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The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how past stories of women’s insufficiency for military work survive and how they come to form a gendered organizational narrative dominant in constructing current opinions on women in the military.

The analysis is based mainly on archival data, but supported by interview material as well as participant observation data. The authors do this from the assumption that the culturally constructed notion of the ideal soldier is based on a historically constructed professional narrative.

The authors show how a historically produced gender narrative – based on (fictional) stories on what women can and cannot do – is perceived as true and thereby casts women as less suitable for a military career. Thus, despite the current equal legal rights of men and women in the military, the power of the narrative limits female soldiers’ career possibilities.

The paper is unique as it, in drawing on archival data, is able to trace how an organizational narrative comes to be and due to its ethnographic data how this creates limitations for women’s careers. This narrative is stronger and much more powerful than management is aware of. The paper therefore adds crucial knowledge about the ideological influence a historically produced organizational narrative can have on current change initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the construction and everyday maintenance of racialized psychological borders in the Greenlandic Police Force reproduce a postcolonial hierarchy of knowledge, where Danish knowledge and perceptions of professionalism are constructed as superior to Greenlandic knowledge and perceptions of professionalism.

The paper is based on an ethnographic study comprising 5 days of observation of a training course for Danish police officers going to Greenland on summer assistance, 13 days of observation of police work in Greenland, 2 days of participatory observation of a leadership development seminar in Greenland, 26 interviews conducted in Denmark and Greenland with both Danish and Greenlandic officers and interventions in Denmark and Greenland.

The racialized borders create strong perceptions of “us” and “them”, which are maintained and reinforced through everyday work practices. The borders have damaging effects on the way police officers collaborate in Greenland and as the borders are maintained through (often implicit) everyday micro-processes, management has difficulty dealing with it. However, the way the racialized borders became visible through this research project created an awareness of – and sparked conversation about – the colonial stereotypes that have constructed and reinforce the borders. This awareness opens up possibilities of collaborative disruption of those borders.

The paper shows how racialized borders limit the way professionalism is understood in the Greenlandic Police Force. But it also shows that, because these borders are socially constructed, they can be contested. Making the implicit everyday discrimination explicit through vignettes, for example, offers the chance to contest and disrupt the colonial hierarchy otherwise deeply embedded in the work practices of the police force.

Thanks to unique access to Greenland’s police force, this paper offers exclusive in-depth insights into current processes of racialization and colonialization in a contemporary colonial relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the identity and diversity literatures and discuss how a better understanding of the theoretical connections between the two informs both diversity research and diversity management practices.

Literature review followed by a discussion of the theoretical and practical consequences of connecting the identity and diversity literatures.

The authors inform future research in three ways. First, by showing how definitions of identity influence diversity theorizing in specific ways. Second, the authors explore how such definitions entail distinct foci regarding how diversity should be analyzed and interventions actioned. Third, the authors discuss how theoretical coherence between definitions of identity and diversity perspectives – as well as knowledge about a perspective’s advantages and limitations – is crucial for successful diversity management research and practice.

The authors argue for a better understanding of differences, overlaps and limits of different identity perspectives, and for a stronger engagement with practice.

The work can encourage policy makers, diversity and HR managers to question their own practices and assumptions leading to more theoretical informed diversity management practices.

The theoretical connections between identity and diversity literature have so far not been reviewed systematically. The work foregrounds how important it is for diversity scholars to consider identity underpinnings of diversity research to help further develop the field within and beyond the three streams the authors discuss.

The purpose of this article is to question whether business is ethical as long as it follows rules, and on this view, to reflect over the relation between responsibility and justice.

To exemplify this relation, the paper is based on in‐depth interviews with a human rights consultant. In this way, the paper presents a story from the field and thus follows a narrative method to retell the story of the consultant leading a human rights project in South Africa.

