Habits of the Heart Individualism and Commitment in American Life

This article presents a constitutive approach to the study of organizational contradictions, dialectics, paradoxes, and tensions. In particular, it highlights five constitutive dimensions (i.e., discourse, developmental actions, socio-historical conditions, presence in multiples, and praxis) that appear across the literature in five metatheoretical traditions—process-based systems, structuration, critical, postmodern, and relational dialectics. In exploring these dimensions, it defines and distinguishes among key constructs, links research to process outcomes, and sets forth a typology of alternative ways of responding to organizational tensions. It concludes by challenging researchers to sharpen their focus on time in process studies, privilege emotion in relation to rationality, and explore the dialectic between order and disorder.

Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizations: A Constitutive Approach†

Consumption and Identity at Work.

The editors of this collection declare its mission to be to ‘stimulate thinking on quality-related issues and to facilitate bringing quality into the mainstream of organisational effectiveness’ (p. ix). I understand the first of these goals, but the precise meaning of the second defeats me; in a way, this is emblematic of the volume as a whole. There is some very interesting material here, and some useful guides to prior work—but there is also much to mystify and some disappointments. The book opens with an erudite and lengthy piece by Lengnick-Hall which plays with the idea that existing Total Quality (TQ) thinking and practice is premised on stable and repetitive environments and organisations, and, in these oso-turbulent times, some new thinking is required. After a brief introduction to TQ, there is a lot of discussion on the wild and intriguing world of complex adaptive systems, with allusions to many relevant literatures. This is an important issue, and has much in common with the debates which gently rage in this journal about the prospects for rational intervention in human systems—although the article ignores Beer, Checkland and Mingers and others whose perspectives would be informative. Indeed, Lengnick-Hall’s analysis focuses on the dynamic instability of human systems rather than the subtler philosophical problems about system ontology and epistemology. Nevertheless, it would be churlish to complain about such omissions when there is such a fecund supply of citations from strategy, operations and organisational analysis, and even (curiously) the poppsychology of Michael Scott Peck. The key weakness of the article is that its abstract prognostications are under-illustrated, and careful use of real examples would make the argument more convincing. Strangely, interesting examples are only a few pages away, and the article by Easton and Jarrell on the Japanese concept of Hoshin Kanri (loosely, ‘policy deployment’, a neglected element of Japanese TQ thinking which relates to the generation and cascading of plans for operational improvement) would be an excellent starting point for a discussion of Lengnick-Hall’s themes. Easton and Jarrell compare the experiences of three US organisations who each work with some variant of the technique, and then contrast these implementations with the ‘ideal’ Japanese system—a highly formal process of planning and control which seems to lie in diametric opposition to LengnickHall’s ruminations on managing complexity. Unfortunately, comparisons are drawn against how Hoshin Kanri is supposed to work in Japan rather than against empirical data from Japanese companies: a matched pair comparison would be more interesting. Nevertheless, the chapter contains some useful commentary and some illuminating insights. Elsewhere in the book, several papers give rather cursory coverage of important ideas without offering new data or sufficient depth to really push the debates forward: Greller presents an outline of feedback in TQ systems, and Knouse examines reward and recognition schemes. Both will be useful for teaching, but had the two authors collaborated one would have expected a richer set of ideas to emerge. Harvey, Buckley and Novicevic examine the important question of how TQ ‘culture’ translates across national boundaries in multi-national corporations, but also settle for ruminations and pointers to further work rather than the presentation or discussion of data. Vaughan and Renn present a systematic and informative account of what they term ‘Customer Service Citizenship Behaviour’, and reflect on how employees and customers interact with the notions of ‘organizational justice’ and the degree of support perceived to be available in the organisation in regard to customer service. The article is well-argued and thoughtful, and is worth closer reading by anyone interested in the management of services in which direct customer–employee contact is central. The final chapter, by Handfield, Calantone and Ghosh, is the most disappointing. At last, the reader is offered a chapter with data, but the methods used are suspect and the resulting conclusions are unsupported by the research. Some rather over-ambitious claims do not seem to integrate with the more thoughtful theorisations offered earlier in the book. Incidentally, the authors ignore the controversy regarding the Baldrige award, and the view of WE Deming (whom they cite approvingly) who once wrote that the award ‘transgresses all that I try to teach’. Overall, the volume is a useful addition to the literature, although it does not live up to its potential. One might hope that for subsequent volumes there might be a greater degree of integration between the contributions, and a more obvious contribution from the academic editors. It is also plagued by more typographic errors, misspelled names, and missing references than one would expect in such an expensively produced book from a respectable publisher.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jors.2601260.pdf

