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This study, a theoretical article, aims to introduce new institutionalism as a framework through which business and management researchers can explore the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) in organizations. Although the new institutional theory is a fully established research program, the neo-institutional literature on AI is almost non-existent. There is, therefore, a need to develop a deeper understanding of AI as both the product of institutional forces and as an institutional force in its own right.

The authors follow the top-down approach. Accordingly, the authors first briefly describe the new institutionalism, trace its historical development and introduce its fundamental concepts: institutional legitimacy, environment and isomorphism. Then, the authors use those as the basis for the queries to perform a scoping review on the institutional role of AI in organizations.

The findings reveal that a comprehensive theory on AI is largely absent from business and management literature. The new institutionalism is only one of many possible theoretical perspectives (both contextually novel and insightful) from which researchers can study AI in organizational settings.

The authors use the insights from new institutionalism to illustrate how a particular social theory can fit into the larger theoretical framework for AI in organizations. The authors also formulate four broad research questions to guide researchers interested in studying the institutional significance of AI. Finally, the authors include a section providing concrete examples of how to study AI-related institutional dynamics in business and management.

This study aims to reveal a lesser known side of Late James G. March, as a poet, by offering a curated selection of his poems. The other purpose of this study is to make a case for using poetry as a methodology. Poetry requires engagement by the reader, thus creating space for the personal. With multiple personal explanations co-existing, poetry allows clarity of action at the individual level while simultaneously leaving room for debate and discussion at the collective level. Thus, poetry offers pluralistic histories with room for complexity, ambiguity, paradox and contradictions.

The selection of poems is highly subjective, so an auto-ethnographic approach was appropriate. The collection is curated for the readers of this journal, on topics relevant for the members of the Academy of Management. The argument for poetry as a methodology is based on engaging with the poems for self-reflection and reflexivity.

March had a life-long commitment to self-expression through poems. Poetic engagement by one poetry lover with a selection of his poems about our shared profession, yields small self-discoveries that are good for the collective, by revealing unknown histories, with possibilities other than the dominant single story. Poetry as a methodology brings in the personal, that yields moving theories, that are practical in guiding individual action in personally meaningful ways, even in ambiguous, contradictory and complex situations.

Ideas expressed in poetic form provide a way to liberate possibilities latent in the language itself. Future work from this contribution can be that March’s poems stimulate the imaginations of other poets and poetry lovers, who may have kept it as a private pursuit, just as he did, to come out and share their personal reflexive journeys.

It is still not completely understood what speeds up or slows down the decision‐making process. The duration of decision making may range from a month to four years, but usually takes about 12 months. Most processes run into disruptions and interruptions, which lengthen the time taken. Measuring decision making is difficult since it is virtually impossible to define the beginning and end of the process. The evidence for this comes from an extensive study of how top managers and administrators in the public and private sectors move towards a conclusion. A database was established of 150 cases of strategic decision making obtained by interviewing. Six cases were traced back by intensive case study methods. Short, medium and long decision processes are examined using case examples. One of the curious features of decision making is what happens before the deliberation process starts. Impediments and delays are discussed and whether committees slow the process.

Competitions celebrate meritocratic values. Letting the best man or woman win leaves little room for human choice, since presumably the result follows from ascertaining the fact that someone did better than the rest. But in architectural competitions, appointing a winner involves human choice. An in-depth empirical investigation demonstrates that such human choice has the character of intuition and judgment. The choice of the winner preceded the process by which the winning design proposal was established as being better than the other proposals. We discuss the role of intuitive choices in architectural competitions and claim that they reflect necessity more than vice. They are ways around the fundamental incommensurability of the alternative design proposals. The garbage can model is used as a framework for making sense of the observed counterintuitive ways of decision making. Its attempt to theorize alternative forms of orderliness proves helpful, but on certain points our observations also suggest modifications to the model.

