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While the use of the pragmatic sociology of critique has enjoyed increasing academic popularity, the relationship between justification and broader power relations remains unclear. Recent attention to the concept of ‘domination’ suggests the need for a greater focus on how employed public goods reinforce prevailing social arrangements. In this article we explore the public debate over the expansion of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas (so-called ‘fracking’) in the United Kingdom (UK). This technology has generated significant debate and controversy. Through a detailed examination of public inquiries into the technology we explore how different actors employ discursive strategies to justify their claims for the expansion or rejection of fracking. Through this analysis, the article identifies how some of these justifications enjoy precedence over others within the prevailing neoliberal political regime. By explaining how such a political regime is constituted, our study contributes to better understanding how different justifications support hegemonic political ideologies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a national policy on sickness absence management is translated by HR managers into local human resource management (HRM) practices by developing and applying an analytical framework with three dimensions: individual preferences, strategic reframing, and local grounding.

The paper is based on policy documents and interviews with HR managers in Dutch law firms. The theoretical scope is the debate on HRM and institutional contexts.

The paper uncovers a variety of individual preferences among HR managers' interpretations of the national policy. However, in strategically reframing the policy, the organizations act upon it from a mainly “managerialist” perspective: they focus on reducing absence through increased control of employees, rather than reforming organizational practices that may adversely affect the health of workers. The local groundings reinforce unequal power relations between different categories of employees: HR managers/line managers; professionals/administrative personnel; men/women. The paper contributes to the understanding of how changes in institutional contexts are translated into organizations and the role of HR managers within this process.

The paper explores the translation process in a particular setting. It would be fruitful to broaden the scope to other institutional contexts and organizations and to include a diverse range of actors to develop additional knowledge of the interaction in the translation process.

The paper develops both empirical and theoretical conclusions on the translation, that is, the sense making of HRM in an uncertain environment of changing national institutions.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework. In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now. We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions. This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume. We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly. Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions. Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars.

The aim of this paper is to give an account of how the author aims to engage with his new appointment as co-editor-in-chief of the Society and Business Review (SBR) and to reflect on why an academic journal like the SBR is relevant – if not absolutely necessary.

By drawing on a synthesis of past publications in the journal, academic roots and editorial trends of the SBR are presented.

Three promising areas of research in the “business & society” field are identified for the future: monitoring the expansion of managerialism, analysing the role and impact of management education in society and conceptualising the politicisation of corporations.

Although these trends are promising and subjectively identified, the journal will obviously not restrict its scope to these three topics alone and will continue to welcome all submissions that fall into its mission statement.

This paper provides insights into how the editors evaluate not only articles but also special issue proposals and book reviews that are submitted to the SBR.

Free at last, NCR focuses on its technological and market niches to grow and profit as a centenarian start‐up.

The dominant view of responsible leadership (RL) has so far lacked adequate testing for employees' motivational outcomes, including presenteeism. Presenteeism, or attending work while being ill and unable to work at full capacity, causes productivity loss and imposes a significant economic burden to businesses and national economies. Applying the social identity theory of leadership (SITL), this paper aims to offer a conceptual framework supporting the relationship between RL and presenteeism and incorporating the mediating roles of organisational commitment and employees' turnover intentions.

This paper conducts a systematic literature review using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart with the existing research on RL, presenteeism, organisational commitment and employee turnover intentions covering the main contributors to this research stream. The proposed model offers eight propositions to promote the examination of RL in more insightful ways.

A shift in focus to the aspect of value-based leadership and presenteeism allows this paper to explore probable employee motivational outcomes, especially with consideration of organisational commitment and turnover intentions. While extant studies about presenteeism have tended to identify negative consequences, this paper explores different contexts in which RL could be crucial and positive. Based on a PRISMA flowchart, this paper provides a conceptual framework and directions that scholars might use to guide organisations and evaluate future research studies in RL and presenteeism.