Doing Critical Management Research

We propose a novel approach to theorizing hybridity in public and nonprofit organizations. The concept of hybridity is widely used to describe organizational responses to changes in governance, but the literature seldom explains how hybrids arise or what forms they take. Transaction cost and organizational design literatures offer some solutions, but lack a theory of agency. We use the institutional logics approach to theorize hybrids as entities that face a plurality of normative frames. Logics provide symbolic and material elements that structure organizational legitimacy and actor identities. Contradictions between institutional logics offer space for them to be elaborated and creatively reconstructed by situated agents. We propose five types of organizational hybridity – segmented, segregated, assimilated, blended, and blocked. Each type is theoretically derived from empirically observed variations in organizational responses to institutional plurality. We develop propositions to show how our approach to hybridity adds value to academic and policy-maker audiences.

/pdf/theorizing-hybridity-institutional-logics-complex-5d61c1zxxr.pdf

Theorizing hybridity: institutional logics, complex organizations, and actor identities: the case of nonprofits

As social entrepreneurship gains increasing acclaim and institutional support, there is a need for greater critical assessment of its practices and effects, including how it relates to current concerns about meaningful work. Our critical analysis of popular autobiographies of social entrepreneurs provides insight into how marketization forces are shaping the construction of meaningful work within the US nonprofit context. Our findings illustrate that although popular portrayals of social entrepreneurship offer a compelling vision of meaningful work centred on solving pressing social problems, they also celebrate a troubling account of work/life balance centred on self-sacrifice, underpaid and unpaid labour and the privileging of organizational commitment at the expense of health, family and other aspects of social reproduction. In focusing critical attention on popular autobiographies, our analysis contributes to ongoing efforts to understand how popular culture assists in reproducing problematic assumpti...

Meaningful work? Nonprofit marketization and work/ life imbalance in popular autobiographies of social entrepreneurship

Nonprofit organizations face an increasing expectation to be more business-like Although scholars have theoretically explored this phenomenon and studied its influence in various contexts, there has been little empirical examination of the ways in which nonprofit practitioners themselves describe and make sense of their organizations and their work as business-like Specifically, scholars have not explored the ways in which nonprofit practitioners communicatively reconcile the inherent tensions between being business-like and the pursuit of a social mission Based on findings from an eight-month ethnographic field study of a US nonprofit organization, this article describes the sophisticated ways in which nonprofit practitioners understand, define and negotiate the need to be business-like within the nonprofit context and the central role of communication in that process Additionally, critical assessment of these findings reveals the political qualities of talking about nonprofit organizing as being business-like, leading to potential transformative redefinitions of the business-like imperative that acknowledge rather than suppress conflicts inherent in the practice of nonprofit organizing

Being business-like while pursuing a social mission: Acknowledging the inherent tensions in US nonprofit organizing

Nonprofit organizations experience a tension between pursuing their social missions and meeting the demands of a market economy. This mission-market tension is an everyday, practical concern for nonprofit practitioners. Yet, scholars know very little about how nonprofit practitioners define and manage this tension. Drawing on contradiction-centered perspectives of organizing, data from an ethnographic study of a single U.S. nonprofit organization demonstrate that the mission-market tension was defined and managed by organizational members as both a contradictory and interconnected phenomenon. This framing was enabled by specific communication practices that supported a productive and generative relationship between these seemingly incompatible goals. Findings suggest that the mission-market tension is an inherent condition of nonprofit organizing and highlight the central role of communication in successfully managing mission and market concerns.

Being Nonprofit-Like in a Market Economy: Understanding the Mission-Market Tension in Nonprofit Organizing

Course: Qualitative Research MethodsObjectives: To provide students with an experiential understanding of the six steps to conducting a thematic analysis: (1) gaining familiarity with the data, (2)...

Matthew L. Sanders

Papers

Meaningful work? Nonprofit marketization and work/ life imbalance in popular autobiographies of social entrepreneurship

Being business-like while pursuing a social mission: Acknowledging the inherent tensions in US nonprofit organizing

Being Nonprofit-Like in a Market Economy: Understanding the Mission-Market Tension in Nonprofit Organizing

What is a theme? Teaching thematic analysis in qualitative communication research methods

Theorizing Nonprofit Organizations as Contradictory Enterprises: Understanding the Inherent Tensions of Nonprofit Marketization