Prelims

Half Title Page

ORGANIZING FOR SOCIETAL GRAND CHALLENGES

Series Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS

Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury

Recent Volumes:

Series Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS ADVISORY BOARD

Series Editor

• Michael Lounsbury

• Professor of Strategic Management & Organization

• Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation

• University of Alberta School of Business

RSO Advisory Board

• Howard E. Aldrich, University of North Carolina, USA

• Shaz Ansari, Cambridge University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Silvia Dorado Banacloche, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

• Christine Beckman, University of Southern California, USA

• Marya Besharov, Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Eva Boxenbaum, Copenhagen Business School, DENMARK

• Ed Carberry, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

• Lisa Cohen, McGill University, CANADA

• Jeannette Colyvas, Northwestern University, USA

• Erica Coslor, University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

• Gerald F. Davis, University of Michigan, USA

• Rich Dejordy, California State University, USA

• Rodolphe Durand, HEC Paris, FRANCE

• Fabrizio Ferraro, IESE Business School, SPAIN

• Peer Fiss, University of Southern California, USA

• Mary Ann Glynn, Boston College, USA

• Nina Granqvist, Aalto University School of Business, FINLAND

• Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, CANADA

• Stine Grodal, Northeastern University, USA

• Markus A. Hoellerer, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

• Ruthanne Huising, emlyon business school, FRANCE

• Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM

• Sarah Kaplan, University of Toronto, CANADA

• Brayden G. King, Northwestern University, USA

• Matthew S. Kraatz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Tom Lawrence, Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Xiaowei Rose Luo, Insead, FRANCE

• Johanna Mair, Hertie School, GERMANY

• Christopher Marquis, Cornell University, USA

• Renate Meyer, Vienna University, AUSTRIA

• William Ocasio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Nelson Phillips, Imperial College London, UNITED KINGDOM

• Prateek Raj, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, INDIA

• Marc Schneiberg, Reed College, USA

• Marc-David Seidel, University of British Columbia, CANADA

• Paul Spee, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

• Paul Tracey, Cambridge University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Kerstin Sahlin, Uppsala University, SWEDEN

• Sarah Soule, Stanford University, USA

• Eero Vaara, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM

• Marc Ventresca, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM

• Maxim Voronov, York University, CANADA

• Filippo Carlo Wezel USI Lugano, SWITZERLAND

• Melissa Wooten, Rutgers University, USA

• April Wright, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

• Meng Zhao, Nanyang Business School & Renmin University, CHINA

• Enying Zheng, Peking University, CHINA

• Tammar B. Zilber, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ISRAEL

Title Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS - VOLUME 79

ORGANIZING FOR SOCIETAL GRAND CHALLENGES

EDITED BY

ALI ASLAN GÜMÜSAY

University of Hamburg, Germany

Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany

EMILIO MARTI

Erasmus University, Netherlands

HANNAH TRITTIN-ULBRICH

Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany

and

CHRISTOPHER WICKERT

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Emilio Marti, Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich and Christopher Wickert.

Individual chapters © 2022 the respective chapter authors

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited.

These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83909-829-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-826-0 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-828-4 (Epub)

ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

Open access. Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Emilio Marti, Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich and Christopher Wickert. Individual chapters © 2022 the respective chapter authors. Published under exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Contents

List of Tables and figures

About the Editors

Ali Aslan Gümüsay is a Senior Researcher at University of Hamburg and the Head of research group “Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Society” at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society Berlin. His work on values, meaning, & hybridity in entrepreneurial settings; grand challenges, innovation, & new forms of organizing; societal complexity & engaged scholarship; and digitalization & the future of work/leadership has been published in outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives, Business & Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Theory, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Research Policy.

Emilio Marti is an Assistant Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and part of the Erasmus Initiative “Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity.” His main research interest is to explore how different types of shareholders – from sustainable investors to activist hedge funds – influence corporate sustainability. His research has been published in outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Journal of Management Studies.

Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich is an Assistant Professor for Business Ethics at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. Her research interests include corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability, corporate digital responsibility (CDR), CSR communication, diversity management, digitalization, stakeholder engagement, as well as new forms of work and organizing. Her research has been published in outlets such as Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Organization, and Journal of Management Inquiry.

Christopher Wickert is an Associate Professor in Ethics and Sustainability at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), Netherlands. His research interests include corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, business & society, social entrepreneurship, and organizational theory. His research has appeared in outlets such as Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Academy of Management Discoveries, Human Relation, Business & Society, and Journal of Business Ethics. He is the Founding Director of the VU Center for Business & Society (www.business-society.org) and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Management Studies.

About the Contributors

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari is a Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He serves on the Editorial Boards of leading FT50 Journals. His research interests include social and environmental issues, frames and framing, social movements, technology and innovation management, platforms, commons, temporality, institutional change and diffusion.

Héloïse Berkowitz is a CNRS Researcher at LEST, Aix Marseille University. She works on sustainability transitions and new ways of organizing, in particular meta-organizations. She has a PhD in Management from Ecole Polytechnique and graduated from Paris Sorbonne, HEC Paris and CEMS Alliance. She is a Co-editor in Chief of the open access journal M@n@gement.

