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Technology is an important driver of organizational change and often strategically used to facilitate adaptations in organizational processes and cultures. While the link between technological and organizational change is widely recognized, the role of macro‐context for this link remains undervalued. Based on data from technology implementations in European police forces the paper aims to illustrate the importance of integrating analyses of the macro‐context to understand the complexity of technology driven organizational change.

The authors conducted 56 interviews and five focus groups with police officers from 13 countries on two of the major technology trends in European police forces: automatic number plate recognition systems (ANPR) systems and social media. They further conducted site visits to police forces in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom to observe technology usage first hand. Comparing accounts across countries they analyzed how macro‐context impacted adoption decisions and implementation processes. In this analysis they concentrated on the five macro‐contextual factors in the PESTL framework, i.e. political, economic, social, technological and legal factors.

In analyses of ANPR systems and social media the paper details how the macro‐context of police organizations impacted decisions to adopt a technology as well as the intra‐organizational alignments of processes and structures.

Organizational decision makers and implementers need to be aware not only of the strong agency of technology for organizations' structure and processes, but also of the relevance of the organizational macro‐context for the process and impact of technology implementations on the organizational as well as individual level.

The paper illustrates the impact of the macro‐context of organizations in shaping the link between technological change and organizational change.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the social understanding of stigma as a societal and cultural barrier in the life of a survivor of human trafficking. The findings illustrate several ways where stigma is internal, interpersonal and societal and impacts survivors’ lives, including the care they receive.

This study used qualitative methods. Data collection occurred during 2018 with efforts such as an online survey (n = 45), focus groups (two focus groups of seven participants each) and phone interviews (n = 6). This study used thematic analysis of qualitative data.

The research team found that a multiplicity of stigma occurred for the survivors of human trafficking, where stigma occurred across three levels from micro to meso to macro contexts. Using interpretive analysis, the researchers conceptualized how stigma is not singular; rather, it comprises the following: bias in access to care; barriers of shaming, shunning and othering; misidentification and mislabeling; multiple levels of furthering how survivors are deeply misunderstood and a culture of mistrust.

While this study was conducted in a single US city, it provides an opportunity to create dialogue and appeal for more research that will contend with a lens of seeing a multiplicity of stigma regardless of the political climate of the context. It was a challenge to recruit survivors to participate in the study. However, survivor voices are present in this study and the impetus of the study’s focus was informed by survivors themselves. Finally, this study is informed by the perspectives of researchers who are not survivors; moreover, collaborating with survivor researchers at the local level was impossible because there were no known survivor researchers available to the team.

There are clinical responses to the narratives of stigma that impact survivors’ lives, but anti-trafficking response must move beyond individualized expectations to include macro responses that diminish multiple stigmas. The multiplicity in stigmas has meant that, in practice, survivors are invisible at all levels of response from micro, meso to macro contexts. Therefore, this study offers recommendations for how anti-trafficking responders may move beyond a culture of stigma towards a response that addresses how stigma occurs in micro, meso and macro contexts.

The social implications of examining stigma as a multiplicity is central to addressing how stigma continues to be an unresolved issue in anti-trafficking response. Advancing the dynamic needs of survivors both in policy and practice necessitates responding to the multiple and overlapping forms of stigma they face in enduring and exiting exploitative conditions, accessing services and integrating back into the community.

This study offers original analysis of how stigma manifested for the survivors of human trafficking. Building on this dynamic genealogy of scholarship on stigma, this study offers a theory to conceptualize how survivors of human trafficking experience stigma: a multiplicity of stigma. A multiplicity of stigma extends existing research on stigma and human trafficking as occurring across three levels from micro, meso to macro contexts and creating a system of oppression. Stigma cannot be reduced to a singular form; therefore, this study argues that survivors cannot be understood as experiencing a singular form of stigma.