Office work has grown explosively in this century. Once a small occupational category, office work now includes about 40 percent of the American work force. Yet office work continues to be “the familiar unknown”: we worry about its growing size, we are concerned about its productivity, and we design systems to improve it; but our real knowledge of what goes on in the office is very shallow. This article discusses only a few of the many subtle facets of office work that vendors and users must understand to meet the needs of this attractive, but difficult market.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that systematically captures the ambiguity of different understandings about science, the university and its relation to society, while conceptualising sustainability. Following Corley and Gioia (2004, p. 174) on identity ambiguity and change, it seems pivotal to better understanding the ambiguity of sustainability in relation to academic cultures and university models to manage the transition more effectively.

The nature of this paper’s objectives as well as the wide thematic scope leads to the need of exploring a broad knowledge base. This was best addressed by an exploratory literature review with data collection from primary and secondary sources. The data was interpreted through a hermeneutic analysis and resulted in the inductive development of first categories and goals (further referred to as category development). In addition, a multi-method approach further adjusted the categories and raised their empirical validity and social robustness.

Implementing sustainability involves dealing with a double bound ambiguity due to organisational and individual identity reasons. Five fields of ambiguity were developed to systemise the conceptualisation of a sustainable university along contradictory understandings of science, the university and sustainability. These fields offer a framework to qualitatively assess the degree of sustainability in higher education institutions. Arguments for and against sustainability in universities have been categorised around five criteria and associated to the fields of ambiguity. The finding indicates that meaning in organisational change management for sustainability can be considered both, a potential driver and barrier for a sustainability transition in universities.

This paper exclusively focussed on the internal perspective and left aside any external factors that influence the sustainability transition, such as political measures to stimulate sustainability in higher education. In addition, the operational dimension of a sustainable university has been neglected, which is by all means a necessary and important aspect. The interrelation of the identified goals has not been discussed.

This paper focusses on the conceptualisation and understanding of sustainability within the institution, an often-forgotten but fundamental aspect of implementation. The fields of ambiguity are designed to be applied for assessing the “degree of maturity” of a sustainable university. The fields reveal the different understandings about the role, the mission and the governance of universities, stemming from competing preferences about goals and their assumed relations by various stakeholders of a higher education institutions. The five fields are not an attempt to resolve the hidden contradictions and tensions in a sustainability transition, but to state them clearly to anticipate resistances and conflicts that hinder the development of a shared understanding.

This article aims to empirically investigate the influence of socio-cultural and political factors and actors on the perceived autonomy and control of state agencies in Pakistan. Taking an institutional perspective, which envisages a diverse course of agency reforms, owed to varied national cultures, historical paths and traditional mindsets, the authors argue that the institutional theory provides an explanation to the autonomy and control status of the agencies.

Data were collected from 39 senior public officials and governing board members in federal agencies by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was performed using NVivo-12 for data analysis.

The results disclose that the agencies operate within an overriding politico-administrative culture of intervention and supremacy of the central government. There is a close relationship between the political actors and actors' implementing agents, the bureaucrats. Although the disaggregated public agencies are created under the agency model, a culture of political influence and control still prevails within them. Among the socio-cultural factors, corruption is reported as a critical influencing factor for agency autonomy.

The study emphasizes the need to adapt and modify agencification practices in developing countries based on the political, socio-cultural and administrative contextual factors and actors and the varying degrees of influence the practices exercise over the Government machinery.

This study unveils the implications of the new public management (NPM)-led agency model in Pakistan, which was primarily adopted as a part of the structural adjustment program (SAP) under loan conditionality from international donor agencies and explores the indigenous doctrines that govern agencies functioning under ministries.

Public administration as an aspect of governmental activity has existed as long as political systems have been functioning and trying to achieve program objectives set by the political decision-makers. Public administration as a field of systematic study is much more recent. Advisers to rulers and commentators on the workings of government have recorded their observations from time to time in sources as varied as Kautilya's Arthasastra in ancient India, the Bible, Aristotle's Politics, and Machiavelli's The Prince, but it was not until the eighteenth century that cameralism, concerned with the systematic management of governmental affairs, became a specialty of German scholars in Western Europe. In the United States, such a development did not take place until the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the publication in 1887 of Woodrow Wilson's famous essay, “The Study of Administration,” generally considered the starting point. Since that time, public administration has become a well-recognized area of specialized interest, either as a subfield of political science or as an academic discipline in its own right.