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We illustrate the potential of diaries for advancing scholarship on organization studies and grand challenges. Writing personal diaries is a time-honored and culturally sanctioned way of animating innermost thoughts and feelings, and embodying experiences through self-talk with famous examples, such as the diaries written by Anne Frank, Andy Warhol, or Thomas Mann. However, the use of diaries has long been neglected in organization studies, despite their historical and societal importance. We illustrate how different forms of analyzing diaries enable a “deep analysis of individuals’ internal processes and practices” (Radcliffe, 2018) which cannot be gleaned from other sources of data such as interviews and observations. Diaries exist in different forms, such as “unsolicited diaries” and “solicited diaries” and have different purposes. We evaluate how analyzing diaries can be a valuable source to illuminate the innermost thoughts and feelings of people at the forefront of grand challenges. To exemplify our arguments, we draw on diaries written by medical professionals working for Doctors Without Borders as part of our empirical research project conducted in extreme contexts. We show the value of unsolicited diaries in revealing people’s thought world that is not apprehensible from other modes of communication, and offer a set of practical guidelines on working with data from diaries. Diaries serve to enrich our methodological toolkit by capturing what people think and feel behind the scenes but may not express nor display in public.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in local institutional change. To what extent do multinational organizations help or hinder change, in particular new industry creation?

The paper presents a qualitative case study examining the role of multinational temporary work agencies in the development of temporary agency market in Spain.

The authors find that while multinational firms were less constrained by the norms, values and logics of the home environment, they also encountered specific challenges in the implementation of new practices. First, high‐profile introduction of a novel practice requires checks and balances to manage unanticipated developments, such as undesirable activities by opportunistic actors that may derail the change process. Second, rapid growth is not conducive to concerted efforts at industry level, leaving the public identity of the institutional innovation extremely vulnerable. Third, high‐profile change is also vulnerable to redefinition of the practice through misinterpretation or misuse by inexperienced users.

The findings highlight the interaction between global and local actors in the development of a novel market and the main findings provide three concrete aspects of the change process that need to be carefully monitored in processes of MNC‐driven institutional change.

MNCs have been argued to be important agents of change in an organizational field as they are less bound by the norms, values and logics of any particular institutional environment. The authors' analysis shows how this disconnectedness of MNCs can also hinder the change effort in three important ways.

It has been well established that organizations often need to restructure themselves to meet new technological challenges. We review the organizational impact of a recent technological development, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 that enables users to leverage the Internet and generate “user-generated content” by acting as a supplier, co-producer, or even innovator of products and services. We draw on the social studies of technology, including actor-network theory to develop a conceptual understanding of how this phenomenon is challenging deeply entrenched mental models among managers and management theorists as well as problematizing the way organizational boundaries are conventionally drawn.

Recent studies in strategy have highlighted both the successes and failures of applying conventional perspectives in strategic management to developing markets. Within this debate, Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies, aimed at exploiting high-volume, low-margins strata at the bottom of these societies, have particularly drawn interest. We critically examine the emergence and evolution of BoP strategies and compare their anticipated outcomes to some of the empirical evidence. We then draw on the concept of global value chains to usefully extend the BoP concept, and suggest areas for further theory building and empirical research. We offer a typology of BoP ventures, and suggest appropriate levels of public–private engagement to achieve the desired social and economic outcomes.

Joan undertook the ground-breaking project originally reported in the 1958 pamphlet, Management and Technology, not at one of Britain's great universities, but at the unfashionable address of the South East Essex Technical College (then in the county of Essex but now part of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham). The Human Relations Research Unit had been set up at the college, which is now part of the University of East London, in 1953 with support from a number of agencies including funding ultimately derived from the Marshall Plan. Its express purpose was to enhance the performance of industry and commerce through the application of social science. Those readers familiar with the area will know that, at the time, it was economically and culturally dominated by the Ford assembly plant in nearby Dagenham, but it was also home to a diverse range of small- and medium-sized industrial workshops that were typical of the pre-war Greater London economy (Woodward, 1965; Massey & Meegan, 1982). It was into this diverse industrial milieu that Joan and her research team ventured (Fig. 1), completing their main study in 1958.