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This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

Goffman’s (1961) work on total institutions has been relatively neglected in the fields of organizational research. This paper compares the conceptions of obedience to authority in two different types of voluntary total institutions and how such conceptions affect interaction contrary to the aims of the organizations. Consequently, by addressing how conceptions of authority and constructions of the obedient self shape conditions for underlife, the analysis provides knowledge about the variety of ways in which total institutional authority works and contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of organizational underlife.

Sport organizations hold substantial ideological power to showcase and reinforce dominant cultural ideas about gender. The organization and portrayal of sporting events and spaces continue to promote and reinforce a hierarchical gender binary where heroic forms of masculinity are both desired and privileged. Such publicly visible gender hierarchies contribute to the doing of gender beyond sport itself, extending to influence gender power relations within sport and non-sport organizations. Yet, there has been a relative absence of scholarship on sport organizations within the organizational sociology field. In this paper, we review findings of studies that look at how formal and informal organizational dimensions influence the doing and undoing of gender in sport organizations. Subsequently, we call for scholars to pay more attention to sport itself as a source of gendered organizational practices within both sport and non-sport organizations. We end with suggestions for research that empirically explores this linkage by focusing on innovative theoretical perspectives that could provide new insights on gender inclusion in organizations.

Organizations are affected top-down by the overarching societies and bottom-up by foundational face-to-face encounters: societies provide norms, values, laws, institutions, beliefs, markets, political structures, and knowledge bases. What happens within organizations is done by people interacting with other people, arguing, discussing, convincing each other when preparing and making decisions. Organizations operate within social environments that leave their – however indirect – imprint on what is going on within organizations. This article argues that organizational sociology can benefit from an integrated theoretical framework that accounts for the embeddedness of organizations within the micro- and macro-levels of social order. The argument is developed in two main points: First, this article introduces the multilevel framework provided by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory to demonstrate how organizations are shaped by the functionally differentiated macro-structure of society. Organizations follow and reproduce the operational logics of societal domains such as the political system, the economy, science, law, religion, etc. Second, this paper demonstrates how organizations are shaped by micro-level dynamics of face-to-face interactions. Face-to-face encounters form a social reality of its own kind that restricts and resists the formalization of organizational processes. Here, this article draws on Erving Goffman’s and Randall Collins’ work on interaction rituals, emotions, and solidarity, which is inspired by Durkheimian micro-sociology. At the end, this article brings together all the elements into one general account of organizations within the context of their macro- and micro-structural social environments. This account can yield a deeper and more sociological understanding of organizational behavior.

Our chapter explores the benefits of informal academic communities by focusing on the Finland-based early career higher education researchers' network (ECRN). Established two years ago, the ECRN primarily operates through monthly online coffee meetings. Via dialogical reflections by the authors and a qualitative inquiry into the ECRN, we explore the ECRN's role in its members' professional growth and well-being. We provide a narrative vignette of an imagined online coffee meeting to illustrate the significant peer-learning conversations in the ECRN. Based on our dialogical approach, we conclude that the ECRN is beneficial for its members' professional growth and well-being as it provides peer support, information sharing, scholarly support and higher education research-related support. Hence, we call for academia to better recognise and support informal academic communities as they have the potential to nourish a more collaborative working culture in academia.