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Based on themes the authors observed in workplace spirituality texts, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the historicity of these texts and induce a model to help them understand how this discourse of workplace spirituality came into being.

The authors perform intertextual analysis to show how authors draw upon concepts available in the broader discursive context, from which the authors produced a textscape of the workplace spirituality discourse to depict these layers of discursive interconnections.

The expressed novelty and recency of workplace spirituality as a form of management knowledge, the authors argue, is made ambiguous by its heavy borrowing from other discourses. The authors show how existent spiritual, organizational and societal-level discourses create the conditions of possibility for the discourse of workplace spirituality to emerge. Most of the authors within the corpus engaged the same theories in organizational studies that created the kind of workplaces they now seek to change.

The power of the workplace spirituality discourse to improve the state of workers and work and achieve the expressed desire for change may be diminished through the discursive practices of its authors.

The authors offer a visual “textscape” in which the findings are framed and hence operationalize this idea in a novel manner that contributes to the methods of discourse analysis. The findings also call for more critical reflection into whether workplace spirituality represents a solution to organizational problems when neither the workers nor work it constructs are particularly new.

This chapter outlines a discursive epistemology of knowledge production through an analysis of the role of time and context in the social construction of organizational insights, outcomes and theories. While the role of time and context has been widely acknowledged in organizational discourse analysis, it has remained unclear what is specific to knowledge generation. Drawing upon a case study of an attempted company acquisition, the authors illustrate how knowledge is discursively produced and consumed during a process of strategizing. The analysis of this study shows how knowledge producing processes (e.g., strategizing, theorizing, conceptualizing and hypothesizing) extend both the time horizon of discourses that relate to the future, and the context horizon for discourse(s) that relate to the broader context. This reconstructs the tapestry of interwoven discourses that make up a local discourse and enable new managerial knowledge to be produced.

The purpose of this conceptual study is to explain the way in which employees influence social innovation in the employee–organization relationship, such as job crafting, i-deals, New World of Work, talent management, or high performance work practices.

This study applies a practice perspective in order to explain how employees affect their employee–organization relationship and thus influence the outcomes of social innovation.

The theoretical exploration suggest that employees can engage in the enactment of the employee–organization relationship in three ways: enacting employment relationships, enacting employment practices, and enacting employment practices’ outcomes. In doing so, they can draw on interpretive schemes, resources, and norms for realizing the benefits of social innovation for themselves and/or their employer.

Although organizations have started social innovation initiatives that allow employees to actively shape the employee–organization relationship, existing studies still treat employees as inactive recipients in the relationship with their employer. As a result, it remains unclear how social innovation in employee–organization relationships is implemented in practice and thus, how social innovation provides benefits to the employee and the organization. The originality of this study is its focus on how employees, as (pro-)active constituents, shape the employee–organization relationship, for finding better explanations of the outcomes of social innovation initiatives.

Ideology is discussed as the missing link between material practices and symbolic constructions in defining institutional logics. Institutional streams are proposed as disembedded institutional logics traveling as ideologies that are taken for granted. They affect specific (inter)action contexts on a global level providing institutional entrepreneurs and workers with symbolic elements to translate into local institutional arrangements. Such translations can give rise to institutional change. Local translation of nonlocal elements advances the interests of the elites of the “sending” institutional context, as well as it may advance those of the receiving one. Dominant transnational streams may or may not coalesce to form a global world order.

The chapter elaborates how organizational governance can optimally address workplace bullying, a synergy possible because organizational governance seeks to promote ethical functioning while workplace bullying is considered an unethical behavior. Through its suggestions, the chapter aims at furthering employee dignity and well-being, cohering with international calls for human rights at work.

A review of two literatures was conducted: (a) workplace bullying differentiated on the basis of its situatedness and level into internal bullying – of an interpersonal and depersonalized nature – and external bullying; and (b) organizational governance including its theoretical perspectives, especially the societal lens, and international, national, and firm codes.

Several organizational governance measures at institutional level – both international and national in scope – and at firm level are proposed to deal with varieties of workplace bullying encompassing primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. Accordingly, a shift in organizational effectiveness from goal-based models to process-oriented frameworks so that economic and non-economic objectives are balanced, following the stakeholder approach, is advocated. The political dynamics involved in such an initiative are alluded to.

Application, drawing on secondary rather than primary data, is the essential thrust of the chapter, with recommendations anchored in organizational governance, particularly its societal perspective, conceptualized to address workplace bullying in a holistic manner.

First, despite the clear relevance of organizational governance to workplace bullying, the prospect of interventions from this standpoint has never been previously explored. Second, the term “varieties of workplace bullying” is propounded to capture the different types of emotional abuse at work known so far.

This work examines the intersection between traditional human resource management and the novel employment arrangements of the expanding gig economy. While there is a substantial multidisciplinary literature on the digital platform labor phenomenon, it has been largely centered on the experiences of gig workers. As digital labor platforms continue to grow and specialize, more managers, executives, and human resource practitioners will need to make decisions about whether and how to utilize gig workers. Here the authors explore and interrogate the unique features of human resource management (HRM) activities in the context of digital labor platforms. The authors discuss challenges and opportunities regarding (1) HRM in organizations that outsource labor needs to external labor platforms, (2) HRM functions within digital labor platform firms, and (3) HRM policies and practices for organizations that develop their own spin-off digital labor platform. To foster a more nuanced understanding of work in the gig economy, the authors identify common themes across these contexts, highlight knowledge gaps, offer recommendations for future research, and outline pathways for collecting empirical data on HRM in the gig economy.

The discourse of human resource management (HRM) is increasingly dominated by a normative, consensus‐oriented perspective on managing the employment relationship. This paper aims to explore the potential of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to provide new and different understandings of HRM and processes of organisational change, and which highlights the creative role of language in the shaping of organisation and management practice.

A case study analysis of managers' experiences of introducing change in a large catering firm is drawn upon to highlight the inherent tensions in people management, which stem from the need for employers to motivate and control labour in order to remain profitable. This is illustrated in a change programme aimed at increasing organisational efficiency and achieving a “results driven culture” that exhorted managers to think and behave as “entrepreneurs” and to “comply” with stringent new rules on managing their staff.

It is concluded that conflict and resistance is an inevitable feature of HRM‐based initiatives and that CDA offers a powerful lens for exploring this dynamic. Importantly, it provides a less restrictive view of management decision making than that found in conventional understandings of HRM, which tend to treat management as a more or less culturally unified body, and ignores the subjectivity of managers. In contrast, the empirical evidence presented here provides an example of how the deployment of CDA can provide rich insights into the dynamics of HRM‐based change rooted in a complex shifting network of alliances (and related discourses).

Focus is placed on how concepts, objects and subject positions are constituted through language and embedded in power relations.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005

The main aim of this study is to examine a moderated–mediated model empirically to understand whether and how spiritual leadership (SL) affects corporate social entrepreneurial orientation (SEO) with the role of workplace spirituality (WS).

The study adopts a sample of 524 key role employees at 76 four–five-star hotels and tourism firms in Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam, using a partial least square structural equation model (PLS-SEM).

SL of social entrepreneurs can vigorously promote corporate SEO's formation and development, with WS's mediating role.

This study demonstrates how SL and WS can help organisations achieve higher corporate SEO levels in contradictory empirical evidence and a lack of theoretical framework.