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This chapter defines culture and explains the different conceptual models developed by critical researchers in the field. First, the authors explain why it is essential for us to learn to see our cultures. Next, the chapter breaks the conceptual model of culture into its essential elements, including assumptions, beliefs, values, behaviors, and artifacts. The authors explain why and how each organization’s culture is unique – and walk through the factors that influence our organizational cultures. Finally, the chapter reminds us that it is hard to deliberately change an organization’s culture, because it is inherently dynamic. Instead, each organization should strive to understand how these factors affect our organizations.

The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) – a platform by which senior leaders, with the help of consultants, can have an honest, collective, and public conversation about their organization's alignment with espoused strategy and values. The research has identified a syndrome of six silent barriers to effectiveness and a dynamic theory of organizational effectiveness. Empirical evidence from the 20-year study demonstrates that SFP always enables truth to speak to power safely, and in a majority of cases enables senior teams to transform silent barriers into strengths, realign their organization's design and strategic management process with strategy and values, and in a few cases employ SFP as an ongoing learning and governance process. Implications for organization and leadership development and corporate governance are discussed.

Talent management and its associated issues are a perennial concern for human resource management (HRM) practitioners and HR professional bodies. The disruption of the gig economy has exacerbated these concerns in multiple ways. This chapter seeks to interrogate this arena, its drivers and in particular the onward impacts on HRM practice and direction at the wider organisational level. The conceptual lens of Critical HRM has been selected for this analysis to examine how a variant of neoliberalism, that of human capital theory, has exuberated and legitimised a shift from an inclusive human relations approach to talent management to an exclusive individualised one with onward impacts on the talent development opportunities for individuals inside and outside of the organisation. This chapter also considers the reemphasis on the role of ‘strategic planning’ and the rise of supply chain management discourses in the context of managing atomised talent. It is argued that in the absence of mutuality in the gig economy espoused talent management strategies can create a conflict between the agendas of giggers, platforms and agencies and wider stakeholders in organisations. These issues are examined through an in-depth case study of gig-based contracts in the higher education and their impact on talent management and associated goals of innovation and creativity.

World Vision exists to eradicate extreme poverty. The primary fundraising mechanism that has fuelled its growth into one of the largest international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has been Child Sponsorship, which connects over 10 million individual donors with vulnerable children around the world. However, shifts in the market, geopolitical landscape, and institutional logics have seen this once innovative product come under increasing pressure. Using World Vision New Zealand (WVNZ) as a case study, we explore the challenges of implementing social entrepreneurship strategies, including the institutional constraints of developing new business models, through hybridization. Hybridity has gained increasing attention in the field of entrepreneurship and has been offered as a sense-making frame for business model innovation within social entrepreneurship. The use of institutional logics to understand the challenges of hybrid organizing in social entrepreneurship has been invaluable. However, as with any theoretical perspective, this approach has limitations. We suggest that nuanced challenges and sources of resistance to social entrepreneurship in established sectors and organizations might usefully be explored through concepts drawn from complexity theory. Specifically, we propose the use of the concept of structural attractors, which enables the explication of convergent, unifying, and generative dynamics. Our case study findings suggest that, paradoxically, the very essence of historical success may constrain future success. To wit, when faced with changes to institutional and market conditions, WVNZ was constrained by the very construct that enabled its initial growth. The challenge that this case demonstrates is that despite ostensibly hybrid shifts occurring in the management, governance, and espoused innovation strategy of the organization, the governing structural attractor of Child Sponsorship has constrained innovation and change.

In this study, I explore the link between workforce downsizing and the predominance of a corporate governance model that espouses a shareholder value maximization principle. Specifically, I examine how top managers’ shareholder value orientation affects the adoption of a downsizing strategy among large, publicly traded corporations in the United States. An analysis of CEOs’ letters to shareholders indicates that firms with CEOs who use language that espouses the shareholder value principle tend to have a higher rate of layoffs, after controlling for various indicators of the firm’s adherence to the shareholder value principle. The finding suggests that corporate governance models, particularly those advocated by powerful organizational elites, have a significant impact on workers by shaping corporate strategies toward the workforce. The key actors in this process were top managers who embraced the new management ideology and implemented corporate strategy to pursue shareholder value maximization.

This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.

Despite ongoing controversy, emotional intelligence is emerging as a potentially important variable in furthering our understanding of individual behavior in organizations. In this respect, however, most of the research in relation to emotional intelligence has been at the individual level of behavior. In this chapter, we develop a framework for considering the impact of emotional intelligence at the organizational level. Specifically, we map Mayer and Salovey's four emotional intelligence abilities onto Shein's three-level organizational culture schema. We conclude with a discussion of implications for managers and suggest that the model we propose may prove to be a useful starting point for future research into emotional intelligence as an organizational phenomenon.

The strategy field has historically addressed the problem of strategy as a problem of ex-ante economic calculation of pay-offs associated with alternative choices. Given the inherent intractability of such problems, at least with respect to identifying an optimum, behavioralism is in some form inevitable. However, behavioralism need not imply a lack of intentionality or even high-order design efforts. The argument proposed here is for a focus on the design of organizations as complex, adaptive systems that are more or less capable of achieving satisfactory strategic outcomes.

How can we account for patterns of mobilization undertaken by ethnic movements? What leads ethnic collectives to shift between mobilization strategies? Addressing the general lack of attention in the ethnic conflict literature to the diverse political strategies employed by ethnic minorities – particularly those in democratic and semi-democratic contexts, this chapter accounts for mobilization as developing along an institutional spectrum of ethnic contention. I argue that the internal dynamics of ethnic movements shape patterns of mobilization. Utilizing literature from new institutionalism and employing the approach advanced by the study of contentious politics, ethnic movements are theorized as developing through the interplay of three causal mechanisms, which combine to form processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. The process of deinstitutionalization is explored through the case of the mobilization of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, tracing the development of the three causal mechanisms and their influence on the collective’s mobilization pattern. The chapter concludes by considering the range of movements that can be explored along the institutional spectrum.