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In this introduction, the authors outline some critical reflections on the sociology of knowledge within management and organization theory. Based on a review of various works that form a sociology of organizational knowledge, the authors identify three approaches that have become particularly prominent ways by which scholars explore how knowledge about organizations and management is produced: First, reflective and opinion essays that organization studies scholars offer on the basis of what can be learned from personal experience; second, descriptive craft-guides that are based on more-or-less comprehensive surveys on doing research; third, papers based on systematic research that are built upon rigorous collection and analysis of data about the production of knowledge. Whereas in the studies of organizing the authors prioritize the third approach, that is knowledge produced based on systematic empirical research, in examining our own work the authors tend to privilege the other two types, reflective articles and surveys. In what follows the authors highlight this gap, offer some explanations thereof, and call for a better appreciation of all three ways to offer rich understandings of organizations, work and management as well as a fruitful sociology of knowledge in our field.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to describe and explain how organisations use internal projects to implement organisation-level strategy objectives.

Theory development with an emphasis on explaining key constructs and their mutual relationships. The theoretical contribution is represented in a diagram along with a detailed verbal account.

The paper develops a dynamic, cross-level framework to illustrate the organisational processes and outcomes that determine project-based strategy implementation within a single organisation. The interplay between the base organisation and the project, and benefits realisation were singled out as key future research areas. The proposed framework engages with central discourses in the fields of project management, strategic management, innovation studies, knowledge management and organisation studies.

Only the contours of an organisation-level theory of strategically motivated internal projects are outlined. Future research must elaborate on the complexities, the non-linear relationships and the boundary conditions that follow from the proposed framework.

Managers are alerted to the strategic role of internal projects, how these projects help connect strategy and performance and what the accompanying organisational processes and outcomes look like.

The paper constitutes an early conceptual treatment of strategy-driven internal projects as a distinct project category, thus addressing a major knowledge gap in project studies. Organisational project-management theory is extended with suggestions for future research.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.

Bringing spiritual and religious perspectives to management and organization research requires clarifying the methodological implications and grappling with the diversity that characterizes the research community. This article aims to address both of these issues. The focal question addressed here is, how might spiritual and religious researchers effectively engage in interfaith dialogue in the ostensibly secular field of management and organization studies?

This article takes exception to privileging secularism over other faiths and argues for admitting spiritual and religious perspectives into the field of management and organization studies. It addresses how theological reflection can be carried out within a spiritually and religiously pluralist research community in management and organization studies.

Section 2 characterizes secularity and raises the possibility of moving beyond secularism to interfaith dialogue in the field of management and organization studies. Section 3 reviews influential perspectives on dialogue to identify attitudes and behaviors conducive to social learning. Section 4 introduces theological reflection as a method for conducting management and organization research and provides guidance and methods for pursuing interfaith dialogue.

This article proposes interfaith dialogue as a way to explore important assumptions, ultimate concerns and innovative practices that currently go largely unraised in management and organization research.

This article adds to the methods available in the field by characterizing effective dialogue and introducing and explaining theological reflection. It contributes general guidance and proposes specific methods for moving to interfaith dialogue among researchers working from diverse faiths.

This article is devoted to conditions and examples of how theories may be applied as methods in the fields of management research and organization studies.

An introduction to minimum requirements for a successful refunctionalization of theory as method as well as to nine contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management on “Theory as method” is provided.

The review of these nine cases suggests that the use of theories as methods is not necessarily harmful for the former, and particularly not for the more robust among them.

This article sheds new light on the value of theoretical monism or loyalty and calls for a reassessment of the relative value of expertise in a specific research field, method and or theory.

This paper aims to investigate the conceptualisation of corporate communication management (CCM) and its dimensionality from the practitioners’ perspectives. It proposes to validate an operational definition and dimensions of the CCM construct, which have not been identified in the literature.

The initial concepts are based on academic literature and followed by 12 face-to-face interviews with corporate communication practitioners and consultants from Malaysia to confirm the practicality of each dimension. QSR Nvivo Version 9.0 software is used to analyse the qualitative data. Then, the data are classified through deductive content analysis based on key words or themes.

The diverse perspectives are shown from the practitioners and consultants on the dimensionality of CCM. Most of the interviewees suggest that CCM dimensions include corporate advertising, corporate affairs, investor relations and employee communication within the corporate communication and other departments. They also found the public relations and media relations are clearly under corporate communications manager’s supervision. This research confirms the concept of CCM and its dimensionality to operationalise the CCM construct. The CCM dimensions also offer opportunities for further research to develop the measurement scales.