The paper concludes that following rules is not enough to ensure ethical business in a global market place. As global business rests on dynamics and flexibility, it seems limited that most business ethics rests on bureaucratic notions. The value of also viewing ethical decision‐making as personal responsibility is introduced through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

The study is based on in depth interviews with one person. Although this method ensures access to deeply personal and thorough knowledge about the event, it also has its limitation and risk of bias. Although this paper points towards some interesting relations between personal responsibility and international/organisational justice, more research is needed in the field of personal responsibility to make stronger conclusions.

The paper proposes that people working at the global market place could benefit from being educated in personal ethics and not only bureaucratic notions of ethics.

The paper provides valuable insight into the scarcely researched area of personalised business ethics.

With the help of Slavoj Žižek's concept of interpassivity, this paper seeks to illustrate the frantic activities performed by employees to maintain a separation between the idea of an authentic self and the idea of a corporate self. Furthermore, this paper aims to illustrate these activities empirically.

The empirical example is based on a case study of three of the largest international consultancy firms. About 50 consultants were interviewed in this study, but this paper primarily focuses on the experiences of one of these consultants, and goes into depth with his experiences to illustrate the frantic mechanisms of interpassivity.

The paper shows how the maintenance of an “authentic self” outside of the corporate culture demands a distinct and frantic activity; that this activity can best be understood as interpassive in the sense that it involves taking over the passive acknowledgement for which someone else is responsible; and how the separation of an authentic from a corporate self, rather than resist the demand to enjoy one's work – prescribed by contemporary management programs – nourishes it.

The paper builds on recent literature on cynicism and normative control in organisations. It introduces interpassivity to this discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introductory overview of this special issue highlighting some of the distinctive features of Žižek's Lacan‐inspired thought relevant to the role of ideologies in organizational change management.

The approach used aims to show how ideological and ethical ramifications of Žižek's recent analysis of a “Jacobin” change paradigm can affect thought on everyday change practices in business and management.

Some parallels are drawn between current change practices and narrative tactics employed by Robespierre during the Jacobin reign of terror to “extort” the commitment of participants in the change process.

This paper/special issue invites reconsideration of our late capitalist intellectual/practical “reflexes” in change management, i.e. to reassess their ideological mechanism.

Žižekian/Lacanian approaches to organizations and change are especially suitable for this purpose but have only recently begun to emerge.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between sustainability adoption and internal legitimacy construction.

The paper is designed as a critical inquiry into existing research and practice on sustainability adoption, illustrated by two corporate vignettes.

Prior studies tend to assume that awareness raising is a sufficient means to create employee commitment and support for corporate sustainability programs, while empirical observations indicate that managerial disregard of conflicting interpretations of sustainability may result in the illegitimacy of such programs.

The authors suggest that a loosely coupled approach to sustainability adoption is a productive way to understand internal legitimacy construction, as it appreciates complexity and polyphony.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the politics involved in local struggles against forestry extractivism. The forestry sector is dependent on vast areas of land for tree plantations. This creates deep-rooted conflicts between global corporations that seek access to natural resources and locals whose way of life requires the use of the same land.

This study draws on a political ontology frame of reference and storytelling methodology to build on testimonies of three small-scale farmers who actively seek to resist forestry plantations next to their land in rural Uruguay. The stories reveal the impossibilities they face when raising claims in the public political sphere and how they lack the means to organise strong collective resistance.

One of the testimonies reveals how the farmers engage in a form of “politics of place” (Escobar, 2001, 2008) to counter the power of the proponents of forestry and the further expansion of plantations. This form of politics strengthens and politicises the ontological difference between extractive and non-extractive worlds. The farmers seek to build new imaginations of rural living and sustainable futures without the presence of extractive corporations. They fulfil this aim by designing community projects that aim to revitalise ancient indigenous legends, set up agro-ecological farms, and teach schoolchildren about the environment.

The struggles of the farmers indicate the territorial transformations involved in (un)making (non)extractive places and the need to expand the analysis of the politics involved in struggles against extractivism beyond social struggles.