The implications of this paper lie first in highlighting the demand for scholars to employ RL when conducting research reviews in organisational leadership and presenteeism. Beyond this broad purpose, this paper will help researchers to develop a holistic and pragmatic research approach more systematically and coherently. It is hoped that this conceptual framework can potentially lead to higher employee productivity and retention.

The systematic literature review offers a novel framework that will allow future researchers to conduct and explore empirical studies in organisational leadership. The suggested propositions will direct future scholars and practitioners to explore solutions in which presenteeism can be recognised at work and managed to achieve practical application of RL within organisational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to present a degendered organizational resilience model challenging current and dominant conceptualizations of organizational resilience by exploring how gendered organizational power structures, language and practices of everyday organizational life interplay and limit inclusive constructions of organizational resilience.

The degendered organizational resilience model was developed using Acker’s (1990) model of gendered organizations, Martin’s (2003) gendering practices, Lorber’s (2000) degendering and other feminist research on gendered organizations. The purpose of the model is to explore power structures, practices and language within the organizational context during conditions requiring organizational resilience.

A conceptual model for analyzing the theoretical development of organizational resilience is presented. The model analyzes the following three different aspects of organizations: power structure, to identify which resilient practices receive status based on established gendered organizational hierarchies and roles; actions, to identify how resilience is enacted through practices and practicing of gender; and language, to identify how and what people speak reinforces collective practices of gendering that become embedded in the organization’s story and culture.

The degendered organizational resilience model offers a process for researchers, managers and organizational leaders to analyze and reveal power imbalances that hinder inclusive theoretical development and practices of organizational resilience.

The degendered organizational resilience model can be used to reveal power structures, gendered practices and language favoring normative masculine organizational practices, which restrict the systemic implementation of inclusive democratic practices that incorporate and benefit women, men and other groups subject to organizational subordination.

This paper offers an original perspective on the theoretical development of organizational resilience by proposing a degendering model for analysis. A feminist perspective is used to reveal the gendered power structures, practices and language suppressing the full range of resilient qualities by restricting what is valued and who gives voice to resilient processes that lead to resilient organizations.

The purpose of this study is to find the connection between leader behaviour and employee sickness absence in public administration.

The research data was collected with the help of an online questionnaire. The SPSS statistical programme and structural equation modelling in AMOS were used to analyse the data.

The research was conducted in public administration institutions, and 3,220 employees from public administration were included in the research sample. The author found a negative one-way relationship between certain types of behaviour and sickness absence. The author defines leader behaviour as a multidimensional construct in which each dimension represents a separate cluster of leader behavioural characteristics. Leaders’ “progressiveness” is the most important dimension, and a one-point increase in “progressiveness” (five-point scale) leads to a reduction of 2.8 days in sickness absence for one employee.

The author focused only on one segment of factors (the behaviour of leaders) that affects sickness absence. To explain the maximum possible measure of the variability in sickness absence, it would be best to include several different influencing factors.

The study represents a structured model of the link between sickness absence and leader behaviour. With the model, it is possible to determine which behavioural forms of leaders influence sickness absence, where leader behaviour is treated as a complex whole, and not as an individual behavioural characteristic.

The study addresses calls for research on the relationship between leader behaviour and employee sickness absence within countries.

In the context of worker–firm complementarities, the extant literature has focused primarily on worker–firm dyads that generate additional revenue for the firm. However, we extend the study of worker–firm complementarities by examining matches that create value through the generation of additional nonpecuniary utility for employees. Through this lens, we hypothesize that mobile employees will receive lower wages to offset the benefits they receive from these nonpecuniary complementarities. Further, we hypothesize that star employees who create unique revenue-generating complementarities receive higher wages than otherwise predicted as they can capture a share of the additional revenue they generate. We test this conceptualization using panel data on all US National Basketball Association players from 2000 to 2009. We demonstrate that NBA players accept lower than predicted wages to play for their home teams which reflects worker utility-generating complementarities. We also show that superstars receive higher than predicted wages to play for their home teams, consistent with firm revenue-generating complementarities.