This research contributes to the clarification on the subject matter by developing clear concepts of the CCM and by offering insights about the role of the CCM dimensions, which help managers to more successfully incorporate the CCM dimension into the corporate management strategy. This paper also examines the concept of CCM and confirms its dimensionality, which helps in developing the CCM measurement for further quantitative research.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the development of visual qualitative research in organizations and management over the past ten years, the experience of editing a special issue of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management entitled “Exploring the visual in organizations and management”, and the potential contributions this journal could make to the advancement of this significant area of research.

This paper provides an overview and critical reflections on visual qualitative research in the study of organizations and management.

The authors note that organization studies have been slow to develop visual research compared to other disciplines, especially the humanities and branches of the social sciences. However, development has been rapid over the past decade, and the authors comment on the diverse visual empirical material and the range of conceptual approaches.

The paper is a condensed reflection. It predicts a “mainstreaming” of visual research in future years and an increased integration of the visual into the study of management processes and organizations.

This piece provides useful directions and references for researchers new to the field and different ways of thinking the visual and visual methodologies.

The paper provides a rapid overview of the state of visual research in organizations and management studies.

Standards are written by practitioners for practitioners. It is therefore logical that project managers should comply with project management standards. Benefits management is a domain within programme management. The focus of benefits management is to deliver benefits of initiatives beyond the closure of a normal programme or project. This is not the case with projects within the information systems (IS) discipline, implying that IS programme and project managers are not adhering to standards. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the best practices associated with benefits management are applied to IS initiatives in order to maximise the benefits of these initiatives.

Senior and middle managers in South African organisations were interviewed to determine how benefits are managed within their various projects. The purpose of the interviews was to determine adherence to standards and especially benefits management and, second, to determine whether these organisations are achieving any benefits and ultimately value.

There is an overwhelming non-adherence to benefits management best practices within the IS discipline, and IS programme and project managers do not have the slightest idea how to perform benefits management. Irrespective of this, organisations do believe that they are receiving benefits and value from these IS projects.

The research was only done in South Africa with the specific focus of IS. The results are thus very specific and opens the door for more comprehensive research that focusses on various industries, countries and standards.

The results have several implications ranging from how standards are written to the professionalism of IS programmes and project managers. Organisations are not achieving the optimal benefits from investments. The fact that organisations do realise benefits from a broken process, implies that more benefits can be realised when the entire benefits realisation process is followed. Governance controls should also be put in place to ensure that programme and project managers are adhering to standards.

Standards are dominating the project management discipline and there is a general assumption that programme and project managers are adhering these standards. This research queries the value of standards as the results indicate that there is limited adherence to standards and best practices.

The purpose of the paper is to critically question conventional views of the one‐dimensional, mechanistic and negative image of human nature of Scientific Management. Both for worker behavior and for managerial behavior positive aspects of an image of human nature are reconstructed in organizational economic terms.

Through institutional economic reconstruction, drawing on the methods and concepts of organizational and institutional economics, the portrayal of workers and managers by Scientific Management is critically assessed.

It is suggested that a conceptual asymmetry exists in Taylor's writings regarding the portrayal of human nature of workers and managers. Whereas for workers a model of self‐interest was applied (through the concepts of “systematic soldering” and “natural soldiering”), Taylor portrayed managers through a positive, behavioral model of human nature that depicted the manager as “heartily cooperative”. The key thesis is that by modeling managers through a rather positive image of human nature Taylor could no longer methodically apply the model of economic man in order to test out and prevent interaction conflict between potentially self‐interested managers and workers.

The paper focused on Scientific Management to advance the thesis that the portrayal of human nature has been ill approached by management and organization theorists who were apparently pioneering an institutional and organizational economics. Future research has to broaden the scope of research to other pioneers in management and organization research, but also to critics in behavioral sciences, such as organization psychology, who may misunderstand how economics approaches the portrayal of human nature, in particular regarding self‐interest.

Taylor's portrayal of managers as naturally good persons, who were not self‐interested, caused implementation conflict and implementation problems for Scientific Management and led to his summoning by the US Congress. By modeling managers as heartily cooperative, Taylor could no longer analyze potentially self‐interested behavior, even opportunistic behavior of managers in their interactions with workers. Scientific Management had thus no remedy to handle “soldiering” of managers. This insight, that managerialism needs to be accounted for in a management theory, has manifold practical implications for management consultancy, management education, and for the practice of management in general. Students and practitioners have to be informed about the necessary and useful role a model of self‐interest (economic man) methodically plays in economic management theory.

The paper reconstructs the portrayal of human nature in early management theory, which seemingly anticipated the advances – and certain pitfalls – of modern institutional economics. The paper unearths, from an economic perspective, conceptual misunderstandings of Taylor regarding his image of human nature of workers and managers.