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This study aims to adopt the institutional theory perspective to understand how institutional inconsistencies experienced by individuals translate into meaninglessness. Moreover, using the constructive development theory, it provides a plausible explanation to the enigma – why do some organizational members develop meaninglessness, while others do not?

This conceptual paper is based on a critical evaluation of extant literature that helped to develop the empirically testable propositions.

Grounded in the three types of mindsets as proposed in the constructive development theory, this paper suggests that, for socialized knowers, the degree of meaninglessness is directly related to the extent to which valued others perceive meaninglessness with respect to the institutional prescription creating a certain degree of inconsistency. The self-authoring knowers experience a higher degree of meaninglessness, if the alternative institutional prescriptions challenge the ones attached to their desired identity. While, the self-transforming knowers feel a higher level of meaninglessness, when they realize that the institutional inconsistency is strongly related to the experiences of others impacted by it.

This study adds a significant value to the streams of institutional and constructive development theories literature. It theorizes the variations in organizational members’ feeling of meaninglessness in the face of institutional inconsistencies while considering the shaping effects of field pressure and disposition. These propositions integrate the institutional theory and constructive development theory and present more socially acceptable justifications of the organizational members’ reaction of meaninglessness to institutional inconsistencies.

Human resources are of great importance to provide competitive advantage in tourism, which is a labour-intensive industry. It is seen that the level of organizational commitment of the individuals who have similar values with the organization they work for and who can fulfil the roles and duties they undertake and who can meet all their needs in return increases. Their level of alienation is also observed to decrease. Population of the study, which purposes to reveal whether organizational culture has any impact on the employees' perception of person-organization fit and their level of organizational alienation or not, constitutes 4- and 5-star hotels in service in the central district of Izmir province. According to the results, it was seen that hotel businesses had two types of organizational culture such as hierarchy and clan culture. In the hotels with clan culture, demands-abilities fit levels of the worker were higher than value-congruence and needs-supplies dimensions. It was seen that workers alienated on meaninglessness dimension mostly. Similarly, in the hotels with hierarchy culture, demands-abilities fit levels of the worker were higher than value-congruence and needs-supplies dimensions. Workers alienated from their organization on meaninglessness dimension mostly.

The objective of the study is to investigate the social alienation status of Swedish high school students with respect to gender and immigrant background.

The sample was randomly selected from high school students aged 15‐19, and 446 students participated in the study. The Jessor and Jessor general alienation questionnaire was used to explore feelings of social alienation. Sequential multiple regression analyses were performed to examine the relationships between alienation, age, sex, and immigrant background.

The results demonstrated a significant association between immigrant background and alienation. It was found that first‐generation immigrants felt more alienated than second‐generation immigrants and second‐generation immigrants felt more alienated than natives. Adolescents who were first‐generation immigrants had higher scores on the social isolation subscale than second generation immigrants and native Swedes. However, second generation immigrants had higher scores on the meaninglessness subscale than first‐generation immigrants and native Swedes. Age proved to have a significant quadratic component. The research found feeling of alienation significantly higher among youngest and oldest students but lower for those aged 17.

The study was limited by the number of participants with different cultural background in the immigrant samples. As such, it was unable to compare feeling of alienation between students with different cultural background.

As the authors could not identify any studies that specifically address feelings of social alienation among adolescents in Sweden, thus this study is believed to be the first one in this context.

The purpose of this research is to examine work alienation (WA) as a mediator in the relationship between employees' perceptions of person‐organization (PO) fit – operationalized as value congruence – and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) directed at their organization (OCBO), co‐workers (OCBIC), and students or clients (OCBIS).

Data were collected from 99 of the 156 (63.5 percent) teachers at a district high school in Spain. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the predicted relationships.

Results support that PO fit is an antecedent of OCBO, OCBIC, and OCBIS and also, in general, that the three dimensions of WA (powerlessness, meaninglessness, and self‐estrangement) mediate this link. Separately, all WA dimensions are totally or partially supported as “full mediators,” except for powerlessness and meaninglessness that appear to act on OCBIS as “partial mediators.” The model tested suggests PO fit predicts OCB and that this relationship can be explained by the mediating role of WA.

Subjects in this study reflect job conditions peculiar to the public sector. This may limit the ability to extrapolate the findings to the private sector. Also, results may not generalize to other cultural or national contexts. The findings contribute to an improved understanding of the influence of PO value fit/misfit on OCB.

Understanding how PO fit is able to affect citizenship behavior suggests that actions designed to promote PO fit may be useful for more efficiently managing employee WA, and, therefore, more powerfully eliciting OCB in the workplace.

Employee work alienation is demonstrated to be a mediator in the relationship between PO fit and OCB. This is the first empirical test of this relationship.

This paper furnishes an inaugural reading of abjective consumption by drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection within the wider terrain of consumer cultural research. It offers a conceptual framework that rests on three pillars, viz. irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution of selfhood.

Qualitative research design that adopts a documentary ethnographic approach, by drawing on a corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction” and “Freaky Eaters”.