Joep P. Cornelissen is a Professor of Corporate Communication at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands and Chair in Strategy and Organization (part-time) at Liverpool University Management School, United Kingdom. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Organization Theory.

Anja Danner-Schröder is an Associate Professor for Management Studies at the Department of Business Studies and Economics at the University of Kaiserslautern. Her research focuses on the dynamics of organizational routines, temporal dimensions of organizing and novel forms of coordinating and organizing including the use of digital technologies.

Katharina Dittrich is an Associate Professor of Organization Studies in the Organisation and Work Group at Warwick Business School, UK. Her research interests include routine dynamics and strategy, with an emphasis on practice-theoretical approaches and qualitative research methods. She explores these dynamics in the context of climate-related risks in the financial investment industry.

Leonhard Dobusch is a Professor of Business Administration with focus on Organization at the University of Innsbruck and Academic Director of the Momentum Institute in Vienna, Austria. His research interests include the organizational openness, management of digital communities and private regulation via standards, specifically in the field of intellectual property.

Dror Etzion is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, and an Associate Member of the Bieler School of Environment. His research program focuses on grand challenges: the unyielding, intractable problems that characterize the Anthropocene.

Fabrizio Ferraro is a Professor of Strategic Management at IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain. His current research explores the global rise of ESG and Impact Investing. More broadly, he is interested in understanding how robust action can enable deliberative process among actors and help them tackle grand challenges.

Corinna Frey-Heger is an Assistant Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. She seeks to understand new forms of organizing in the context of today’s grand challenges and global crisis and is particularly interested in how well-intended responses to such challenges may intensify the very problems they are meant to solve.

Sascha Friesike is a Professor of Digital Innovation Design at the Berlin University of the Arts and Director of the Weizenbaum Institute. He is also an Associate Researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. In his research, he focuses on the role digital technologies play when something new is created.

Marian Konstantin Gatzweiler is a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh Business School. Marian’s research mainly focuses on the intersection of organizing and technologies of calculation in high-performance settings. His field work includes research on management practices in large-scale humanitarian crises and Europe’s largest megaproject.

Thomas Gegenhuber is a Professor for the Management of Socio-Technical Transitions at JKU Linz. Thomas researches digital forms of organizing such as crowdsourcing or platforms. Thomas’ work appears in international journals such as Human Relations, Long Range Planning, Business & Society, and Information & Organization.

Joel Gehman is a Professor of Strategic Management & Public Policy and Lindner-Gambal Chair in Business Ethics at the George Washington University. His research examines strategic, technological, and institutional responses to grand challenges related to sustainability and values concerns.

Michael Grothe-Hammer is an Associate Professor of Sociology (Organization and Technology) in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His research interests include new forms of organization, decision-based theories of organization, and macro-societal differentiation.

Franziska Günzel-Jensen is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation as a vehicle to address societal grand challenges and achieve the UN SDG agenda.

Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä is a Scholar-Activist at Aalto University School of Business, and visiting scholar Stanford University and Harvard University. His research interests circle around participatory organizing and entrepreneurship to bridge science and practice.

Maximilian Heimstädt is a Senior Lecturer at Bielefeld University and the Head of the research group “Reorganizing Knowledge Practices” at Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin. He draws on analytic sensibilities from organization studies, sociology and science & technology studies to explore the changing nature of expert work in digitally networked environments.

Jennifer Howard-Grenville is the Diageo Professor in Organization Studies at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge (UK). She conducts qualitative research focused on how people generate change related to sustainability. Through editorial work and essays, she aims to support rigorous engagement of management scholarship with societal grand challenges.

Leo Juri Kaufmann is a doctoral student at the Department of Business Studies and Economics at the University of Kaiserslautern. His research focuses on the dynamics of coordinating, new forms of organizing and climate change. His current research project is analyzing coordinating mechanisms of Fridays for Future.

Arne Kroeger is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Aalto University School of Business. His research interests circle around social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and societal grand challenges.

Camilo Arciniegas Pradilla is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tolima, Colombia, in the Management and Marketing Department. His research consists of explaining how temporality and diverse notions of time influence the understanding of the past and future phenomena in organizations.

Madeleine Rauch is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Madeleine conducts research in extreme contexts and challenges faced by people both working and living in difficult contexts, such as war-torn areas like Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen.

Juliane Reinecke is a Professor of International Management and Sustainability at King’s Business School, King’s College London, UK, and Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, from where she received her PhD. Her research interests focus on global governance for wicked problems, temporality, sustainability, and social movements.

Georg Reischauer studies digital strategy, digital organization, and digital sustainability at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business as well as at Johannes Kepler University Linz.

Matteo Ronzani is a Lecturer at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Matteo studies the effects of performance measurement practices on organizations and society. His interdisciplinary work draws from the sociology of quantification, accounting, and organization theory, and focuses primarily on understanding how technologies of calculation can be mobilized to address grand challenges.

