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In this paper, we call for renewed attention to the structure and structuring of work within and between organizations. We argue that a multi-level approach, with jobs as a core analytic construct, is a way to draw connections among economic sociology, organizational sociology, the sociology of work and occupations, labor studies and stratification and address the important problems of both increasing inequality and declining economic productivity.

Idiosyncratic jobs occur when formal job duties match the abilities or interests of a specific person. New duties can accrue or be negotiated to match an existing employee or a potential hire. Idiosyncratic jobs can help organizations deal with changing contexts, and influence organizational goals and structure. They can affect job holders’ careers and organizational job structures. The evolutionary accumulation of idiosyncratic jobs can potentially generate unplanned organizational learning. Promising research frontiers include links to work on job crafting, I-Deals, negotiated joining, and ecologies of jobs. Deeper exploration of these domains can advance core theories of job design and organizational transformation and inform normative theory on organizational use of idiosyncratic jobs without falling into cronyism, inefficiency, or injustice.

The case depicts Krispy Kreme's franchise system growth and decline as a lesson to entrepreneurs running a company as a franchisor. Burton D. Cohen, retired senior vice president and chief franchise officer for McDonald's Corporation from 1980 to 1999, explains the strengths and weaknesses in Krispy Kreme's franchising strategy during the period from 1997 to 2006. Areas examined in the case include: franchisee agreements, accounting practices, volatility in stock valuation, franchise system growth, franchise ownership structure, product distribution strategy, and commissary growth. The case depicts how Krispy Kreme started and how it ended up in a low point.

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According to neo-institutional scholars, experts need to support decoupling, yet doing so may be more or less subjectively understandable for those who are employed as experts. The authors mobilize the phenomenological concept of the life-world as a lens for reconstructing how individuals give meaning to decoupling processes. Based on a hermeneutic analysis of a human resource management expert’s reflections on his activities, the authors highlight the subjective experience of decoupling as a process of solving tensions between an individual’s convictions and the relevances imposed by an organization. The authors conclude that a phenomenological lens enriches microfoundations debates by focusing on an individual’s learning within the framework of an imposed organizational reality.

Jobs fundamentally influence and are influenced by individuals, organizations, and societies. However, jobs themselves are largely conceptualized in an atomized and disembodied way. They are understood as being designed, altered, and dissolved and bringing their consequences one at a time. I advance an alternative view of jobs as a system of ties that span jobs, organizations, and the environment beyond organizational boundaries. These ties create Gordian Knots that hold jobs in place and explain how they change. I illustrate the model with case study evidence and propose an agenda for research on jobs as organizational systems.

In this chapter, the authors contribute to the scholarly discourse on poverty, inequality, and economic mobility within low-income families who have children with disabilities. Few extant studies have addressed issues of socioeconomic mobility relative to families with children who have disabilities. Accordingly, we employed analyses of secondary longitudinal ethnographic data from the Three-City Study to explore socioeconomic mobility among 31 mothers of children with disabilities in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. The authors examined two central issues that emerged in our ethnographic data: (1) mothers’ aspirations regarding their socioeconomic mobility, and (2) the barriers which make it difficult for them to reach their mobility aspirations. The authors also considered the role of family comorbidity and cumulative disadvantage in this inquiry. Through our analyses of mothers’ talks regarding socioeconomic mobility, we identified three domains of their aspirations – work and career, education, and intergenerational. We also identified three “barrier bundles” – pragmatic needs, relationship and social liabilities, and socio-emotional concerns – which compromised mothers’ abilities to be upwardly mobile. In essence, we found that mothers’ aspirations were not aligned with the barriers that precluded them reaching their goals. The authors conclude with a discussion on the implications of this research for future studies.

We advance entrepreneurship research by developing a theoretical model of how founding teams form. Our neo-Carnegie model situates nascent founders in particular network-structural milieus, engaging in aspiration-driven search for and evaluation of prospective co-founders. The formation of co-founding ties between nascent founders can be divided into four theoretical steps, which we label activation, evaluation, approach, and reciprocation. Successful founding team formation is a consequence of mutually favorable evaluations by nascent founders in a multi-sided matching process. Nascent founders with higher and less flexible aspirations are more likely to undertake distant search for co-founders by seeking referrals, forming ties with strangers, and forming new ties to social foci where they might meet potential co-founders. Churn in newly formed founding teams emerges as a consequence of shifting dominant coalition dynamics in the founding team caused by organic venture evolution and intentional changes in strategic direction. Our theoretical model provides new insights on the formation pathways of founding teams, their initial task and relational resource endowments, and initial team dynamics.

This study enriches the theory of effectuation by discussing the four independent dimensions of effectuation and their relationships with causation. Additionally, we fill the gap in prior literature by showing how entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture. Our study of 171 practising entrepreneurs regarding their entrepreneurial decision-making logic yielded multiple findings. The authors find that entrepreneurs rely on causation as well as effectuation in their decision-making; the more experienced entrepreneurs are, the more they actually use causation; and entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture firm.