Search

In this study, we examine the process of organizing risk by unconventional actors in an informal setting. As the organizing of risk is embedded in the practices of the actors and the particularities of their context. Thus, we employ the bottom-up, and work-centered concept of risk work to study the organizing process. To study the organizing of risk through risk work, we draw on the empirical setting of a mobile phone repair cluster in India and the work carried out by the mobile phone repairers there. We adopt a qualitative, ethnographic methodology given our work-based approach to studying the process of organizing risk. Through systematic inductive data analysis, we develop a framework comprising of five stages, reflecting the chronological processes through which repair workers organize risk while carrying out repair. As a result, in our knowledge, we undertake the first study to examine all three modes of organizing risk as they together unfold in an empirical setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing interest around multiple job holding (MJH) or moonlighting, where individuals hold one or more jobs in addition to a primary job, the sustainability of such work arrangements from a career perspective has come into question. The present study examined the experiences of multiple job holders (MJHs) and identified how they strived towards building sustainable careers. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty-five MJHs, this study noted three different strategies employed by MJHs to build sustainable career models -- (a) proactively leveraging time and resources by developing networks, seeking out diverse opportunities, investing in building their skills, (b) constantly negotiating boundaries between work, side work and non-work, and (c) enabling opportunities for recovery experiences through side work that facilitated autonomy, control, and mastery. Implications for individual and organizational career management practices are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though multiple job holding (MJH) is not a new phenomenon, the recent trends in the contemporary work context, such as technology-enabled platforms, are bringing about a renewed interest in the field, as people are increasingly exploring opportunities to monetize their interests and passions by engaging in additional work along with their full-time employment. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of what factors lead people to engage in multiple jobs, and in what ways, becomes important. Current research on MJH either focuses on outcomes of MJH, or examines the individual-level motivations to take up multiple jobs, while largely understating the role of contextual factors. Our review offers a synthesized framework of antecedents of MJH operating at multiple levels - individual, job, organizational, and macro level. The framework also captures the mechanisms through which these antecedents influence MJH. Synthesizing these different levels of factors can facilitate organizations to better design policies and practices to address the issues related to MJH arrangements and employment contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While extant research identifies strategies to prevent or counterbalance mission drifts at an organizational level, the examination of entrepreneur level responses to manage such drifts remains limited. The present study, borrowing from paradox theory and using the case of an Indian nonprofit organization which gradually evolved into a social enterprise, identifies factors which helped the entrepreneur to make sense of, and manage multiple mission drifts with the organizational evolution. These factors, namely, ability to integrate idealism and pragmatism, awareness of contextual factors, and ability to navigate contradictory forms of organizing helped the entrepreneur manage two different types of drifts--referred to as sustenance drift and mission drift. We conclude with implications for paradox theory and mission drift literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional change literature has predominantly focused on successful changes, with limited examination of failed institutional changes. The present study, using the case of reforms in the petroleum sector in India, examines a failed attempt at institutional change. We propose the concept of institutional elasticity to explain institutional changes, wherein, institutions revert, or tend to revert, close to their initial state. Further, based on the case and extant literature on failed institutional changes, we discuss and provide propositions mapping how the scope of change efforts, pace of change efforts, and existing institutional arrangements impact institutional elasticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Based on an in-depth case study of Goonj, an NGO in India combining charity, community development, and commercial logics, I advance an evaluation based approach to legitimation of hybrid organizations. I examine a recursive relationship between organizational actions and the legitimacy evaluations of these actions expressed through discursive means. I contribute to research on hybrid organizations by complementing existing outcome based approach to legitimacy with an approach where legitimacy is an evaluation based on organizational characteristics. Further, I examine legitimacy evaluations by both internal and external stakeholders, thus departing from extant research examining only internal organizational actions or those of internal stakeholders. I also identified four themes of legitimation in the context of hybrid organizations - delegitimation of existing systems, legitimation of individual logics, legitimation of commonalities, and legitimation of coupled logics - which were composed of different discursive strategies like rationalization, moralization, authorization, narrativization, use of metaphors, and categorization. The present study also provides insights to the literature on emergence of hybrid organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most empirical studies on institutional change show that once change processes are in motion an old institution is inevitably replaced by a new one. Drawing on a longitudinal study of institutional change in the exploration and production sector of the oil and gas industry in India, we argue that not all institutional change efforts result in a new institution. There may be situations where the change efforts fail and the organizational field reverts to the pre-change state with the revival of the old institution. We suggest that while it is relatively easier to enforce modifications to elements of the regulative pillar, it is more difficult to bring about alterations to the normative pillar and even more difficult to effect changes in the cultural-cognitive pillar of an institution. We emphasis that unless the change process ensures that changes in all three pillars are aligned to support the new institution, the old institution, which has a certain level of resilience, is likely to regain its dominance within an organizational field. We coin the term 'institutional elasticity' to describe the property of an institution that allows it to revert to its original status once forces for change have weakened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of media discourse in the legitimation of Goonj, a non-governmental organization (NGO) in India, which combines elements from social development and waste management logics. This hybrid organization works on the issue of clothing. Using a critical discourse approach I outline a process model of legitimation while specifically investigating role of stories and metaphors within the discourse. I observe how one set of stories discredited the status quo around the clothing issue by invoking morals like suffering and discrimination while another set of stories provided rationalization for Goonj's functioning by reference to its utility, and still another set of stories rationalized Goonj by references to successful outcomes. The metaphors in the media discourse provided legitimacy to the novel practices and organization through normalization. Further, texts referring to experts of both fields provided legitimation through authorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study we asked: how do institutional discourses, as represented in mass media such as newspapers, confer identities upon a traditionally marginalized collective such as those with a disability? To answer our question, we examined Indian newspaper discourse from 2001 to 2010, a period which represents the temporal space in between two census counts. We observed that disability identities - that of a welfare recipient, a collective with human rights, a collective that is vulnerable, and that engages in miscreancy - were ascribed through selective highlighting of certain aspects of the collective, thereby socially positioning the collective, and through the associated signaling of institutional subject positions. Present observations indicate that identities of a collective can be governed by institutional discourse, that those 'labeled' can themselves reinforce institutionally ascribed identities, and that as institutional discourses confer identities onto the marginalized, they simultaneously also signal who the relatively more powerful institutional actors are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]