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The study has origins in paradoxical foundations: although the trends in the theory of organizational change emphasize organizational uniqueness, in a case study it was found that metacultural ideals about the rules, order, hierarchy and predictability were privileged and had a remarkable effect on organizational change. It is suggested that metalevel “Grand Story”, hiding ideals about what is a “real” organization still exists strongly in the societal memory, and especially in circumstances of rapid change and financial problems of an enterprise this “Grand Story” easily grasps the uniqueness of that organization.

This study investigated the joint impact of organizational and individual career management on employees' ideal self-discrepancy. Drawing on the identity literature, the authors aimed to uncover the mechanism and boundary condition of this impact, focusing on how organizations influence ideal and actual selves of employees with different protean career orientation.

The authors conducted a four-wave time-lagged study over eight months, with a sample of 331 employees from various organizations.

Perceived organizational career management negatively influenced ideal self-discrepancy via organizational identification, and such relationship was strengthened by protean career orientation. Employees with stronger protean career orientation saw a stronger moderating effect of individual career management on the relationship between organizational identification and ideal self-discrepancy, whereas their counterparts saw an opposite effect.

This study highlighted the essential role of organization in narrowing employees' ideal self-discrepancy in the protean career era. It suggested that organizations should set differentiated career practices depending on employees' protean career orientation levels.

By integrating vocational psychology and organizational scholarship, this study extended the ideal self-discrepancy literature by offering a nuanced understanding of the mechanism and boundary condition of the role of organizational career management in narrowing ideal self-discrepancy in the protean career era. It identified the joint efforts of organization and employee as a fascinating avenue for future studies.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a psychoanalytic explanation for the challenges facing social entrepreneurs in Scotland.

A qualitative approach was used, in an exploratory study involving semi‐structured interviews with, and observation of, a purposive sample of social entrepreneurs.

Respondents exhibited a sense of splitting between the archetype of hard driving business leader and that of social reformer. One respondent was able successfully to integrate the two roles through an intuitive understanding of psychodynamic processes.

This was an exploratory study with a small sample.

In a period of financial challenge for the UK economy, presenting new challenges for social enterprises, the findings add to researchers' understanding of apparently irrational responses to change.

There is limited research into the impact of archetypes on business behaviours and the paper aims to extend the literature.

Most analyses of the relationship between the internal distribution of formal organizational power, generally manifested in ownership and governance rights, and innovation efforts apply a principal-agent framework. The key implication of this framework is that firms with distributed formal power are more likely to engage in labor-intensive innovation because external capital providers are unwilling to entrust their investments to a worker controlled firm. In this paper, we critique the principal-agent framework and propose an alternative institutionalist approach, where the type of innovation pursued by firms with distributed formal power is contingent on the norms advanced by the innovation and the alignment of external stakeholders with those norms. After presenting this alternative framework, we illustrate its application with positive and negative cases of capital and labor-intensive innovation at the MONDRAGON cooperatives, a network of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. We conclude with a set of propositions to guide future research.

Recent changes in university systems, debates on academic freedom, and changing roles of knowledge in society all point to questions regarding how higher education and research should be governed and the role of scientists and faculty in this. Rationalizations of systems of higher education and research have been accompanied by the questioning and erosion of faculty authority and challenges to academic collegiality. In light of these developments, we see a need for a more conceptually precise discussion about what academic collegiality is, how it is practiced, how collegial forms of governance may be supported or challenged by other forms of governance, and finally, why collegial governance of higher education and research is important.

We see collegiality as an institution of self-governance that includes formal rules and structures for decision-making, normative and cognitive underpinnings of identities and purposes, and specific practices. Studies of collegiality then, need to capture structures and rules as well as identities, norms, purposes and practices. Distinguishing between vertical and horizontal collegiality, we show how they balance and support each other.

Universities are subject to mixed modes of governance related to the many tasks and missions that higher education and research is expected to fulfill. Mixed modes of governance also stem from reforms based on widely held ideals of governance and organization. We examine university reforms and challenges to collegiality through the lenses of three ideal types of governance – collegiality, bureaucracy and enterprise – and combinations thereof.