The findings from this analysis point to different orders of mediatized discourse that are simultaneously operative in different actors’ frames (e.g. moralizing, medical), in Goffman’s terms, yet none of which attains to address the phenomenon of abjective consumption to its full-blown extent.

Although some degree of bias is bound to be inherent in the data because of their pre-recorded status, they are particularly useful not in the least because this is a “difficult sample” in qualitative methodological terms.

The multi-order dimensionalization of abjective consumption opens up new vistas to marketers in terms of adding novel dimensions to the message structure of their communicative programs, in line with the three Lacanian orders.

The adoption of a consumer psychoanalytic perspective allows significant others to fully dimensionalize the behavior of abjective consumption subjects, by becoming sensitive to other than symbolic aspects that are endemic in consumer behavior.

This paper contributes to the extant consumer cultural research literature by furnishing the novel conceptual framework of abjective consumption, as a further elaboration of my consumer psychoanalytic approach to jouissance consumption, as well as by contrasting this interpretive frame vis-à-vis dominant discursive regimes.

This study aims to re-examine the concept of alienation, particularly from the perspective of existential psychology. While research interest continues to centre on links between human resource management (HRM) and organizational performance, such as in studies by Beer et al. (1984), Huselid (1995), Becker and Gerhart (1996) and Guest (2011), there is a growing interest in individual attributes such as employee well-being in addition to organizational performance, as mentioned in studies by Macky and Boxall (2007), Wood and de Menezes (2011) and Guest and Conway (2011). In this paper, we focus on issues related to the individual, and in doing so we suggest that HRM theory needs further development, as pointed out by Guest (2011).

This is a paper in the tradition of critical theory that draws on both classical and modern research in the business and psychology literature. It outlines the development of the concept of alienation from its classic articulation by Marx through to the perspective offered by existential psychologists such as Blauner (1964). How alienation, thus, defined might manifest in the workplace is then discussed, as are its links to other concepts associated in the literature with positive and negative work experiences is presented.

We argue that alienation needs to be addressed at two levels, namely, at the systemic level, in terms of factors external to the individual such as work and organizational systems and processes, and in terms of factors internal to the individual’s “state of mind”. We offer strategies for management to consider counterbalancing the negative effects of residual feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement that systemic change is unable to eliminate.

The paper refocuses attention on the individual within the context of HRM, the effects of alienation and other outcomes of positive and negative work experiences such as work engagement and job burnout.

This article aims to develop a conception consisting of insights from complexity theory and additional notions from Weick's sense‐making theory and existentialism for examining organization behaviour.

This paper carries out a literature review of Karl Weick's theory of sense‐making and some notions from existentialism to discuss the possible contributions to complexity theory and with this a further comprehension of organizational behaviour.

Four existential conditions, namely death, freedom, existentialism and meaninglessness, give a further comprehension of Weick's concept of equivocality. Equivocality is an important input for organizing processes. The complexity of organizing processes is an object for examining organizational behaviour from a complexity scientific standpoint. The authors argue that the concept of equivocality and with this the states of equilibrium in an organization can be approached with examining the states of the mentioned four existential conditions.

An important point of application for change managers in an organization is equivocality. The increase of equivocality will lead to a shift in the state of equilibrium in which new themes will emerge and corresponding organisational behaviour. The level of equivocality is due to the presence of existential fears. Hence, change managers should focus on existential themes and anxieties in an organization to advance emergent change.

New in this paper is the usage of notions from existentialism to elaborate Weick's conception of sense‐making. Also this paper discusses the possible contribution of this elaboration to research of organisational behaviour from the perspective of complexity theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how decision-maker attributes unfold to precipitate organisational failure. The analysis brings to light how key attributes such as information-processing capabilities and human capital decay interact to bring about business decline and exit.

The study is based on an integrated review and conceptualisation of the literature.

The study articulates how a set of attributes of decision makers, i.e. human capital obsolescence, powerlessness, meaninglessness and institutional linkages, contributes to organisational failure.

The paper concludes by setting out an array of strategies of learning from others’ failures.

In spite of a growing body of research on organisational failure, scholars have placed overwhelming emphasis on ecological explanations and business failure prediction models. The study moves beyond the ecological explanations to offer a more fine-grained analysis of firm-level factors that precipitate business failure.

This study puts focus on teaching and learning attitudes in two schools, one in England and other in Sweden. The purpose is to highlight and problematize teaching and learning in a changing society and find out what happens when two school cultures learn from each other. In Sweden, the attitude is “entrepreneurial learning” and in England “personal learning and thinking skills,” different names, but the same underpinning approach to teaching and learning. This chapter is based on an “open” questionnaire, classroom observations and group interviews with teachers. In our way of analyzing the material, we have chosen the concepts dualistic and integrative perspective on knowledge and school development. Following themes was visualized: authority – authoritarian, interest – meaninglessness, and control – trust. Results show both similarities and differences between the two countries. However, the most unexpected result was what the teachers focused on in the classroom. The Swedish teachers paid more attention to the relationship to the students, while the English teachers focused more on the relationship to learning.