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The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.

The authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.

The paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.

The authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.

This paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call “spatial legacies”), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.

This essay aims to focus on the long‐term emergence of management research journals, and highlights the social, cultural, technological and financial factors that facilitate or constrain such modes of writing. Drawing on historical material and direct observations, two future scenarios can be projected.

The paper reviews management writing in its long‐term historical context, offers a critical analysis using direct observations and projects two future scenarios.

This work sheds light on a long‐term historical imprint on management writing. It describes a long‐term legitimacy trap in which management research is stuck. Two possible scenarios for the next years are described: first, development of a Global Market of Citations (GCM). Incentives become more and more individual. Research and researchers both become commodified. E‐reputation (at the individual level) becomes the key driver of management science. Scientific paradigms disappear...; second, development of several competing paradigms, involving various cumulative traditions. New incentives, shedding light on collective dynamic, are institutionalized. Scientific performance is not any more the sum of individual performances.

Very few studies put management writing into perspective with the long‐term history (three centuries old) of scientific writing. Critical analysis of this historical imprint (on writing standards but also evaluation or diffusion of articles) is rarely offered in management literature. In addition, this paper's two scenarios are a way to suggest an interesting debate about management writing and the way we evaluate it.

This paper investigates how Information Systems (IS) researchers apply institutional theoretical frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to explore the operationalization of meta-theoretical frameworks for empirical research which can often present difficulties in IS research. The authors include theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects to explore modalities of use and suggest further avenues.

After an overview of institutional concepts, the authors carry out a thematic analysis of journal papers on IS and institutional frameworks indexed in EBSCO and ABI databases from 1999 to 2009. This consists of descriptive, thematic coding and cluster analysis of this textual database, this combined qualitative and quantitative method offers a unique way of analyzing how operationalization is carried out.

The findings suggest three groups of publications which represent different methodological approaches and empirical foci: “descriptive exploratory approaches,” “generalizing approaches,” and “sociological approaches.” The authors suggest that these three groups represent possible patterns of the use of “meta” social theories in IS research, reflecting a search for disciplinary legitimacy. This helps us analyze papers according to how they use and apply theories. The authors identify the “organizing vision” and the regulatory approach as two institutionalist “intermediary” concepts developed by IS researchers. Furthermore, the authors find that institutional theoretical frameworks have been used in “direct,” “intermediary” or “combined” conceptualizations. The authors also confirm the dynamism of the IS institutional research stream, as evidenced by the increase in number of articles between 1999 and 2009, and identify a maturation process of the IS field in investigating a social theory.

The evolution the authors identify in the application of institutional theoretical frameworks in the IS field reveals conformity in methodological, theoretical and empirical terms. By identifying these patterns, it becomes possible to understand institutional reasons for their existence and legitimacy; and to propose other avenues of exploration in future IS research, such as combining different theoretical lenses in institutional frameworks. The methodological contribution is to provide an innovative methodology which helps describe categories and levels of institutional theoretical frameworks used, leading to the identification of gaps and proposing further avenues of research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of managerial controversy. This concept focusses on organizational disagreements in order to understand the emergence of organization, and also postulates that researchers can better understand organizational phenomena through the ruptures that occur in an organization's everyday activities.

While the concept of controversy was initially developed to understand the emergence of outputs, this paper develops the concept of managerial controversy in order to understand the emergence of ways of working.

The concept of managerial controversy demonstrates that the authors can improve the understanding of organization by focussing on the disagreements, the associations of heterogeneous elements, the mediators, and the traces left by actors, as well as by considering the viewpoints of these actors.

The concept of managerial controversy can be used as a framework for describing the development of organization over time. This concept is suitable for management and organization scholars interested by issues related to organization and organizing.

This paper offers an analytical framework for analyzing the emergence of organizational features from ruptures. Furthermore, the concept of managerial controversy extends to not only the literature of actor-network theory, but also to the literature related to organizing.