Scandinavian Journal of Management最新文献

Organizational routines embody the stability-change duality: for routines to be consistent, actors performing them must improvise to adjust to changing conditions. While these interdependent aspects are often intuitively navigated by organizational actors, sometimes they can manifest as contradictory, paradoxical requirements. Using a paradox lens, this paper explores how individuals deal with tensions as they oscillate between preserving and altering routines. Building on an ethnography of an emergency room, we unpack routine dynamics and identify three tensions with paradoxical attributes: learning vs. efficiency, flexibility vs. compliance, and autonomy vs. control. When triggers render tensions salient, organizational members rely on three responses (avoiding, shrinking, and stretching) to deal with tensions while performing routines. Based on these findings, we contribute to the routines and paradox literatures by discussing how routines are used as rubber bands in balancing tensions.

The paper delineates how our understanding of reflection and knowledge development changes, if we drop the widespread assumption that objects such as tools merely ‘talk back’ (Schön) or ‘bite back’ (Engeström & Blackler) when humans use them. By drawing on the notion of affordances, the paper provides an account of how tools ‘bite first’, which means that their materiality pre-reflectively affords certain patterns of thinking and acting as well as affective states while others are less likely. My 12-month action ethnography basically offers three insights. First, my findings indicate that a tool’s materiality which affords flexibility, complexity, embodied engagement, and happiness is more likely enacted as ‘facilitative reflection’, a type of reflection that results in knowledge creation. Second, if a tool’s materiality affords less flexibility, an entity-focus, detached interaction, and frustration, ‘oppositional reflection’ is enacted, a second type of reflection that does not result in knowledge creation. Since only ‘facilitative reflection’ results in knowledge creation, the affordances-based account of tools-for-reflection also challenges the widespread argument that reflection leads to knowledge creation. Third, I offer some fresh insights into the relation between a tool’s materiality, breakdowns, and associated affective states.

In this study, we examine how sexual harassment accusations against executives affect the stock returns of the affiliated organization. Taking a reputation cost perspective, we identify 98 sexual harassment accusations during 2016–2019, of which 25 directly target organizational executives. We employ an event study methodology to detect abnormal stock reactions for the affiliated organization. The results indicate that #MeToo accusations substantially harmed the stock returns of the organization despite the accusation relating to an individual’s misconduct. We discover significant results only for executives who are employed at the parent organization. Therefore, we first provide evidence that misconduct by individuals matters for organizations. We demonstrate that executive misconduct becomes particularly relevant when the executive assumes a leading position at the parent organization. This finding has important implications for future research and practitioners.

This study focuses on how ideas of ‘digitalization’ are discursively constructed in the Swedish steel industry. Using a discursive psychology approach, we identify seven interpretative repertoires in the discursive practicing of digitalization: everyone-else, speed, competition, job loss, control, safety, and equality. Examining their functions and effects, we show that not only is digital transformation constructed as more productive, efficient, competitive, technologically advanced, safe, and equal, it also involves a shift towards the blue-collar worker being more vulnerable; a construction where she is able-minded but lonely, physically fragile, obtuse and unreliable, and a victim of a development beyond her control, forcing of her to acquire new competence. We conclude that this reproduces asymmetrical power relations between workers and companies, pushing the challenges of digital transformation to the workers. At the same time, we also see how these local discourses hold a possibility of tempering this asymmetry through the construct of togetherness of different contexts, bodies, and hierarchal levels, thus connecting steel industry workers of the future through the use of digital technology.

Concerns about the relevance of management research and its impact on management practice have been ongoing for decades. We propose a novel angle to explain this research vs practice gap: instead of focusing on the content and language of management papers as reasons for practitioners’ limited interest in the majority of our results, we focus on the role of trust. We propose that management research is often seen as irrelevant by practitioners because of the shape and direction of trustworthiness-building institutions. Unlike in other professions, such as medical doctors and lawyers, the trustworthiness-building institutions in our field are directed inwards rather than outwards. Institutional arrangements governing the area of management research ensure that scholars can trust results delivered by other scholars, but they do not cover the interaction between scholars and practitioners. Thus, practitioners have few reasons to trust and reach for our results. We conclude that the issue can be addressed, albeit only partially. This is because, unlike in the case of established professions, the well-being of our discipline is not highly dependent on practitioners, neither is practitioners’ well-being particularly dependent on our research.

Narrative strategy-making is useful in the mobilization of strategies because narratives impart coherence and linearity to our understanding of organizational events. Our paper examines the relation between narrative strategy-making and the flow of events. We present a longitudinal, participatory study of a software company seeking global growth. Specifically, we followed events preceding and succeeding construction of the strategic ‘success stories’ used by the software company’s managers in investor negotiations. We conceptualize the point of illusion and disillusion underlying the temporal construction and use of strategy narratives and show how the former enables strategy-making, while the latter constrains it. We add to narrative strategy research by elaborating the relation between the construction of strategy narratives and the flow of organizational events.

In advancing the notion of stakeholder capitalism, the great reset of management and organization theory must address governance implications of stakeholder heterogeneity. The paper contributes to this task by focusing on the governance of agricultural cooperatives whose members often have heterogeneous preferences. The key novel idea is to conceptualize cooperative governance in the light of the proposed distinction between the core and peripheral activities of cooperatives. While core activities are based on members’ truly common interests, peripheral activities include all else. This approach allows tracing governance challenges of agricultural cooperatives back to the inflation of peripheral activities. Based on this approach, cooperative managers and members are advised to minimize these activities and to draw clear boundaries between core and periphery.

Although scholars have recognized the importance of innovation in family firms, the literature on family firm innovation tends to generally depict family firms as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for innovation, or focus on the factors with the potential to positively stimulate family firm innovation. Drawing on path dependence theory, this study focuses specifically on what family-specific barriers work against innovation in family firms. To that end, we follow a qualitative theory-building approach due to the limited amount of extant theory, and study a sample of four family businesses headquartered in Spain and Uruguay. The related propositions and theoretical contributions emerging from our study are shared in the concluding section.