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The purpose of this paper is to challenge the understanding of paradox in corporate strategy as unintended and unwanted consequences that must be overcome.

The paper builds upon the concept of patching and holds the paradoxical nature of multi‐business firms as essential for corporate evolution. It presents an inherent contradiction of corporate organising, closely related to interdependency between patches. These interdependencies vary according to whether the patches are similar or different and whether there exist competing views on centralisation and decentralisation within the company.

Studying reorganizations in a large Norwegian telecommunication corporation, we explore these interdependencies and find that for the corporation to move in novel ways, combinations have to display a dynamic close to the edge of chaos.

This paper presents new research on organizational “patching”.

“Change or perish” has become a corporate mantra (Abrahamson, 2000). What happens when change becomes excessive? We define excessive change as when organizations pursue several seemingly unrelated and perhaps conflicting changes simultaneously, or when organizations introduce new changes before previous changes have been completed. When change is perceived as excessive, organizational members react in various ways. In this paper we draw on existing literature in strategy and management to theoretically develop the phenomenon of excessive change, ways of coping with excessive change, and organizational consequences of excessive change. Implications include how excessive change can be managed as well as suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how experience with organizational change influences employees' reactions to change. While exposure to an increasingly frequent organizational change can lead to change fatigue and cynicism, it can also generate more positive reactions to change. The authors identify experience‐based change capabilities and explore conditions for developing such capabilities.

The paper draws on qualitative interview data from two studies of reactions to planned change. The authors probe employees' accounts of their reactions to change and show how they vary depending on employees' level and type of experience.

The findings suggest that experience provides opportunities for employees to develop their change capabilities, which leads to milder and more constructive reactions to subsequent change initiatives. However, negative experiences can lead to loyal behavior that is based on cynical attitudes.

The findings contribute by identifying experience‐based capabilities among change recipients. The limitations of the study include the threat of self‐selection as employees who remain in the organization may be more prone to loyal behavior.

When employees have extensive change experience, managers must adjust their way of thinking about change. Managers need to be alert to the prominence of more loyal behavior. They should also recognize their own role in generating positive process experience, which is a precondition for developing change capabilities at the employee level.

The study adds to the increasing focus on change recipient perspectives during change and shows how change capabilities can be developed among employees.

The purpose of this paper is to address gender and management in contemporary globalization by focusing on the ways in which male top managers in a multinational corporation (MNC) construct their identities in interviews with researchers.

Qualitative analysis based on interviews with virtually all top managers in the Nordic financial services company Nordea (53 men and two women).

It is found that becoming international induces a particular masculine identity for the top managers. In becoming international, however, their national identification persists. The unstability of the MNC as a political constellation leaves room for questioning the transnational identity offered.

This paper's findings suggest that in the global world of business, national identity can also be interpreted as something positive and productive, contrary to how it has been previously treated in feminist and men's studies literature.

We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.

The growing interest in the microfoundations of institutions is a significant, yet surprising development given that the theoretical tradition’s original insight was to account for macro, institutional influences on lower-level units. The call for microfoundations has gone on without really clarifying what institutionalists mean by microfoundations. Some reflections on the usefulness or purpose of establishing the microfoundations of institutional theory are in order. The authors advocate for treating the micro as part of pluralistic and multi-level accounts of institutional processes. Central is the conceptualization of actors as more or less institutionalized identities and roles.

The interactional and distributive dimensions of perceived justice as one of its objectives are to reveal the link between perceived justice and service satisfaction (SS). The purpose of this paper is to consider the influence of the perceived justice that South African retail bank customers experience based on the service recovery efforts of these banks in response to their complaints, the customers’ SS, and, consequently, the behavioral intention (BI) toward these banks.

This study focuses on the perceived justice construct where a service failure has occurred followed by a customer complaint and a resultant service provider response. In total, 281 respondents completed a structured self-administered questionnaire.

The study found that interactional and distributive justice (DJ) experienced in response to the service recovery efforts of a bank significantly and positively influence SS, and that SS in turn significantly and positively influences the BI of these customers. However, it was found that interactional and DJ had no direct effect on BI.

The research model tested addresses the interfaces between service receivers’ perception of interactional justice, distributional justice and SS as well as the interface between SS and BI. The tested research model indicates that both are interrelated through SS.

It is evident from the findings that retail banks should utilize the service encounter that follows a customer complaint as a desirable prospect to implement strategies to recover from service failures in an effort to bring about perceived justice that will ultimately influence customers’ levels of SS and BI.

This study makes a complementary contribution to previous studies and existing theory building a nomological framework of constructs in service encounters consisting of service receivers’ perceived justice, SS and BI.

This experimental study investigates the connotative (measured) meaning of the concept “auditor independence” within three audit engagement case contexts, including two acknowledged in the literature to represent significant potential threats to independence. The study’s research design utilises the measurement of meaning (semantic differential) framework originally proposed by Osgood et al. (1957). Findings indicate that research participants considered the concept of independence within a two factor cognitive structure comprising “emphasis” and “variability” dimensions. Participants’ connotations of independence varied along both these dimensions in response to the alternative experimental case scenarios. In addition, participants’ perceptions of the auditor’s independence in the three cases were systematically associated with the identified connotative meaning dimensions.