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The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework that explains structural responses to external organizational shocks. The authors illustrate framework dynamics with one district's secondary schools' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The conceptual framework imagines structure as emergent, dynamic and responsive to external pressures, as the authors posited in an earlier publication. From an open systems perspective, the authors focus on restructuring for more effective sensemaking and bridging and buffering.

The framework in this paper shows promise for its descriptive power. Interview participants' recollections of their responses to COVID-19 revealed an emergent structure and displayed evidence of crisis management, sensemaking and bridging and buffering.

The intent of this article, consistent with the special issue, is to propose a set of concepts that, together, shed new light on how researchers and leaders might think about structural adaptations to external influences. The conceptual framework shows promise, but has yet to be put to the test with systematic empirical research.

The conceptual framework the authors develop here may serve to guide empirical research that expands knowledge of how school and district structures adapt to external influences. Viewing structure as supportive of adaptation to changing circumstances also informs preparation for and practice of education leadership.

Capturing school and district leaders' recollections shortly after their schools' return to in-person learning is rare in the literature, and examining their reactions from an open systems perspective sheds new light on leadership under stress.

The purpose of this paper is to test the model first presented by Federici and Skaalvik (2012) involving the relationships among four attributes of principals’ work: self-efficacy, burnout, job satisfaction, and intention to leave (persistence). The model is then extended to test the role of isolation as a precursor.

Path analysis is used to test the models, based on responses from an electronic survey of first-year principals in a southeastern US state, using established measures of each construct.

First, the results show support for the model presented by Federici and Skaalvik, supporting their original hypotheses. Second, the authors show that isolation is an important predictor of all four constructs in the model, and that when included as an antecedent factor, isolation represents the most potent predictor of new principals’ intention to leave.

The analysis involves a sample of new principals from a single setting, thus limiting generalizability. Additionally, the exclusive use of self-reported data in this study raises the possibility that the results are influenced by single-source bias.

The findings showing that isolation is a significant predictor of work outcomes, such as efficacy and satisfaction, and an important predictor of persistence suggest that scholars and practitioners alike need to consider ways to understand and mitigate the sources of isolation experienced by school leaders.

Isolation is largely neglected in empirical studies of principals’ work. This study adds to what is known and raises questions about the study of isolation experienced by school leaders.

The primary purpose is to present empirical measures of variables relating to practices engaged in by site‐based teams, and then to use these variables to test a model predicting significant outcomes of site‐based decision making. The practice variables of site‐based management (SBM) teams are essential in promoting research within a distributed leadership framework.

A path model is computed to test the relationships between factors relating to the support received by site‐based teams; site team communication and decision‐making practice, and perceived outcomes of SBM. Measures are based on survey data collected from 367 team members in 50 schools from fifteen school districts in a northeastern state in the US.

Results show that different factors relating to the support provided to site‐based teams and practices employed by these teams emerge as statistically significant predictors of various outcomes. Results suggest that the resources provided to support site teams, e.g. the devolution of decision‐making power, results in enhanced stakeholder influence, but whether this influence results in better decisions or improvement in teaching and learning depends on the communication and decision‐making practices site teams employ within a distributed leadership framework.

This study sought to identify site team decision making and communication processes that reflect how site teams conduct their work, defining how members of site teams perceive the “rules of the game.” In doing so, it offers a new and different perspective on how such processes impact outcomes associated with shared decision‐making processes, and thus a better understanding of the complex dynamics of school‐site decision making and the distribution of leadership in schools.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.

Economics and political philosophy tend to lead separate existences in separate university departments. This paper argues that there are gains to be had in the understanding of the teaching of economics if the intellectual divide between these disciplines is bridged. The history of economic thought owes its evolution in part to responses at particular points in time to the enduring questions of political philosophy. A more deep‐seated understanding of economics and of HET is therefore available if considered in conscious alliance with the history of political philosophy (HPP). In short, the argument of this paper ‐ which considers five dimensions of the interdependence of HET and HPP ‐ is the reverse of Scott Gordon’s conclusion that economists have little or nothing to learn from philosophers.

Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power has received relatively little attention despite its novelty and theoretical potential. This paper explores the meaning and implications of the construct, and integrates it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Drawing on an extensive dataset profiling the careers of members of the French business elite, it compares and contrasts those who enter the field of power with those who fail to qualify for membership, exploring why some succeed as hyper-agents while others do not. The alliance of social origin and educational attainment, class and meritocracy, emerges as particularly compelling. The field of power is shown to be relatively variegated and fluid, connecting agents from different life worlds. Methodologically, this paper connects biographical data of top French directors with the field of power in France in a novel way, while presenting an operationalization of Bourdieu’s concept of the field of power as applied to the French elite.

This chapter discusses the use of qualitative content analysis in the field of hospitality and tourism. The primary objective of this chapter is to draw attention to the use of a content analysis approach for the treatment of data. As a further objective, the chapter contributes to current knowledge by underscoring a qualitative content analysis approach that would be of benefit to hospitality and tourism scholars. Overall, the chapter serves to inform hospitality and tourism scholars of how to increase the trustworthiness of qualitative content analysis approaches, which is seen as one of the most crucial impediments to its use.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.