This chapter presents a holistic view of dynamic external macro environments and their impact on internal organizational strategies. It suggests how events, and particularly major crises at the global or national level, affect organizational responses. Specifically, the authors submit that organizations adapt their strategy in line with the pressures they face from the external environment. Consequently, the day-to-day operations inside the organization change, and managers find themselves faced with new challenges in terms of how they manage their talent. By exploring critical roles that human resource (HR) professionals can play in talent management, the authors delineate several ways in which the HR department can help organizations to react to these external pressures, supporting managers in ensuring that employee behavior and values are aligned with the new organizational strategy. The objective of this chapter is not only to reflect on the HR professionals and their role in helping to manage organizational talent, as their organizations navigate the dynamic macro context, but also to stimulate further research in this field.

This purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive constructions of context and its significance in employees’ accounts of leadership practices, more specifically, discourses of communicative leadership. In doing so, it also seeks to clarify the relationship between perceptions and constructions of contexts and leadership discourses.

This study relies on focus group interviews conducted with nine groups and a total of 31 employees (16 males and 15 females) in a Swedish industrial organization employing 490 employees.

The findings reveal that micro-contexts were more evident influencing leadership discourses in the accounts of employees. However, macro-contexts identified as an authoritative leadership style were triggering constructions of “idealized” communicative leaders in contrast to the leadership experienced in the work environment by employees as “real.”

The investigation presents one organizational context, but can be expanded using additional contexts that may show various leadership forms and communication needs. Findings suggest that understanding the context considered to be relevant to perceptions and constructions of leadership can be essential for identifying and confronting challenges, leading to a more communicative organization.

The study approaches leadership and context as dynamic and multifaceted constructs shaped locally in interaction with macro-discourses. Further, it also suggests that individuals are agents of change controlling context through being aware of their discourses.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how home-country institutions influence firms’ servitization decisions. Existing studies have mostly neglected differences across countries and implicitly assumed the servitization process and drivers are homogenous across national institutional environments. The authors challenge this assumption.

Using case-based research, the authors explored the influence of formal institutions of the product, financial and labor markets on the servitization of two firms operating in a developed country and two in an emerging country.

The absence of robust home-country institutions did not necessarily hinder the servitization process. On the contrary, firms servitizate to overcome the difficulties posed by these institutional voids. The flexibility associated with service offerings enables firms to create viable alternatives to cope with taxes, lack of infrastructure and qualified labor force.

These outcomes contribute to the servitization literature, which has mainly focused on single-country studies and takes for granted the institutional differences between countries. The findings suggest future studies need to consider how and, to what extent, the country where the company is located influences servitization strategies and processes. Such reflections will improve the inferences made concerning firms’ servitization. For practitioners, the results suggest that the move into the provision of services can be a fruitful strategy to overcome the difficulties faced in emerging markets.

This paper looks at the current portrayal of emotion in healthcare as delivered within formal organisational settings, notably the UK National Health Service (NHS). Its purpose is to set out some examples of the problems and suggest new ways of conceptualising issues that will assist healthcare organisations in gaining a better understanding of the role of emotion and its impact, using appropriate examples. Developing understanding of the location of emotion and its differing constructions indicates that interdisciplinary and interpersonal boundaries differentiate interpretations of emotion, often for instrumental purpose as examples drawn particularly from the Public Inquiry into Paediatric Cardiology at Bristol Royal Infirmary (The Kennedy Report) demonstrate. The privileging of rationality over emotion as part of the dominant paradigm within the healthcare domain is shown to affect outcomes. However, the boundaries between organisations and individuals are changing, so are the location, access, technologies and timing of activities, and these are reconstructing healthcare organisation and the patient's experience of healthcare at both rational and emotional levels. It is suggested that in healthcare it is the patients’ journey through their lives (the macro context), as well as their individual encounters with the system at different times of need (the micro context), that iteratively constitute the construction of the emotional terrain. The conclusions drawn could have wider implications for the development of emotional understanding, across organisations that are subject to similar changes.

