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We examine the emergence of an organizational form, charter schools, in Oakland, California. We link field-level logics to organizational founding identities using topic modeling. We find corporate and community founding actors create distinct and consistent identities, whereas more peripheral founders indulge in more unique identity construction. We see the settlement of the form into a stable ecosystem with multiple identity codes rather than driving toward a single organizational identity. The variety of identities that emerge do not always map onto field-level logics. This has implications for the conditions under which organizational innovation and experimentation within a new form may develop.

The term “crowdwork” describes a new form of digital work that is organized and regulated by internet-based platforms. This chapter examines how crowdwork platforms ensure their virtual workforce’s commitment and control its performance despite its high mobility, anonymity, and dispersion. The findings are based on a case study analysis of 15 microtask and macrotask platforms, encompassing 32 interviews with representatives of crowdwork platforms, and crowdworkers, as well as an analysis of the platforms’ homepages and community spaces. The chapter shows that performance control on crowd platforms relies on a combination of direct control, reputation systems, and community building, which have until now been studied in isolation or entirely ignored. Moreover, the findings suggest that while all three elements can be found on both microtask and macrotask platforms, their functionality and purpose differ. Overall, the findings highlight that platforms are no neutral intermediaries but organizations that adopt an active role in structuring the digital labor process and in shaping working conditions. Their managerial structures are coded and objectified into seemingly neutral technological infrastructures, whereby the underlying power relations between capital and labor become obscured.

Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an understanding of how social ties and resource dependencies among firms affect market structure and the resulting behavior of firms within it. Evidence is furnished that supports the assumptions of the perspective and provides a basis for specifying propositions about the effect of network structure on organizational survival. I conclude by discussing the perspective’s implications for organizational theory and economic sociology.

Existing research indicates that collective identity is critical in sustaining social movements, especially in the face of significant opposition. We extend this literature by analyzing the ways collective identity evolves and develops over time to combat external barriers and obstacles. Drawing from a unique dataset on activists in the post-communist Czech environmental movement, we analyze how women rallied around their gendered identity to protest against nuclear power. Our analysis focuses on the case of the South Bohemian Mothers (Jihočeské matky), an organization that rallied specifically around the protection of children and healthy communities. The activists faced extensive obstacles including: post-communist patriarchal institutions and sexism; the South Bohemian Daddies, a male-dominated pro-nuclear countermovement; and pervasive anti-environmentalist sentiments. Our results highlight the complex and evolutionary nature of collective identity and the role it can play in sustaining activism in the face of external challenges.

In markets, audiences generally discount offerings that fail to fit established product categories, but when misfit offerings change category meaning, the effects of conformity and deviation can reverse so that previously overlooked or unappealing offerings become popular while previously appealing products fall into disfavor. After introducing the idea of category currency to explain how the value of conformity changes with ongoing meaning construction, we use it to make sense of the emergence of nanotechnology. In conclusion, we argue that category currency is useful for explaining the changing value of conformity both in and beyond markets.

Struggling economies provide an interesting venue for international management researchers to build and test theory. Struggling economies are characterized by conflict and confrontation between established forces trying to impose conformity and emerging forces seeking variety. Economies once healthy, but in sustained recession, are also fertile sites for exploring the conflict between problem-solving based on traditionally, but no longer, successful strategies and new solutions brought in from outside. Struggling economies also present opportunities for examining the interaction between people and structures, where established relationships are open to question. This volume explores change in one struggling economy – Japan. In doing so, it seeks to draw from the experience of Japanese companies in extending international management theory beyond the boundaries of that one country.

School library media specialists (SLMSs) often struggle with assuming leadership roles. Discrepancies existed in perceptions of SLMSs of their leadership preparedness, their opportunities to exert leadership, and their assumption of leadership roles. The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the perceptions of SLMSs regarding their instructional leadership and to examine the extent to which they practiced instructional leadership. The study was designed to determine whether there were differences between SLMSs perceptions of the importance of their leadership roles and their opportunities to practice those roles. The results of the study indicated that SLMSs perceived all of the leadership roles to be more important than they were able to carry out in practice and that supportive administrators were the most essential factor in providing SLMSs the opportunity to practice and expand their roles as instructional leaders.