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Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

Working to improve organizations is the mainstay of organization development (OD) practice and includes figuring out the sources of workplace disruptions and dysfunctions. Casting aside the focus of most change-management initiatives, the organization, organizing intelligence (OQ) relies on paying attention to what people actually do, making meaning of complex, messy human-social organizing activities, in the interests of fostering productive workplaces. Resting on dialog with and among participants “feeling their way” as they organize their work, OQ is an exercise in synthesis rather than analysis. A holistic understanding of organizing activities is helped by exploring the roles of a triad of closely interwoven factors – organizing structures, work-practices, and relationships – in how people get things done, while understanding how these are interconnected. This chapter examines why the capacity for OQ matters, why and how OQ differs from widely practiced, technically framed, organizational analysis, and what distinguishes people with OQ from those with a more conventional interest in organizational change. A case study of the Dutch home-nursing organization, Buurtzorg, illustrates OQ in practice. With small groups of nurses who self-organize, this is a structure that changes both the way people work and their relationships, to the benefit of nurses and the quality of life and care of their patients, while reducing costs; clearly an example of a more productive workplace.

Henryk Grossman was the first person to systematically explore Marx’s explanation of capitalist crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to place it in the context of the distinction between use and exchange value. His “The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System” remains an important reference point in the Marxist literature on economic crises. That literature has been plagued by distortions of Grossman’s position which derive from early hostile reviews of his book. These accused Grossman of a mechanical approach to the end of capitalism and of neglecting factors which boost profit rates. Grossman, in fact, contributed a complementary economic element to the recovery of Marxism undertaken by Lenin (particularly in the area of Marxist politics) and Lukács (in philosophy). In both published and unpublished work, Grossman also dealt with and even anticipated criticisms of his methodology and treatment of countertendencies to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Far from being mechanical, his economic analysis can still assist the struggle for working class self-emancipation.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be used as a link of trust between business and society, and which role CSR plays in recovering distrust in businesses. It uses a mixed methods study of processes of moving businesses within the Danish water sector from a general trust-breakdown to trust recovery from 2003 to 2013.

Trust recovery is found to depend on stakeholders’ mutual engagement with each other and their willingness to share knowledge and learn from each other’s professional and institutional cultures and languages. An alignment of vocabularies of motives between regulation and voluntary CSR is found to be useful for building trust between conflicting parties. Furthermore the findings shows that the more stakeholders’ languages, motives and logics can coexist, the more trust can be recovered.

The research is limited by a study of one business sector in one country and the findings have implications greater than the local contexts of which it is researched, because it is usable in other sectors that suffer from severe trust-breakdowns such as government systems in both the public and private sectors.

This chapter suggests a theoretical extension of Bogenschneider and Corbett’s (2010) Community Dissonance Theory to embrace multiple stakeholders each having their own complex and unique culture and communication modus based on their institutional, professional or individual comprehensive language universes. This includes knowledge-sharing and educative diffusion of the stakeholders’ language universes’ vocabularies including its important nouns, verbs, terminologies, semantics, taxonomies and axioms as well as the stakeholders’ motives and logics implemented into these universes.

This chapter examines why the political collapse of Russia and Germany in the end of the First World War resulted in massive expropriation of private property in Russia and consolidation of private property in Germany. This historical divergence is explained by the different measure of coercive capacities of the provisional governments and, consequently, their different ability to withstand the assault of the radical Left during the periods of turbulent political transitions. The measure of coercive capacities was determined primarily by support of the army, which, in turn, was contingent upon the provisional governments’ decisions to negotiate peace and exit the war.

This chapter intends to provide a reflexive discussion of the experience I loosely refer to as the ‘supervisory relationship breakdown’, which led me to withdraw from a Professional Doctorate in the penultimate year of completion. The event left an indelible impact upon me; a reminder of my blackness, the contrast between that and the ivory tower of academia and the emotional toil I endured as each incident unfolded, ultimately leading to my exit and the shattering of my emotional wellbeing. The term ‘supervisory relationship breakdown’ is a superficial reference to a complex entanglement of what I deemed to be dysconscious racism and attempts situated historically to control people of colour through education. I will explore how I as a black woman in academia believe I am perceived through a dysconscious racial lens, a lens shaped by a perception to maintain white privilege. I posit how a misalignment existed between who I am and who I was perceived to be by my doctoral supervisor. The space between this misalignment became filled with inequity, tension and oppression, culminating in the relationship breakdown. I present an ‘implosion’ of the relationship as a metaphor for the embodied affect having to withdraw from the doctorate had on me; it felt as though my ‘self’ – body, mind and spirit – were broken, in a state of collapse which I did not know how I would recover from. I conclude with support and renewed hope, I returned to academia and found an alternative approach for completing my doctorate.

A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional issues are typically captured by adjusting a poverty measure to be sensitive to inequality among the poor. This approach, however, has certain practical and conceptual limitations. It conflicts, for example, with some policy-relevant measurement features, such as the ability to decompose a measure into dimensions post-identification and does not create an appropriate framework for assessing disparity in poverty across population subgroups. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a separate decomposable inequality measure – a positive multiple of “variance” – to capture the distribution of deprivations among the poor and to assess disparity in poverty across population subgroups. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through two contrasting inter-temporal illustrations using Demographic Health Survey data sets for Haiti and India.

This chapter suggests a robust Hausman and Taylor (1981), hereafter HT, estimator that deals with the possible presence of outliers. This entails two modifications of the classical HT estimator. The first modification uses the Bramati and Croux (2007) robust Within MS estimator instead of the Within estimator in the first stage of the HT estimator. The second modification uses the robust Wagenvoort and Waldmann (2002) two-stage generalized MS estimator instead of the 2SLS estimator in the second step of the HT estimator. Monte Carlo simulations show that, in the presence of vertical outliers or bad leverage points, the robust HT estimator yields large gains in MSE as compared to its classical Hausman–Taylor counterpart. We illustrate this robust version of the HT estimator using an empirical application.