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This chapter suggests that moving beyond positivism entails a recognition that the social world is made up of complex phenomena that are heterogeneous, and events are caused by contingent conjunctures of causal mechanisms. To theorize the social world as heterogeneous is to recognize that social causes, categories, and groups combine different kinds of phenomena and processes at various levels and scales across time. To speak of conjunctural causation implies not only that events are caused by concatenations of multiple, intersecting forces but also that these combinations are historically unique and nonrepeatable. Both the historical materialist conception of the “conjuncture” and the poststructuralist theory of “assemblages” take heterogeneity and multicausality seriously. I compare and contrast these formulations across three dimensions: the structure of the apparatus, causation, and temporality. I argue that these theories offer useful tools to social scientists seeking to engage in complex, multicausal explanations. I end the article with an example of how to use these concepts in analyzing a complex historical case.

One of the two main tasks of innovation leadership, a practice to inspire and enable creativity and innovation in organisations, is to construct a creativity-enabling organisational environment. One form of this main task is using developmental interactions, like mentoring, as innovation leadership practices. A hackathon is one type of innovation contest with three designed phases: pre-hackathon, hackathon event and post-hackathon, involving multiple stakeholders with distinct roles, such as hackers and mentors. In a hackathon, the central activity of mentors is to support the hackers’ innovation process, especially in idea creation and concept development. The mentor role has not been focal in hackathon studies; thus, this chapter addresses the role, impact, and ways to acknowledge the mentors as an integral, contributing innovation leadership practice in hackathons. As an empirical study, this chapter presents the results of a public sector case in a Swedish multi-disciplinary municipality conducting intra-organisational hackathons in three different collocations. The chapter contributes to the literature on innovation leadership at the team level with mentorship in innovation contests in the public sector context by revealing the dual-role tension of innovation leadership in mentor activities in the hackathon event phase from both the hackers’ and mentors’ viewpoints, and the necessity of mentor-benefitting training in pre-hackathon phase.

This paper explores the practicalities of organizational change in complex settings where much change has already occurred. It therefore offers insights into tackling and overcoming change fatigue.

The paper uses a longitudinal study of change within a healthcare organization. The paper draws on interviews, focus groups and observations during a 2.5‐year long action research project.

The paper reports findings on the speed at which change takes place, the importance of communication and the burden placed on senior officers during such communication and consultation processes, the use of appropriate external resources and expertise, the benefits of sharing best practice across sectors and the role of academic researchers in change processes.

The paper offers valuable insights to those charged with effecting organizational change in change fatigued settings.

As Ovid said, “There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent.” It is this very premise that frames the discoveries in this chapter and the compelling paradox it has raised. What began as a question of how performance is sustained, unveiled a collection of core organizational paradoxes. The findings ultimately suggest that sustained high performance is not a permanent state an organization achieves, but rather it is through perpetual movement and dynamic balance that sustainability occurs.

The idea of sustainability as movement is predicated on the ability of organizational members to move beyond the experience of paradox as an impediment to progress. Through holding three critical “movements” – agile/consistency, collective/individualism, and informative/inquiry – not as paradoxical, but as active polarities, the organizations in the study were able to transcend paradox, and take active steps to continuous achievement in outperforming their peers. The study, focused on a collection of hospitals across the Unites States, reveals powerful stories of care and service, of the profound grace of human capacity, and of clear actions taken to create significant results. All of this was achieved in an environment of great volatility, in essence an unbalanced system. It was the discovery of movement and ultimately of dynamic balancing that allowed the organizations to in this study to move beyond stasis to the continuous “state” of sustaining high performance.

This article examines the framing of immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City. A content analysis of local and national newspapers on the Lower East Side of the borough of Manhattan that included the infamous Five Points neighborhood demonstrates that the contemporaneous media narratives constructed a discourse of fear and contempt about residents of the area by emphasizing their alleged vice-ridden lifestyle. This discourse framed immigrants as a threat to the existing social order and diagnosed their moral failings on their cultural alienation. We argue that this process can be seen as an example of the exercise of symbolic power that sought to maintain existing social and cultural hierarchies by denigrating the disadvantaged sections of the population.

This chapter revisits central knowledge-based mechanisms that explain variance in value creation through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). It places the organizational capabilities of absorptive capacity and combinative capability in the context of M&As. Absorptive capacity – i.e., the combining firms’ ability to explore new knowledge – relies on the extent of prior related experiences of acquirers and their acquired firms, and available complementary knowledge among the two. Combinative capability – i.e., the combining firms’ ability to combine and recombine available existing knowledge – depends on the opportunity, motivation, and ability to share knowledge. The chapter concludes with several contextual factors that intensify the roles of knowledge, and reveal important contradictory roles in the development and value of absorptive capacity and combinative capability.

Across K–12 settings, instructional coaching continues to flourish as an approach to teacher professional development intended to address long-standing inequities in student achievement. Yet, coaching models differ in how to conceptualize change or transformation as a result of coaching efforts.

This case study problematizes the concept of change within one practice-based coaching program, by positing the possibilities of striving for transformational change directed at addressing educational inequities.

Qualitative methods reveal how coaching belief statements guide the burgeoning identities of beginning coaches to align to (and at times extend beyond) coaching for change through the lens of teacher practice.

Implications describe ways that coaching programs might utilize reflection and analysis activities to foster more equity-oriented coaching identities, regardless of coaching model.

Designing and facilitating authentic learning opportunities for coaches to reflect, rehearse, connect, and apply knowledge to practice as they develop their own understanding of what it means to coach for change is crucial.

The purpose of this paper is to present advances towards a social intrapreneurship department within energy corporations. By drawing on the literature on social intrapreneurship and stakeholder theory, this paper provides a conceptual proposal for an organisational structure. This paper builds on the notion of bridging and boundary organisations, to suggest an organisational innovative structure as a social intrapreneurship endeavour focussing on the increasing salience of weak stakeholders in energy corporations from the energy justice approach.

This paper draws on the literatures on social intrapreneurship and stakeholder theory, to provide arguments and an organisational proposal to alleviate energy poverty in energy corporations.

The results are presented in a conceptual process model for the development of Social Energy Department units within large energy companies, illustrating their embeddedness in both societal and company-level processes to facilitate social intrapreneurship initiatives that would alleviate energy poverty in the just transition.

The paper promises novel insights at the nexus of social enterprise and organisational change. The practical applicability is particularly promising, as it focusses on integrating novel units in energy companies and stimulates further research on models of social intrapreneurship to tackle energy poverty.

The paper offers both practical and theoretical contributions to the stakeholder theory field with insights from social intrapreneurship and organisational stakeholder theory in the context of a specific social problem – energy poverty, energy justice and the just energy transition.