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The purpose of this conceptual article is to examine the role of villainification and heroification in social studies through critically analyzing the author’s place-based encounters with three civil war narratives.

The article describes the author’s critical reflections on three narratives involving confederate figures and examines theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The article introduces a spectrum of ethical judgments which plots villainification and heroification on opposing ends. The author advocates for more nuanced ethical judgments that contextualize decisions as understandable or defensible based on evidence. The term understandable reflects a concept of being able to explain (i.e. demonstrate understanding) why a curricular figure made certain choices without agreeing with or supporting those choices. The term defensible denotes the existence of evidence that provides a rationale for a choice such that the person making the ethical judgment would feel comfortable making (i.e. defending) the same choice.

The article introduces a theory of nuanced ethical judgments in social studies that maps onto existing literature on heroification, villainification and place-based education. Pedagogical implications for social studies education are also identified.

This paper revisits the foundational concepts of agency and action in routine dynamics to provide guidance for intentional and directional change in a world in flux from a routine dynamics perspective. First, the authors put forward a relational-temporal triad of agency as a ratio of the past, present, and future to outline what gives shape to individual action. Second, the authors combine with this a relational-temporal triad of routine as a ratio of patterning, performing, and projecting to outline what gives shape to social action. Based on this, the authors reconceptualize the dynamic of routines as an enfolding inside-out and outside-in process that expresses the relational constraints between the intentionality of individual action and the directionality of social action. In managing a world in flux toward desirable futures, routines – as temporal structures for carrying out organizational work – need to be able to carry some degree of continuity to bring about change in fulfilling a desired and identified direction. The authors identify in-tension-less, in-tension-al, and in-tension-ful as three different degrees of intentionality in individual action and continuing, renewing, and transforming as the spectrum of a continuum of directionality in social action for routine change. Using time to bring in a fully relational understanding of agency and action in routine dynamics, the authors render the complexities of structure-agency and continuity-change dualities clearer and reveal their otherwise latent properties. This more complete picture of routine dynamics would allow for more intentional organizational routine change forward when facing significant environmental and social challenges in a world of flux.

In this editorial, the authors present an overview of the papers featured in this volume, all centered around the theme of “Routine Dynamics: Organizing in a World in Flux.” Recognizing the omnipresence of flux in organizational life, the authors identify key themes that emerged across the papers. These encompass temporality, improvisation, process and multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale. The authors elucidate the significance of each theme in the context of routine dynamics, highlight the advancements made by the respective papers in this volume, and underscore questions that warrant further exploration.

The literature on routine dynamics widely explores how organizational routines endogenously change over time, emphasizing the benefits of such property. Until now, there has been relatively little research attention devoted to the potential challenges associated with routine changes. This is a problem in a world in flux, where adaptation is more of a continuous rather than intermittent need. The authors suggest that when routines change, the links they create between agents that enable coordination are destabilized, ultimately hindering organizational change. This work draws on a case study in the automotive industry, a sector in which organizations are encountering significant changes in both their business environment and dominant technological design. The authors show that when new systems of organizational routines emerge to fill new spaces of action the established connections decay and generate relational and temporal voids, that is, missing connections among agents and across time. As these voids form, the change process of organizations is made more complex, no matter the emergence of new routines and agents’ willingness to change. The findings offer a fresh perspective on the impact of organizational routines in a “world in flux” by delving into the costly “side effect” of routine dynamics.

This chapter focuses on the complex dynamics of how photographs, particularly those related to celebrity fashion that challenge traditional gender norms, navigate the spaces from production to reception. By focusing on the processes of circulating and audiencing, the chapter examines the transformations images undergo and the varying interpretations they elicit as they move across different platforms and audiences. The study foregrounds the notion that photographs are not merely passive visual objects but active participants in the negotiation of cultural meanings and identities, especially concerning masculinities. Through an analysis of public appearances of Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan, the chapter explores the technological, compositional, and social modalities that influence these images’ circulation and reception. It highlights how alterations in the context of circulation can subtly or significantly affect audience interpretation, highlighting the role of viewers in constructing meanings around masculinities. This exploration illustrates the broader implications of visual culture in contemporary discussions on gender, revealing how circulating images and audiencing practices contribute to shaping and challenging societal norms and expectations of masculinity. By navigating the intersections of technology, composition, and society, this chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the power dynamics at play in the visual representation of gender.

