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The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how three core elements of critical management studies (CMSs), “de-naturalisation”, “reflexivity” and “(non)-performative intent”, can help expand the current debate in the supply chain management (SCM) field.

The authors used a systematic literature review to select 103 articles published in 12 high-ranking journals in the SCM field based on the Academic Journal Guide of the Chartered Association of Business Schools.

The findings of this study suggest that SCM studies can be narrowed down into four major CMSs themes: “power”, “ethics and environmental issues”, “diversity” and “working conditions”, but even these themes are still under-discussed and undertheorized in SCM. The literature the authors reviewed is more concerned with explaining these phenomena than questioning them and proposing new agendas. This paper, therefore, will discuss how these three core elements of CMS can help transform the “hidden” issues of SCM, which it will do by illustrating it in the context of buyer–supplier relationships and lean manufacturing.

This research will encourage SCM scholars who are interested in conducting more critical studies and teaching the harmful effects of global supply chains.

This paper highlights that a combination of SCM and CMS approaches is important when we decide to adopt a more critical “constructive” view of supply chain challenges and engage practical and critical views, respectively, to generate knowledge that not only increases (corporate) performance but also highlights social needs and values.

This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

This paper illustrates the socio-political nature of accountings, referring to the partial privatisation of the monopoly telecommunications organisation in a lower-middle-income country.

Actor-network theory and an ANTi-history approach are used to trace circumstances and occurrences. Empirical materials include official documents, print media and retrospective interviews with organisation employees ten years on from the privatisation.

Proponents of privatisation used retrospectively constructed historical accounts to problematise the natural monopoly of telecommunications and the government organisation administering it. A restructuring programme followed. Proponents addressed controversies pertaining to the programme thus garnering widespread support for complex and controversial changes. Proponents produced and reproduced accounting artefacts as evidence in these processes of history reconstruction, consequent changes and restoring stability to telecommunications in its reconfigured commercial domain. The proponents used selective, controversial accounting evidence to problematise the government organisation's existence, then to mobilise various actors to reduce and close the controversies previously aroused and reinstate stability in a partially privatised telecommunications company. Although no longer having a monopoly this company still dominates. Dissenters did the same but with little success.

The findings demonstrate the importance of tracing the socio-political process of arriving at the dominant outcome about the past. This assists in making sense of present circumstances and re-imagining the future.

The study demonstrates that, during controversial circumstances, taken-for-granted history, as well as what is thought to have not existed in the past, support the dominant network in gaining advantage over their opponents and black-boxing their perspectives of how things should be.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.