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In this chapter, I explore traditional notions of secondary data in qualitative research and consider the ways in which these are continually being reimagined in the digital age. I situate this discussion in respect to data typologies and, more reflexively, in relation to our need as researchers to make data real. I consider contemporary understandings of reuse in relation to secondary data, focusing particularly on qualitative interview data. Recognizing those who are already forging a path, I then suggest how we might move beyond notions of reuse and reimagine secondary data in the digital age. To illustrate these points, I highlight relevant studies drawing data from a range of online spaces, and finally summarize key considerations and challenges.

Research on creative workers speaks to the relative lack of job opportunities available, the role that changing production logics play in shaping such opportunities, and gender disparities in success. Tracking 22,561 hits found on Billboard's mainstream charts, we examine various factors that may spur or hamper the success of female recording acts. We find that the expanding logic of decentralized production eliminates the negative effect of concentration on the success of female acts and that the presence of successful female acts in one period bodes well for subsequent female acts, until a glass ceiling of sorts is reached.

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.

Although it may be argued that the goal of flattening the organization is to empower employees with a higher level of involvement and decision-making abilities, several cases provide evidence of the emergence of highly restrictive control structures in the “flattened” organization. This phenomenon is not a necessary outcome of an attempt to flatten the organizational hierarchy, however. There is also evidence that the organizational hierarchy can be “successfully” flattened. What is not clear in the current literature is a theoretical basis to explain the tendency for highly restrictive control structures to emerge after a change toward flattening the organizational hierarchy. This essay attempts to address this issue by examining the emergence of disciplinary structures in flattened organizations, looking at cases of various structural changes and, finally, elaborating the basis for a developmental theory of the spiral resulting in the emergence of unintended and oppressive control structures in the flattened organization.