Person—environment (P—E) fit has long been a focus in organizational research. A climate‐based measure of P—E Fit was developed for use in organizational and individual assessment. A series of studies with a Q‐sort measure of climate and fit (the Organizational Fit Instrument—OFI) indicated ways in which P—E fit information can be used in organizational development. In addition, the psychometric properties of the OFI assessed in these studies suggested that, despite the ipsative nature of the measure, it may provide the organizational development practitioner or researcher with a sound and useful tool. Suggestions for future research are proposed.

This purpose of this study is to understand how the spread of audit culture and the related public sector reforms have affected Finnish universities’ organization principles, performance measurement (PM) criteria and ultimately their reason for being.

Applying extensive qualitative data by combining interview data with document materials, this study takes a longitudinal perspective toward the changing Finnish higher education field.

The analysis suggests the reforms have altered universities’ administrative structures, planning and control systems, coordination mechanisms and the role of staff units, as well as the allocation of power and thus challenged their reason for being. Power has become concentrated into the hands of formal managers, while operational core professionals have been distanced from decision making. Efficiency in terms of financial and performance indicators has become a coordinating principle of university organizations, and PM practices are used to steer the work of professionals. Because of the reforms, universities have moved away from the ideal type of professional bureaucracy and begun resembling the new, emerging ideal type of competitive bureaucracy.

This study builds on rich, real-life, longitudinal empirical material and details a chronological description of the changes in Finland’s university sector. Moreover, it illustrates how the spread of audit culture and the related legislative changes have transformed the ideal type of university organization and challenged universities’ reason for being. These changes entail significant consequences regarding universities as organizations and their role in society.

For many years within Organization Studies, broadly conceived, there was general agreement concerning the pitfalls of assuming a ‘one best way of organizing’. Organizations, it was argued, must balance different criteria of (e)valuation against one another – for example ‘exploitation’ and ‘exploration’ – depending on the situation at hand. However, in recent years a pre-commitment to values of a certain sort – expressed in a preference for innovation, improvisation and entrepreneurship over other criteria – has emerged within the field, thus shifting the terms of debate concerning organizational survival and flourishing firmly onto the terrain of ‘exploration’. This shift has been accompanied by the return of what we describe as a ‘metaphysical stance’ within Organization Studies. In this article we highlight some of the problems attendant upon the return of metaphysics to the field of organizational analysis, and the peculiar re-emergence of a ‘one best way of organizing’ that it engenders. In so doing, we re-visit two classic examples of what we describe as ‘the empirical stance’ within organization theory – the work of Wilfred Brown on bureaucratic hierarchy, on the one hand, and that of Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch on integration and differentiation, on the other – in order to highlight the continuing importance of March's argument that any organization is a balancing act between different and non-reducible criteria of (e)valuation. We conclude that the proper balance is not something that can be theoretically deduced or metaphysically framed, but should be based on a concrete description of the situation at hand.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the field of strategic communication is shaped and driven by several different logics that not only simply underpin each other, but also and simultaneously oppose each other and point in many different directions.

The authors address the multiple logics in strategic communication and their interplay by drawing on Edgar Morin’s theory of “dialogics.” According to Morin, complex systems are characterized by multiple logics that are at once complementary, competitive and antagonistic with respect to one another.

The authors present and discuss five dialogics that challenge conventional notions of managerial control: deliberate vs emergent perspectives on communication strategy; top-down vs participatory approaches; bounded vs unbounded notions of communication; consistency vs inconsistency in organizational messages; and transparency vs opacity in organizational practices.

While the dialogical perspective defies the ideal of strategic communication as a unitary discipline, the authors argue that the field can only develop by acknowledging, embracing and bringing to the fore of analysis principles that are at once complementary, competitive and antagonistic.

Recent reforms to higher education systems in many OECD countries have focused on making universities more effective organisations in competing for resources and reputations. This has often involved increasing their internal cohesion and external autonomy from the state to make them more similar to private companies. However, pre-reform universities differed so greatly in their governance and capabilities that the impact of institutional changes has varied considerably between three ideal types: Hollow, State-chartered, and Autarkic. Furthermore, the combination of: (a) the inherent uncertainty of scientific research undertaken for publication, (b) limited managerial control over work processes and reputations, and (c) the contradictory effects of some funding and governance changes has greatly restricted the ability of universities to function as authoritatively integrated organisations capable of developing distinctive competitive competences.