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In order to manage strategic demographic change in economic and labor markets, a common human resource (HR) change strategy is to increase the diversity of the workforce through hiring over time. This study examined department level consensus and valence regarding an organizational HR strategy to shift demography toward greater diversity in race and sex composition over an eight‐year period. Though the organization had experienced significant change in organizational demography: an increase in the overall representation of white women (36 percent) and minorities (41 percent) over time; work group members in units with the greatest change did not necessarily agree nor hold positive perceptions regarding these HR changes. The results show that HR strategies that focus on structural change without working to develop supportive group norms and positive climate may be inadequate change strategies.

The purpose of this preliminary empirical research study is to understand how environmental disruption such as brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic induces shifts in organisational culture, information security culture and subsequently employee information security compliance behaviour.

A single-organisation case study was used to develop understanding from direct experiences of organisational life. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a sequential mixed methods approach, with the qualitative phase following the quantitative to achieve complementarity and completeness in analysis. For the quantitative phase, 48 useful responses were received after a questionnaire was sent to all 150–200 employees. For the qualitative phase, eight semi-structured interviews were conducted. Statistical software was used to analyse the quantitative data and NVivo software was used to analyse the qualitative data.

The pandemic-induced environmental disruption manifested as a sudden shift to work-from-home for employees, and relatedly an increase in cybercrime. The organisational response to this gave rise to shifts in both organisational and information security culture towards greater control (rule and goal orientations) and greater flexibility (support and innovation orientations), most significantly with information security culture flexibility. The net effect was an increase in employee information security compliance.

The vast literature on organisational culture and information security culture was drawn on to theoretically anchor and develop parsimonious measures of information security culture. Environmental disruptions such as those caused by the pandemic are unpredictable and their effects uncertain, hence, the study provides insight into the consequences of such disruption on information security in organisations.

In recent years, organization scholars have engaged in several conversations about the process of theory development, and offered many proposals for building new theories of organization. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a fundamental, fruitful and often neglected method for developing new theories of organization.

This paper draws on Peirce's typology of reasoning: deduction, induction and abduction. This typology helps in analyzing and categorizing the extant proposals for developing new theories of organization, and also makes it visible what approach has been most often missing.

This paper shows that the offered proposals can be categorized into the following two models: (1) armchair theorizing; (2) present capturing. This categorization also highlights a third model – change sensitizing – that is based on shifting organization theories by sensitizing ourselves to macro shifts of organizational reality.

Although the change sensitizing model is an unusual, marginal practice in today's organization research, it has historically been used to develop many of the renowned theories in social sciences. If taken as a serious agenda, it has the potential to generate a host of new, valuable theories of organization.

The use of internal (intra‐organizational) or external (inter‐organizational) labor markets in men and women’s past employment is examined here as an explanation for differences in turnover behavior. A sample of 700 employees from eight medical organizations in seven labor markets was used to assess the importance of previous internal and external shifts and organizational level opportunities on men’s and women’s present job change choices. Women’s job changes were more affected by previous intra‐organizational moves, whereas men’s job changes were increased by previous inter‐organizational moves. These results suggest that gender differences in job shifts are due to women’s greater reliance on internal labor markets.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore how accountants can contribute to organisational sustainability initiatives.

The paper adopts a critical case study methodology, focused on a large Australian company in which senior management sought to engage accounting staff in an internal sustainability reporting initiative focused on eco-efficiency. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capitals and field enable a relational analysis of the findings.

While accountants adapted well to early changes aligned to cost efficiency, they struggled to engage with more creative sustainability improvements. The paper explains both adaptions and constraints as interactions between accountants’ professional habitus, capitals and their broader organisational field. Prior strategies to engage accountants (e.g. training) only partially address these factors.

The accounting profession has persistently urged members to contribute to organisational sustainability initiatives. This paper provides insight into how organisations might combine professional acculturation and appropriate capitals to advance this agenda.

Although eco-efficiency is only one potential element of comprehensive organisational sustainability management, the paper’s insights into engaging accountants contributes to understanding how broader social sustainability agendas might be advanced.

The study addresses calls for empirical insights into how accountants can contribute to corporate sustainability practices. Prior studies have polarised between interpreting accountants as either enablers or barriers to sustainability change. This paper explores how shifting configurations of habitus, capital and organisational field can enable either outcome.

Achieving specific changes within autonomous organizations is often a necessary condition for the success of strategic public policy. Wherever it is impossible to induce such changes by regulations, a frequently used tool is inducing their occurrence with financial stimuli. This practice appears to have been fully substantiated by the early systems-evolutionary understanding of the relationship between organizations and their environment, whose peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the appearance of new international organizations formulating strategic policies on a previously unprecedented scale. The conceptual framework available at that time failed, however, to provide a solid ground for operationalization and systemic evaluation of such interventions. As a result, even though it was implicitly presumed that policy implementation depended on organizational changes taking place in a large number of organizations, a conceptualization of the exact ways of how to ensure and assess such changes was hardly pronounced. This paper aims to uncover the problematique of that missing conceptualization.

In this paper, the author draws on the second-order stream of systems thinking, arguing that without such a deliberate operationalization, it seems much more likely that the external financing of organizational changes functions merely as organizational “perturbations” which do not crystallize into lasting changes, as they are mitigated by equally potent “compensation” to cancel out the perturbations. Using the theory of social system’s autopoiesis, the author posits that adaptive fluctuations evoked in organizations by the interferences of the policymakers may thus be considered “change” just as well as non-change.

