of corporate reputations. The age of a company seems to matter to the Italian public, as old and respected companies seem to enjoy a good reputation regardless of recent misfortunes or poor service. On the other hand negative collective judgment seems to persist even in the face of considerable changes in products, services and codes of conduct.

In this article we examine how loose coupling between units and people can benefit a firm's ability to combine and recombine knowledge-based resources continuously in a creative and flexible way. An in-depth study of Oticon A/S suggests that loose coupling can be deliberately brought into the design of the organisation by introducing a certain structural ambiguity into the configuration of role systems and authority relationships. In the first part of the paper, we show how loose coupling among units and people is a distinctive feature of the way Oticon organises its administrative activities. In the second, we explore the structural properties of a loosely coupled arrangement. We develop the concepts of multipolarity, fluidity and interconnectedness and we show how these properties conduce to an increase in the effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of the processes of knowledge integration. Structural ambiguity is thus proposed as a viable design principle for organisations operating in hypercompetitive environment, where flexible knowledge integration represents a critical condition of survival.

Os consumidores compram bens não só por suas funções práticas, mas também pelos significados que estão imbuídos e aos quais os consumidores querem ser associados. Neste artigo, apresentamos a noção de valor simbólico e descrevemos como ele é construído coletivamente na interação entre produtores, consumidores e outros atores sociais. Com base em estudos anteriores, bem como em nossa própria pesquisa, propomos um modelo que começa a revelar como os produtores podem se envolver sistematicamente na produção de bens que são valorizados como símbolos culturais e por suas propriedades expressivas.

In this article, we present the findings of a longitudinal study of coerced implementation of a practice in the face of a low degree of fit between the practice and an organization's culture. Contrary to current predictions stating that a lack of cultural fit will eventually be resolved through adaptation of new practices, our findings portray the implementation of culturally dissonant practices as an ongoing process involving the mutual adaptation of organizational practices and culture. Our emerging model describes the cultural changes induced by the coercive implementation of new practices as involving a partial change in shared beliefs and behavioral patterns and a more general enrichment of the cultural repertoire of organization members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has largely considered institutional complexity as a condition that organizations need to mitigate. In the present work, we explore instead whether there are certain mechanisms th...