In this study, the authors applied a routine dynamics perspective to examine how agile routines enhance efficiency while allowing flexibility in a world of flux. Hence, the authors conducted an ethnographic case study in the IT sector, following a scrum team. The findings indicate that agile routines create affordances for addressing temporal orientations toward the past, present, and future. Within the scrum framework, each routine has a designed temporal orientation, such that the planning meeting is oriented toward the future. Actors enacted this single, temporal orientation through temporal demarcating patterns. However, in some instances, other temporal orientations conflicted with the dominant one. In those cases, actors enacted temporal integrating patterns that embraced multiple temporal orientations. The authors contribute to research on routine dynamics by demonstrating how (1) temporal demarcating enables organizational benefits, (2) temporal integrating enables learning from and anticipating problems, and (3) temporal spaces emerge within routine enactments to solve problems at hand.

This study addresses an important yet underdeveloped topic in routine dynamics research: how do routines form? Given the salience of routine formation in new ventures, this study is based on a single, longitudinal case study, following MatchMe, a technology-enabled startup. Building on findings from MatchMe, this study posits routine formation as a layered process. Rather than replacing established routines, routine formation was sequential. New routines were formed in addition to routines that continued to run in parallel. Routine formation was guided by organizational goals and monitoring their attainment. Multiple routines are formed to explore and create possibilities by shifting espoused ideals to attain organizational goals. This study advances routine dynamics in three distinct ways. First, it elaborates on a predominantly binary view of routine formation. Second, it extends work focused on the active creation of patterns. Third, it extends the response and outcomes of routine change, providing avenues for future research to explore strategic consequences of routines for outcomes typically associated with firm performance.

The literature on unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPOB) has experienced significant growth in the past decade. However, there is limited research on the effects of organizational, team and malleable individual factors on UPOB. It is also necessary to explore its adverse effects for theoretical advancement and to uncover unexplored opportunities. This study aims to systematically examine the existing body of literature on UPOB, providing thorough theoretical, contextual and methodological insights.

Using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis technique, the authors identified 43 articles on UPOB from journals included in the ABDC-2019 list. The authors conducted an analysis of the identified articles and categorized them using a modified version of Paul and Rosado-Serrano’s (2019) TCCM framework.

Existing literature primarily focuses on attitudinal and contextual antecedents of UPOB, neglecting individual differences and their consequences. The review suggests that certain desired employee attitudes may also lead to UPOB. In addition, the study highlights underutilization of established behavioral theories, emphasizing the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework. The exploration identifies research gaps, including in multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies, aiming to broaden the research scope in this field.

The study highlights the need for a more comprehensive theoretical framework to understand UPOB.

It cautions organizations fostering positive employee attitudes, such as job satisfaction, workplace spirituality and organizational commitment, as these may inadvertently promote UPOB.

Socially, the paper highlights how engaging in UPOB affects the lives of involved employees.

This paper’s originality arises from its methodical review and categorization of prior research on UPOB using a distinctive, multidisciplinary research framework.

This paper investigates the intricate process of integrating historically excluded social groups into long-established routines. Drawing on a dialectical perspective, the research explores how persistence and change emerge through the interplay of opposing forces, shedding light on the dynamics of integrating new participants while ensuring stability in established routines. The empirical focus is on an Armed Forces’ ground combat training (GCT) course, examining the integration of the first female officers after the formal ban on their participation in close-combat roles was lifted. The findings reveal a nuanced evolution of routine adaptation and truce reformation, characterized by three dialectical cycles: tentative truces, experimental truces, and enactment truces. These cycles involve negotiations between continuity and reformation, accommodation and resistance, and modification and preservation, uncovering a dialectical dance where organizational actors invest intense effort in maintaining the status quo while accommodating ambiguity and settling tensions. The findings extend our understanding of routine dynamics by illuminating the performative aspect of truce-making, highlighting the effortful processes involved in accommodating new participants. This paper establishes a connection between routines and dialectics, providing novel avenues for exploring complex organizational challenges and emphasizing micro-strategies employed by routine participants to address differences in practice. It also contributes to the field of organizational inclusion by offering a dialectical understanding of integration, showcasing the intricate dynamics involved in integrating historically excluded groups into established routines.

This paper addresses the issue of granularity. The authors argue that in routine dynamics research granularity can be usefully defined by the number of actors, the variety of places/contexts, and the amount of time it takes to successfully accomplish an action. This is an important but often overlooked aspect of studying routines. It is important because different granularities imply different challenges and opportunities for performing and patterning. The authors propose a framework to distinguish between fine-, medium-, and coarse-grained actions, illustrate how different granularities have been used in existing routine dynamics studies, and discuss the implications for understanding routine dynamics. The authors conclude that granularity is a key construct that needs to be taken seriously and suggest a four-step procedure to help researchers establish and report on the granularity of actions in their research process.