Once the behavior of an autopoietic organizational system is seen as a continuous perpetuation of its own identity pattern, fashioned discursively as the organization’s self-description, then the only change which seems worthy of the publicly assigned resources and efforts is a shift in that pattern.

It is argued that the assessment of whether target organizations are indeed implementing or only superficially performing (and instantly compensating for) the desired changes should be inferred from a qualitative analysis of the daily discursive practices that forge the target domains rather than by a comparison of the measurable parameters, which are currently dominating in the evidence-based paradigm.

Proposes that women will not make significant advances in American businesses unless the focus shifts from a preoccupation on gender awareness to one of multicultural awareness. Discusses the whitewash dilemma and dominant assumptions about women in management to help explain the current management development paradigm that fails to recognize diversity among women. Makes a case for increasing organizational education about racial and gender similarities and differences which are crucial for establishing a successful multicultural organization where a new, all‐inclusive paradigm can prevail and the voices of all women can be heard. An analysis and critique of the women in management field precedes by an emerging model of individual and organizational stages of awareness. Finally proposes recommendations for interventions to shift existing management development practices towards the new paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of effectiveness in the context of organisational crisis. It considers the “darker” side of organisational effectiveness by exploring the processes by which effectiveness can be eroded as an organisation moves from an ordered state, through a complex one, and into a state of chaos, or crisis. It brings together complementary literatures on risk, crisis management, and complexity, and uses those lenses to frame some of the key processes that allow organisations to transition to a state that shapes their inabilities to remain effective.

The paper sets out a theoretical framework for the analysis of a crisis event and does so in a way that emphasises the role of the human element in the various stages of a crisis: the incubation phase, the operational crisis, and the post-event legitimation phase. The paper uses the emerging crisis around the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to illustrate some of the task demands associated with a crisis and the manner in which crisis events challenge the efficiencies and capabilities of organisations to deal with complex, multi-layered issues in which uncertainty is high. Given the emergent nature of that particular crisis, the use of the case is purely illustrative rather than analytically grounded in a normal case study approach.

The paper highlights a number of underlying elements that contribute to the generation of crises and offers recommendations for managers on how to deal with those demands. The paper shows how an organisation can move from an ordered state into a complex or chaotic one and highlights some of the problems that arise when an organisation does not have the capabilities to respond to the task demands generated by such a shift in the environment.

The paper challenges some of the normal practices of management in a “steady state” environment and highlights the need to consider the organisational capabilities that are necessary to deal with the transition from a stable to an unstable system state and ensure organisational effectiveness in the process. A core message within the paper is that the “normal” processes of management can contribute to the generation of crises as organisations prioritise short-term efficiencies over the strategies for longer-term effectiveness. The implications for crisis management practices are discussed.

The paper considers an issue that has wider applicability within society namely the relationships between organisational effectiveness and risk. The issues raised in the paper have applicability in a range of other societal settings.

The key output from the paper is the development of a theoretical framework that allows for an analysis of the relationships between crises and organisational effectiveness. The paper argues that effectiveness and crisis management are intrinsically linked and that crises occur when organisational effectiveness is impaired. The paper highlights the role that template-based approaches to dealing with complex problems can have in terms of the generation of crisis events.

Many criminologists have investigated the implementation process concerning the transformation toward community‐oriented policing, while researchers interested in the area of work and occupations and/or complex organizations have examined factors which contribute to or inhibit successful organizational change. To date, however, there has been little empirical research addressing the issue of employee receptivity to such change. The present study examines the effects of sheriff’s deputies’ socio‐demographic characteristics, work orientations, and perceptions of agency readiness/preparedness on their receptivity to organizational change. These deputies are employed in a sheriff’s department undergoing an agency‐wide shift toward community‐oriented policing. Our findings suggest that a service orientation and a belief that the agency has attained an appropriate level of preparedness positively influence their receptivity to change.

Motivated by Morgan’s (1997) analysis of the “paradoxical” role of metaphors in understanding and managing organisations, the purpose of this paper is to assess in what respects organisations using integrated reporting (IR) are on a “journey” of organisational change.

The paper analyses IR practitioner literature to interpret the IR journey metaphor more precisely. The authors then use in-depth interviews to assess the extent to which this metaphor captures how six early adopter organisations in Australia implement IR, and what changes result, over four years.

The journey metaphor implies substantive and holistic organisational change. By contrast, the authors find organisations use IR in contextual, instrumental and piecemeal ways. The authors propose a “toolbox” metaphor to help (re)present how organisations adapt their reporting to fit decisions already made, and challenges presented, through ordinary and ongoing strategic management.

Morgan (1997) stresses metaphors are invariably used to both describe and manage organisations. The authors’ analysis identifies specific ways the IR journey metaphor is descriptively misleading. The authors’ “toolbox” metaphor suggests different ways organisations are, or could, manage IR to create value.

This is the first paper to provide a systematic analysis of the IR journey metaphors, and to assess in what respects this metaphor captures actual organisational practice. The findings also challenge the broader notion in academic research that reporting frameworks can lead organisational change.