Fouad Philippe Saade is a Doctoral Researcher at Hanken School of Economics, and an experienced family-business entrepreneur. His research focuses on entrepreneurship education and migrant entrepreneurship.

Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor of Communication, Organization, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and a Visiting Professor of Organization Studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. He is a Co-editor (with Markus Reihlen) of the forthcoming Springer Handbook on the Epistemology of Management. He furthermore serves as an Associate Editor at Business and Society.

Elke Schuessler is a Full Professor of Business Administration and the Head of the Institute of Organization Science at Johannes Kepler University Linz. Her research focuses on social challenges such as climate change, decent work or digitalization as well as different forms of organizing that enable creativity, innovation, and change.

Nicole Siebold is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on social entrepreneurship, social venture growth, and social impact.

Jose Bento da Silva is an Assistant Professor at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. Jose’s research is centered on how ambiguity, mystery, temporality, the ineffable and categories deemed “irrational” can foster our understanding of social and institutional order(ing). This theoretical interest has driven Jose’s historical and ethnographic research on large-scale religious and social organizations.

Jonas Spengler is a PhD candidate in Organization Theory at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge (UK). Jonas conducts research on activism within corporations and volunteering in extreme contexts, such as refugee camps.

Iben Sandal Stjerne, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. Her primary research focus sits at the intersection of temporality, transient forms of organizing, and Human Resource Management.

Silviya Svejenova, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She is a Professor in Leadership & Innovation in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on multimodal and temporal aspects of creativity, innovation, space, and place.

Laura Thäter is currently a Research Assistant at the Hertie School of Governance. Her research field is organization theory, with a particular interest in new forms of organizing and the platform economy.

Consuelo Vásquez is an Associate Professor in the Département de Communication at UQAM, Canada. Her research focuses on the communicative constitution of organization, organizational ethnography and fragile organizations. She is the Co-founder of the Research Group Communication and Organizing (ReCOr) and the Latin-American Network of Organizational Communication Research (RedLAco).

Matthias Wenzel, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. He is a Professor of Organization Studies at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. His research focuses on the processes and practices through which the interplay between strategy and organization is produced and recreated.

Foreword: Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Research in the Sociology of Organizations (RSO) publishes cutting edge empirical research and theoretical papers that seek to enhance our understanding of organizations and organizing as pervasive and fundamental aspects of society and economy. We seek provocative papers that push the frontiers of current conversations, that help to revive old ones, or that incubate and develop new perspectives. Given its successes in this regard, RSO has become an impactful and indispensable fount of knowledge for scholars interested in organizational phenomena and theories. RSO is indexed and ranks highly in Scopus/SCImago as well as in the Academic Journal Guide published by the Chartered Association of Business schools.

As one of the most vibrant areas in the social sciences, the sociology of organizations engages a plurality of empirical and theoretical approaches to enhance our understanding of the varied imperatives and challenges that these organizations and their organizers face. Of course, there is a diversity of formal and informal organizations – from for-profit entities to non-profits, state and public agencies, social enterprises, communal forms of organizing, non-governmental associations, trade associations, publicly traded, family owned and managed, private firms – the list goes on! Organizations, moreover, can vary dramatically in size from small entrepreneurial ventures to large multi-national conglomerates to international governing bodies such as the United Nations.

Empirical topics addressed by Research in the Sociology of Organizations include: the formation, survival, and growth or organizations; collaboration and competition between organizations; the accumulation and management of resources and legitimacy; and how organizations or organizing efforts cope with a multitude of internal and external challenges and pressures. Particular interest is growing in the complexities of contemporary organizations as they cope with changing social expectations and as they seek to address societal problems related to corporate social responsibility, inequality, corruption and wrongdoing, and the challenge of new technologies. As a result, levels of analysis reach from the individual, to the organization, industry, community and field, and even the nation-state or world society. Much research is multi-level and embraces both qualitative and quantitative forms of data.

Diverse theory is employed or constructed to enhance our understanding of these topics. While anchored in the discipline of sociology and the field of management, Research in the Sociology of Organizations also welcomes theoretical engagement that draws on other disciplinary conversations – such as those in political science or economics, as well as work from diverse philosophical traditions. RSO scholarship has helped push forward a plethora theoretical conversations on institutions and institutional change, networks, practice, culture, power, inequality, social movements, categories, routines, organization design and change, configurational dynamics and many other topics.

Each volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations tends to be thematically focused on a particular empirical phenomenon (e.g., creative industries, multinational corporations, entrepreneurship) or theoretical conversation (e.g., institutional logics, actors and agency, microfoundations). The series publishes papers by junior as well as leading international scholars, and embraces diversity on all dimensions. If you are scholar interested in organizations or organizing, I hope you find Research in the Sociology of Organizations to be an invaluable resource as you develop your work.

Professor Michael Lounsbury

Series Editor, Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation

University of Alberta