Considerable research has been conducted to highlight women's career decisions to opt-out of corporate positions, but little is said about those who leave to become entrepreneurs. The purpose of this paper is to theorize kaleidoscope career parameters in relation to entrepreneurship stages and demonstrate the role of macro-national context (i.e. government initiatives and cultural practices) in women entrepreneurs' career choices.

The authors interviewed 34 Malaysian women entrepreneurs (MWEs) who were established in their careers and explored the following two research questions: (1) what career parameters are prioritized at different entrepreneurship stages? and (2) how does macro-national context influence women entrepreneurs' careers?

Adopting a kaleidoscope career lens, the authors show that authenticity was prioritized during the initial entrepreneurship stage, while balance and challenge were prioritized during the establishment and business advancement stages, respectively. The authors demonstrate that government support was conducive to women's decision to opt-in and stay in the entrepreneurship path. The findings also denote that cultural practices facilitated women's pursuit of entrepreneurship by encouraging family members to support women entrepreneurs in their career choices and actions.

The qualitative approach enabled us to specify the context-specific meaning women entrepreneurs in our study associated with authenticity, balance, and challenge. In doing so, this research extends the kaleidoscope career model to better understand women's career patterns at different entrepreneurship stages.

This paper aims to provide an account of learning and change in the redesign of a primary health-care initiative in a large metropolitan city in Australia.

The paper is based on research exploring the place and role of learning in the re-making of health professional practices in a major New South Wales Government health reform called HealthOne. The analysis and findings presented here make reference to data drawn from a longitudinal ethnographic study (2011-2014) conducted by an inter-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney. Socio-material and practice-based approaches for understanding learning are used in working with the data.

There were substantial changes in professional practice, especially in the role of the General Practice Liaison Nurse. Changes, and the learning connected to the changes, were dynamically influenced by the macro-context. HealthOne was a reform initiative with a strong focus on achieving health service redesign and a consistent focus on staff developing new ways of thinking and operating. Although learning was often discussed, it was, for the most part, expressed in general terms, and there was a lack of a formal and well-developed approach to learning collectively and individually.

This research paper will inform future attempts at service redesign in community and primary health contexts and provides a site-specific examination of workplace learning in a context of rapid change.

Brazilian sportswomen have arrived in the twenty-first century burdened with a heavy inheritance, which has been called the gendered twentieth century sporting legacy. In relation to football, this heritage includes not only gender and sexuality discrimination but all multifaceted obstacles to playing the sport, such as no access to facilities, equipment and funding. This chapter analyses the careers of three Brazilian women who played in a major tournament organised by the São Paulo Football Federation (FPF), the Paulistana, where orthodox-gendered practices and concepts prevailed to control the bodies of the players. This analysis considers aspects of socialisation and sporting elements in the lives of the participants, derived from informal conversations as well as structured interviews which were inductively framed. As such, the data were analysed by understanding the social division of the professional and corporal practices in society and the representations that permeate Brazilian society regarding the role of women in that society at that time, in the late 1990s. The chapter uses the micro-context of these players' biographies to show how women's football is embedded in macro-contexts of oppressive gender structures in Brazil and South America. The findings show that whilst conceived to be a tournament to promote women's football in Brazil, the 2001 championship was an attack against women's footballers and their human rights. The orthodox rigid gendered rules, which prevented many women players participation, transformed the tournament into a ‘circus’ that received criticism across the whole country, including in the National Parliament.

This chapter addresses the concern that much theory building in organization and management (OM) research suffers from de-contextualization. The authors argue that de-contextualization comes in two main forms: reductionism and grand theory. Whereas reductionism tends to downplay context in favor of individual behavior, grand theory looks at context only in highly abstract ahistorical terms. Such de-contextualization is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the boundary conditions of theories remain unexplored in ways that threaten scientific validity. Second, de-contextualization limits the potential of OM theory to fully understand the role of organizations in society and thereby address societal grand challenges. These claims are exemplified through critical reviews of four fields in OM research – gender, employee voice, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and institutional logics – and counterpoints that may help to overcome de-contextualized research are presented.