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While performativity, as a theoretical concept, has gained much purchase in the field of management and organization studies (MOS), there remains a dearth of empirical work operationalizing the idea. In this article, we argue that empirical studies on performativity in organizational settings have been scarce mainly due to two methodological challenges: (1) the problem of breadth, and (2) the problem of depth. In terms of breadth, to study how a cultural/symbolic construction becomes performative, researchers need to follow threads of meanings and practices that stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford. In terms of depth, studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized understanding of how people live in and through the symbolic world, which few methodologies possess the analytical resources to unravel. We offer multi-sited ethnography as a promising methodological approach that has the potential to concomitantly overcome both challenges. Through a vignette of a study that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we illustrate how multi-sited ethnography enables empirical research on performativity in MOS.

Over the last decade, scholars across the wide spectrum of the discipline of sociology have started to reengage with questions on morality and moral phenomena. The continued wave of research in this field, which has come to be known as the new sociology of morality, is a lively research program that has several common grounds with scholarship in the field of business ethics. The aim of this thematic symposium is to open constructive dialogues between these two areas of study. In this introductory essay, we briefly present the project of the new sociology of morality and discuss its relevance for business ethics. We also review the contributions to this thematic symposium and identify four specific domains where future research can contribute to fruitful dialogues between the two fields.

PurposeThe authors examined the traditional leadership practiced by the Old Order Amish located in the Holmes and Wayne counties of America. Despite popular stereotypes, this community is remarkably innovative and resilient. Amish leadership aligns with the central tenets of humanistic leadership and provides a rich illustration of how such a leadership paradigm can foster a vibrant, inclusive and sustainable community. Unlike current leadership models that focus on instrumental values like wealth, profit and growth, Amish leadership is concerned with faith, community and living a simple life with purpose and dignity.Design/methodology/approachThe primary data required for this paper were collected by the lead author during a six-month ethnographic study on several Amish communities located in Ohio. The authors also consulted a large set of archival data, including think tank reports, census data, biographies, magazine features and academic publications, which helped in placing the primary data in perspective and reminding of the particularities of the contexts from which the primary data were collected. For the data analysis, the authors used a thematic analysis approach to allow the salient themes of Amish humanistic leadership emerge from the data.FindingsA total offour themes emerged from this study: (1) leadership as local identity and practice; (2) leaders without benefits, chosen by the lot; (3) leaders present matters, followers discuss and decide; (4) community welfare as the yardstick for evaluation. These themes highlighted some of the key aspects of humanistic leadership eclipsed in the mainstream theories of management and leadership. They showed how the Amish respond to the encroachment of technology, which holds critical clues for how humanistic leaders can place the needs of their people before the demands of their shareholders. By examining Amish leadership in detail, this study demonstrated the potential of humanistic leadership for creating a strong and sustainable community while also contributing to the empirical foundation of humanistic management.Originality/valueGiven the closed nature of the Amish, only few academic studies exist, which examined their leadership style. Furthermore, the traditional and conservative nature of the Amish community has prevented critics from investigating their leadership as a model for revitalizing other communities.

PurposeIn recent years, organization scholars have engaged in several conversations about the process of theory development, and offered many proposals for building new theories of organization. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a fundamental, fruitful and often neglected method for developing new theories of organization.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on Peirce's typology of reasoning: deduction, induction and abduction. This typology helps in analyzing and categorizing the extant proposals for developing new theories of organization, and also makes it visible what approach has been most often missing.FindingsThis paper shows that the offered proposals can be categorized into the following two models: (1) armchair theorizing; (2) present capturing. This categorization also highlights a third model – change sensitizing – that is based on shifting organization theories by sensitizing ourselves to macro shifts of organizational reality.Originality/valueAlthough the change sensitizing model is an unusual, marginal practice in today's organization research, it has historically been used to develop many of the renowned theories in social sciences. If taken as a serious agenda, it has the potential to generate a host of new, valuable theories of organization.

Descriptive studies of morality in organizations have to date been largely focused on the scene of individual decision making without paying adequate attention to other important scenes. However, an integral part of what people understand as morality is comprised of those moral norms that they appropriate in the scene of moral reflexivity, i.e. through conscious reflection, analysis, and deliberation. In this article, I bring in and integrate a diverse set of insights, primarily from the sociology of morality, to identify what contextual factors condition the moral reflexivity of organizational members, both in terms of triggering their reflexivity and in terms of orienting their thoughts. The result is an integrative framework that delineates three core dimensions representing the conditioning effect of context on individual moral reflections: Symbolic resources, attention prompts, and the existing self-concept. Finally, I discuss the implications of the offered framework for management and organization studies of moral phenomena.

In recent years, research on morality in organizational life has begun to examine how organizational conduct comes to be socially constructed as having failed to comply with a community’s accepted morals. Researchers in this stream of research, however, have paid little attention to identifying and theorizing the key actors involved in these social construction processes and the types of accounts they construct. In this paper, we explore a set of key structural and cultural dimensions of apparent non-compliance that enable us to distinguish between four categories of actors who engage in constructing the label of moral failure: dominant insiders, watchdog organizations, professional members, and publics. The analysis further clarifies which category of actor is more likely to succeed in constructing the label of moral failure under which circumstances, and what accounts they are likely to use, namely: scapegoating, prototyping, shaming and protesting.

How does context condition morality? This is one of the core questions of the sociology of morality and also one that has remained largely untheorized till date. In this article, we draw on insights from symbolic interactionism, and develop a theoretical framework that highlights the role of context in variation of morality. This framework is informed by a view of the self as a reflexive process that engages with moral norms through giving a self-account in relation to the norms. Based on this view, we distinguish between three contextual dimensions that condition morality: symbolic forms, scenes of address, and narrating subjects. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the presented theoretical framework for sociological studies of morality.

Reports of widespread misconduct in organizations have become sadly commonplace. Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, accounting fraud in large corporations, and physical and sexual harassment in the military implicate not only the individuals involved, but the organizations and fields in which they happened. In this paper we describe such situations as instances of “moral collapse” and develop a multi-level theory of moral collapse that draws on institutional theory as its central orienting lens. We draw on institutional theory because of its explicit concern with the relationships among individual beliefs and actions, the organizations within which they occur, and the collective social structures in which norms, rules and beliefs are anchored. Our theory of moral collapse has two main elements. First, we argue that morality in organizations is embedded in nested systems of individuals, organizations and moral communities in which ideology and regulation flow “down” from moral communities through organizations to individuals, and moral ideas and influence flow “upward” from individuals through organizations to moral communities. Second, we argue that moral collapse is associated with breakdowns in these flows, and explore conditions under which such breakdowns are likely to occur.

International audience; Organization studies of morality have paid scant attention to theorizing the relation between morality and organization before engaging in empirical work, which has resulted in inconsistent and incompatible theories implicitly entailed in different empirical studies. In this article, I distinguish between two theoretical perspectives regarding this relation--heterologous and homologous--based on whether morality and organization are viewed as distinct and independent from one another or orders of intertwined constitution. I discuss the implications of taking each perspective for research question and design, and show how the choice of theoretical perspective leads to starkly different conclusions about a single phenomenon. I also illustrate these arguments in the case of studying the recent rise of private military and security industry. To conclude, I highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions of the distinction between heterologous and homologous perspectives and discuss future avenues that it opens for organization research on morality.

Descriptive studies of morality in organizational context have to date been largely focused on the scene of individual decision making based on a set of given moral norms. The individual in a decis...

Organizational research has for the past decade employed several research methods from the field of linguistics; a prominent one among those methods is critical discourse analysis (CDA). Organizati...