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Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.

Is there a specific way of thinking about organisational learning in Nordic countries? Are concepts such as organisational learning and learning organisations imported, or do they emerge with specific meanings from more local discourses? Beyond that, are they supported by specific learning theories? The purpose of this paper is to trace the way that the concepts of organisational learning and learning organisations appear in research and policy documents in Norway and to identify what sort of learning theories pertain to those concepts. The authors discuss whether Norway’s case exemplifies a Nordic way of thinking about learning in organisations.

Through an archaeological investigation into the concepts of organisational learning and learning organisations, the authors explore the theoretical and cultural framing of the concepts in research and policy. The authors limit our work to large industrial field experiments conducted in the 1960s and to large education reform in the 2000s.

During the industrial field experiments in the 1960s, the concept of organisational learning evolved to form participatory learning processes in non-hierarchical organisations able to contribute to democracy at work. Education policy in the 2000s, by contrast, imported the concept of the learning organisation that primarily viewed learning as an instrumental process of knowledge production. That strategy is incommensurable to what we define as a Nordic way, one in which learning is also understood as a cultural and social process advanced by democratic participation.

The authors add to organisational learning theories by demonstrating the importance of cultural context for theories and showing that the understanding of learning is historically and culturally embedded.

This paper argues for an increased volume of references to Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel in the field of organization sociology. The text emphasizes the importance of these two sociologists in understanding the role of imperfection in organizing and the phenomena of fashion and imitation in contemporary organizations. Tarde’s theory challenged the antinomy between continuity and discontinuity, considering finite entities as cases of infinite processes and stable situations as transitory. Simmel’s theory of fashion explores the democratic and democratizing nature of fashion, which satisfies the demand for social adaptation and differentiation. They both saw fashion as a selection mechanism for organizational forms and managerial practices. Furthermore, referring to Tarde and Simmel can help counter the overemphasis on identity construction and the neglect of alterity in social sciences. The construction of identity often overlooks the inevitability of difference and alterity, which are essential aspects of collective projects. Lastly, this paper discusses Simmel’s concept of the stranger and its relevance in analyzing the experiences of foreigners and their potential advantages as “double strangers” in academia and society. The conclusion is that Tarde and Simmel’s contributions offer valuable insights for understanding the dynamics of management, organizing, and social interactions in contemporary organizations.

Immigrant groups often pursue entrepreneurial endeavors in their new home country. Even though both immigrant entrepreneurship and organizational identity have received scholarly attention, there has been little systematic exploration of identity strategies pursued by immigrant-owned organizations. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework that draws on the concepts of liability of foreignness and social identity theory in the context of immigrant entrepreneurship. Our framework explores how immigrant entrepreneurs may negotiate identities for their firms through the development of specific identity strategies that confirm or underplay their national/ethnic identities in order to survive in their immediate environment. We develop a model that shows how these confirmations or underplaying strategies work both for firms that have an individualistic entrepreneurial orientation, as well as those with a collective/associative entrepreneurial orientation. We also suggest two contextual moderators to this relationship: (1) the image of the founder's country of origin, and (2) the presence of immigrant networks in the host country, which may alter the effectiveness of identity strategies in terms of organizational mortality outcomes.