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The purpose of this paper is to present a degendered organizational resilience model challenging current and dominant conceptualizations of organizational resilience by exploring how gendered organizational power structures, language and practices of everyday organizational life interplay and limit inclusive constructions of organizational resilience.

The degendered organizational resilience model was developed using Acker’s (1990) model of gendered organizations, Martin’s (2003) gendering practices, Lorber’s (2000) degendering and other feminist research on gendered organizations. The purpose of the model is to explore power structures, practices and language within the organizational context during conditions requiring organizational resilience.

A conceptual model for analyzing the theoretical development of organizational resilience is presented. The model analyzes the following three different aspects of organizations: power structure, to identify which resilient practices receive status based on established gendered organizational hierarchies and roles; actions, to identify how resilience is enacted through practices and practicing of gender; and language, to identify how and what people speak reinforces collective practices of gendering that become embedded in the organization’s story and culture.

The degendered organizational resilience model offers a process for researchers, managers and organizational leaders to analyze and reveal power imbalances that hinder inclusive theoretical development and practices of organizational resilience.

The degendered organizational resilience model can be used to reveal power structures, gendered practices and language favoring normative masculine organizational practices, which restrict the systemic implementation of inclusive democratic practices that incorporate and benefit women, men and other groups subject to organizational subordination.

This paper offers an original perspective on the theoretical development of organizational resilience by proposing a degendering model for analysis. A feminist perspective is used to reveal the gendered power structures, practices and language suppressing the full range of resilient qualities by restricting what is valued and who gives voice to resilient processes that lead to resilient organizations.

This study aims to expand our knowledge on the processes through which work–family policies relate to work–family conflict as well as work–related attitudes among women in management positions returning to work after maternity leave.

A total of 238 women in management positions who recently have returned to work after maternity leave completed a self-reported questionnaire.

Results show that the availability of policies was either directly or indirectly positively related to work attitudes among female managers. Also, findings show that work–family conflict partially mediates the relationship between the availability of communication and psychological support and flexible time management policies with work engagement, and policy availability moderates the relationship between work–family conflict and work engagement.

Managers have a crucial role in conveying the value of work–family policies and in creating a culture supporting the management of work and family. By investigating the processes underlying the role of work–family policies in influencing work attitudes of women in managerial positions, this study sheds light on how the awareness of the available policies might be an important determinant of work-related well-being and organizational commitment.

This paper empirically explores the types and extent of cultural diversity strategies in Sweden, a developed economy with many migrant workers. The role of organizational culture as the context and the association with diversity strategy and the selection of international skilled migrant workers are examined.

Empirical data are collected by surveying 249 Swedish large or medium-sized firms. Cluster analysis is used to explore the configuration of organizational culture, cultural diversity strategy (CDS) and selection and development criteria.

The authors identify five clusters of organizations. Organizational culture is the main contextual factor that influences the CDS and human resource (HR) approaches for selecting skilled migrant workers. The profile of the clusters including organizational culture, diversity strategies, the selection criteria and firm demographics is presented. The empirical results indicate that organizational culture and demographics are associated with the choice of diversity strategy and, consequently, HR processes.

This study's main focus is on international skilled migrants, which is among empirically less-studied areas in global mobility literature. Furthermore, until now more attention has been directed toward studying the consequences of diversity than toward understanding the factors that influence choice of diversity strategies and practices. This study focuses on antecedents of diversity and attempts to understand the factors that influence adoption and implementation of different cultural diversity strategies.

Adaptation to the requirements of digital economy is especially difficult for older workers, which is a challenge for today’s organizations due to workforce shrinking and ageing. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how it is possible to develop older employees’ potential in technology use in the business environment.

The authors examined how employees at various age perceive barriers during enterprise system (ES) adoption and use. This exploratory study is based on grounded theory and draws from the opinions of 187 Polish ES practitioners.

With age, emphasis on employees’ perception of mandatory ICT implementation projects is shifting from technology to people-related considerations. For older employees, job security and workload appear the most critical issues in such projects. Age-diverse collaboration appears necessary to address the problems posed by technology-related and demographic changes.

The findings imply that incorporating multiple stakeholder perspectives and age-related considerations into research on ICT adoption appears essential.

ICT adoption in the business environment can be successfully supported by age-balanced team building, cooperation between younger and older employees, and age-adjusted change management initiatives.

Supporting older employees during the implementation of mandatory business software should embrace reducing their negative attitudes to ICT-induced change by minimizing their perception of job insecurity.

Unlike many prior studies, the current research places age in the central role and discusses not only how it is possible to support older employees, but also how to leverage their potential in the process of ICT adoption and use in a mandatory setting.

A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

The purpose of this paper is to review state-of-the-art literature on product/brand positioning to re-examine the positioning concept and developing a more comprehensive definition from a theoretical viewpoint.

A systematic review of positioning was conducted. The review conformed to a rigorous set of core principles: it was systematic (organized according to a method designed to address the review questions), transparent (explicitly stated), reproducible and updatable and synthesized (summarized the evidence relating to the review question).

The literature review reveals that there is lack of coherent definition for positioning, and there is no mutual agreement among marketing scholars and practitioners about the exact meaning of the concept. Therefore, comprehensive definition of positioning encompassing the five underlying positioning perspectives (competition; empty slot/mind; consumers’ perception, differentiation and competitive advantage) is suggested.

