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We examined the impact of a leadership support training intervention implemented prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on support behaviors specific to COVID-19 during the pandemic. Primary intervention targets (i.e. family-supportive supervisor behaviors and sleep leadership behaviors) were explored as mediators between the intervention and supportive COVID-19 leadership behaviors.

A cluster randomized controlled trial intervention was implemented with service members and their supervisors in the Army and Air National Guard throughout 2017–2019. Follow-up survey data were collected after the intervention, including during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Direct and indirect intervention effects were tested.

A pre-COVID intervention targeting leader support for family and sleep health had a direct effect on leader support specific to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, sleep leadership, but not family-supportive supervisor behaviors, mediated the intervention effects on supportive COVID-19 leadership. These findings suggest that certain leadership training interventions can transfer across knowledge domains and time.

Findings from this study demonstrate that training leaders on support behaviors improves their ability to support employees during the COVID-19 pandemic and may translate to crisis leadership in other contexts.

We examined the long-term effects of an intervention that was implemented approximately 1–2 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic on leadership support behaviors specific to the pandemic. Our findings contribute to the leadership, training, and organizational intervention literatures, and have implications for how leaders can support employees during crises.

Within the context of the changing nature of research and of universities, insider action research provides a particular expression of action research that poses considerable challenges to those engaging in it. The purpose of this article is to address the challenges of insider action research.

The paper draws on such research undertaken in Sweden.

Insider action researchers need to confront the issues pertaining to preunderstanding, role duality and organizational politics. Attention to experience, understanding and judgement which leads to action, provides a methodology through which they can affirm what and how they know. They need to do so in a critical realist approach which challenges them to transcend their own subjectivity through the quality of how they are attentive to the data, intelligent in their understanding, reasonable in their judgements and responsible in their actions. Such transcendence provides the criteria for a rigorous epistemology and quality action research.

This paper brings the work of Bernard Lonergan to the field of action research and insider action research in particular and addresses in concrete terms how his critical realist approach may be actualized in practice by those engaging in insider action research.

Using a recent philosophical account of trustworthiness, the author evaluates whether Bitcoin can be considered trustworthy in each of its three most common uses: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a speculative investment. Primarily because the entity that controls Bitcoin, its community of users, does not take actions to stabilize and secure the cryptocurrency – that is, in the manner that nations’ monetary policies can stabilize and secure national currencies – the author evaluates Bitcoin as untrustworthy. The author then offer an argument that its untrustworthiness undermines Bitcoin’s ability to serve both as medium of exchange and as store of value. Bitcoin’s untrustworthiness does not, however, undermine its usefulness as a speculative investment. Finally, the author discuss the extent to which – and how – other cryptocurrencies can avoid the evaluation that they are untrustworthy.

Whereas most societal commentators continue to review the historical patterns of men’s leadership in search of models for 21st-century success, few have begun to recognize, let alone appreciate, the equivalent patterns of women’s leadership and the future contributions that women could potentially make as leaders. What could and are women bringing to society as global leaders? Why at this moment in history is there such a marked increase in the number of women leaders? Are we entering an era in which both male and female leaders will shape history, both symbolically and in reality? And if so, will we discover that women, on average, lead in different ways than men, or will we learn that role (global leader) explains more than gender? This chapter reveals the accelerating trends of women joining men in senior leadership positions, establishes the relationship of women leaders to our overall understanding of global leadership, and sets forth an agenda to accomplish much needed research and understanding.

Purpose – This narrative inquiry chronicles our experiences in a social studies methods course and the understandings we gained as we engaged alongside our teacher candidates in democratic practices.

Approach – Our narrative inquiry began as we wondered whether modeling democratic practices and establishing democratic classrooms in our social studies methods courses would enable future teachers to construct democratic classrooms. Through analysis of our field notes from several semesters, we captured and examined our process of curriculum making with our teacher candidates.

Findings – Through recounting and unpacking four stories of our curriculum making, we demonstrate that to prepare future teachers to prepare their students as citizens, teacher educators must do more than merely model democratic practices. While modeling, they must explicitly teach the concepts behind the practices and attend to nondemocratic and missed opportunities for engaging in democratic practices. They must create opportunities for teacher candidates to plan, practice, observe, and critique democratic practices.

Value – To many, social studies is limited to the study and memorization of facts about history and geography. However, the primary purpose of the K-12 social studies is citizenship education (NCSS, 1994). Social studies teacher educators are responsible to prepare future teachers to meet this purpose through social studies methods courses where democratic practices are modeled and explicitly taught, and where teacher candidates are given opportunities to engage in democratic classrooms.

Borrowing from practice theory to enhance institutional theory has much potential. It may help institutional scholars reconnect with its constructivist, processual origins. Yet previous attempts of borrowing across paradigmatic boundaries – both in organization studies and in institutional theory – teach us that borrowing is not a straightforward adoption. Instead, theories that cross known paradigmatic boundaries go through a process of translation, and may well get lost in the way. In this paper, the author focuses on methodology and points to impediments to the fruitful adoption of a practice-driven approach to institutionalization, and offers ways to overcome them. In particular, the author points to the need to change the focus from process as an outcome to the inner life of the process; capturing action in vivo and in situ; and finding ways to focus on practice yet not lose connection to its institutional context and implications.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

This essay addresses the topic of research lifeworlds and personal lifeworlds and what we gain and lose as researchers, and as people, from their overlaps and collisions. The essay analyses six narrative accounts of the authors lived experience of a unique collision between research and personal lifeworlds when the researcher-mother presented with her sick daughter to the hospital emergency department that served as the field site for her own research. This analysis revealed the following themes through which a researcher’s personhood animates the research process: feeling exposed but empowered; gaining conceptual clarity while opening up ethical ambiguity; and becoming liminal because of identity shifts and coping through self-reflexivity. The essay contributes to our collective understanding and shared learning of the ways a researcher’s personhood shapes, and is shaped by, the research process and (re)production of knowledge.

The authors explore the emergence of altmetrics and Open Access (OA) publishing and discuss why their adoption in the management field lags behind other fields such as life sciences. The authors draw on the status literature to discuss the knowledge production and consumption underpinned by the ‘Impact Factor’ metric and high-status ‘Toll Access’ journals and their implications. The authors explain the rise of altmetrics and OA publishing and their implications on the production and consumption of knowledge. The authors then examine the current situation, challenges and offer reflections on the management field’s progression towards a more open research regime in the digital era.

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review of scholarly developments in practice theory and organizational institutionalism that have given rise to this interest in building a bridge between scholarly communities. As signaled by recent efforts to construct a practice-driven institutionalism, we highlight how connecting practice theory with the institutional logics perspective provides a particularly attractive focal point for scholarship at this interface due to a variety of shared ontological and epistemological commitments, including the constitution of actors and their behavior. Collectively, the papers assembled unlock exciting opportunities to connect distinct, but related scholarly communities on practice and institution, seeding scholarship that can advance our understanding of organizational and societal dynamics.