This paper will be useful for academicians to analyze the current nature of academic research in this area and will provide an added advantage to managers to design and implement positioning strategies for their product/brands that will allow their organizations to gain competitive advantage. This study acknowledges limitations with respect to its exclusive search criteria, which might affect its generalizability.

Position and positioning is of relevance in society in broad terms, e.g. in sports, politics and culture. Positioning strategy is discussed and implemented in different industries (business-to-business and consumer), for all kinds of brands (including, for instance, corporate brands) and for “brands” in the very widest sense (such as places or people).

This is the first systematic review of positioning that provides a detailed understanding of the current state of positioning research on a single platform and also draws a comprehensive positioning conceptualization.

Effective policy to support business ecosystems should build on evidence-based analyses of firm-level activities and outcomes. This paper aims to contribute to this requirement and makes three contributions. The first contribution is to extend the application of the network capital concept to a variety of eight distinct linkage categories (e.g. suppliers, customers and business support agencies) that support networking and clustering, in both activity and impact terms. The second contribution is outlining a novel method of network visualisation (V-LINC) based on the collection of primary and qualitative data. The third contribution is in applying the method to one cluster, information and communications technologies.

Qualitative research on the nature and extent of organisational network linkages was undertaken. Structured interviews with a set of focal firms followed a tailored design approach. The concept of network capital was extended and applied to the cluster context by measuring network inputs and output (i.e. investments and impact). The approach was operationalised via a novel impact measurement approach, denoted as V-LINC, an acronym for visualising linkages in networks and clusters.

The authors develop a business impact framework exploiting novel linkage visualisations and qualitative data from firms in a cluster in one city region across eight linkage types to capture distinct network capital elements. Organisational inputs into network development, measured as investment and involvement indicators and organisational outcomes from those networks, measured as importance and intensity indicators, are used to assess network performance. A comprehensive, systematic and robust analysis of network elements and performance is possible. Distance is found to interact differently across linkage types. Targeted recommendations may be made from the analysis of local or regional business ecosystems in light of measured business impacts of linkages.

Due to the resource-intensive nature of data collection, the current study engages a limited sample of firms and interviewees. Applications of this approach in other contexts will permit further research into its usefulness in evaluating business impacts generated through networking activities.

The method introduced here (V-LINC) offers a novel means to include both geography network theory into an understanding of knowledge relationships and networks within clusters. Accounting for both distance and linkage type reveals which categories of intra-regional and extra-regional linkages generate the greatest impact, given their frequency. The approach adds to available cluster visualisation and analysis approaches through identifying patterns of disaggregated knowledge flows and their impacts, with application to evaluation demands of policy.

With the rise of the gig economy, management positions are increasingly staffed with flexible labor, so-called interim managers. They plunge into organizations for a limited period, operating in a liminal position as partly insider, partly outsider. Although several contributions to their client organizations are acknowledged, it is unknown how the interim manager’s knowledge from previous assignments is made useful in the new context under these particular working conditions. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of how the interim manager’s knowledge is transferred to the client organization while operating from a liminal position.

This paper presents an interview-based multiple case study of six interim assignments where knowledge transfer is considered a social and context-dependent process.

The findings unveil the multifaceted nature of the liminal position, which consists of task orientation, time limitation, political detachment and cultural distance. These facets contribute to knowledge transfer in terms of new shared understandings and joint interests, which in turn might create new practices that augment continuous knowledge-sharing patterns.

The results contribute to the research on flexible work arrangements by shedding light on how the liminal position, predominantly depicted as an obstacle for the individual, might facilitate knowledge transfer. Through the process of knowledge generation, it is shown how a short-term engagement might enable the organization to increase its knowledge over time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and theoretically explain how line managers and lower-status experts work together in public health-care organizations. Hence, this study explores how lower-status experts influence line managers' decision-making and task prioritizing in order to guide staff experts' cooperation and performance improvements.

The authors used a qualitative method for data collection and analysis of the experts' and line managers' explanations about their cooperation. A theoretical approach of experts' identity positioning, in terms of differences and similarities, was used in analyzing the interaction between managers and experts.

This study shows that similarities and differences in positioning acts exist simultaneously. Similarity is constructed by way of strategic and professional alignment with the line managers' core tasks. Differences stem from the distinction between knowledge-grounded skills and professional attributes such as language, analytical tools, and jargon. Lower-status experts need to leave their entrenched positions and match the professional status of line managers in both knowledge aspirations and appearance to reach a respected approach of experts' identity positioning.

Unlike many previous studies, this study demonstrates that similarities and differences in positioning acts exist simultaneously.

Privilege is often silent, invisible and not made explicit, and silence is a key question for theorizing on organizations. This paper examines interrelations between privilege and silence for relatively privileged professionals in high-intensity knowledge businesses (KIBs).

This paper draws on 112 interviews in two rounds of interviews using the collaborative interactive action research method. The analysis focuses on processes of recruitment, careers and negotiation of boundaries between work and nonwork in these KIBs. The authors study how relative privilege within social inequalities connects with silences in multiple ways, and how the invisibility of privilege operates at different levels: individual identities and interpersonal actions of privilege (micro), as organizational level phenomena (meso) or as societally constructed (macro).

At each level, privilege is reproduced in part through silence. The authors also examine how processes connecting silence, privilege and social inequalities operate differently in relation to both disadvantage and the disadvantaged, and privilege and the privileged.

This study is relevant for organization studies, especially in the kinds of “multi-privileged” contexts where inequalities, disadvantages and subordination may remain hidden and silenced, and, thus, are continuously reproduced.