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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.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Ulf Bengtsson works for Motorola Inc. as an Organization Effectiveness consultant. In this role he works in the area of change acceleration, organization design, and other strategic OD initiatives. His undergraduate degree is in Organizational Communication from Cleveland State University and he earned a Masters in Management and Organizational Behavior (concentration in OD) from Benedictine University. He has done award-winning papers and presentations and has numerous publications on topics including organizational behavior, organization development, and appreciative inquiry. A Swedish citizen, he now resides in Chicago. Ulf can be reached at: Ulfl@motorola.com.Allen C. Bluedorn (Ph.D. in sociology, University of Iowa) is the Emma S. Hibbs Distinguished Professor and the Chair of the Department of Management at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has taught and studied management and the organization sciences, first at the Pennsylvania State University, then for the last 23 years at the University of Missouri-Columbia. These efforts have produced seven major teaching awards, over 30 articles and chapters, and his recently published book, The Human Organization of Time (Stanford University Press, 2002). He has served as president of the Midwest Academy of Management, as a member of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society’s board of directors, as a representative-at-large to the Academy of Management’s board of governors, as associate editor of Academy of Management Learning and Education, and as division chair of the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division.David Coghlan is a member of the School of Business Studies at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland. His research and teaching interests lie in the areas of organisation development, action research, action learning, clinical inquiry, practitioner research and doing action research in one’s own organisation. His most recent books include Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization (co-authored with Teresa Brannick, Sage, 2001), Changing Healthcare Organisations, (coauthored with Eilish Mc Auliffe, Blackhall: Dublin, 2003) and Managers Learning in Action (eds. D. Coghlan, T. Dromgoole, P. Joynt & P. Sorensen, Routledge, 2004).Paul Coughlan is Associate Professor of Operations Management at the University of Dublin, School of Business Studies, Trinity College, Ireland where, since 1993, he has researched and taught in the areas of operations management and product development. His active research interests relate to continuous improvement of practices and performance in product development and manufacturing operations. He is President of the Board of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, and a member of the board of the European Operations Management Association.Fariborz Damanpour received his Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Graduate School of Management at the Rutgers University in 1985. Currently he is a professor at the Department of Management and Global Business of the Rutgers Business School, where he served as the chairperson of the management department from 1996 to 2002. Prior to his academic career, he worked as an engineer, an organizational development consultant, and the manager of a start-up unit in a large organization. His primary areas of research have been management of innovation and organization design and change. His papers have been published in several management and technology management journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Journal of Management Studies, Management Science, Organization Studies, and Strategic Management Journal. He serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, and Journal of Management Studies.Joyce Falkenberg is Professor of Strategy and Associate Dean of the School of Management at Agder University College (HiA) in Kristiansand, Norway. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1984. Her dissertation focused on strategic change and adaptation as a response to changes in the environment. Her research has continued the focus on strategic change with an emphasis on implementation. Recent work has combined this emphasis with the strategy issues of congition, strategizing, and resource based perspective. Before coming to HiA in the summer of 2003, Joyce Falkenberg was a member of the faculty at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. She taught in many international programs, including NHHs Masters of International Business; executive masters programs in Russia and Poland; and held seminars in Latvia, China, Switzerland, and Germany. Falkenberg has served on the Executive Board of the Academy of Management Business Policy Division and on the Editorial Board of the Academy of Management Review.Mary A. Ferdig Ph.D., is Director of the Sustainability Leadership Institute in Middlebury, Vermont, a research and education organization dedicated to developing leadership capacity for building a more sustainable world. Her research interests focus on leadership for sustainable organizational and social change, grounded in complexity and social constructionist perspectives. She consults with leaders in not-for-profit and business sectors as well as teaching process consultation and leadership communication in the Management and Organizational Behavior Master’s program at Benedictine University and the Public Administration and Community Services program at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She also serves as an External Examiner in the Doctoral Program in the Complexity Management Centre, Hertfordshire University, London, U.K.Robert T. Golembiewski is Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus at the University of Georgia, where he is part of the Public Administration program. Bob G is an internationally-active consultant in planned change, and he is the only pracademic who has won all of the major research prizes in management: the Irwin in business, Waldo Award in PA, the NASPAA Award in public policy, two McGregor awards for excellence in the application of the behavioral sciences, and the ODI Prize for global programs in planned change.

Given the rising complexities around organizational resilience, this study identifies and explains the critical enablers of developing organizational resilience (OR). It offers logical reasoning into the interactions and interdependencies among the identified elements with the help of a hierarchical model of the antecedents of OR.

This paper deployed a mixed methodology research design. Firstly, critical enablers of OR are identified from the literature review. Second, contextual relationships and interactions between the enablers are examined using modified total interpretive structural modeling to derive a hierarchical model among the antecedents that characterize OR. Lastly, a survey study including industry experts is used to statistically verify the model links.

Developing resilience lies at the intersection of organization science and strategic management, involving the interaction of factors within an organization’s strategic behaviors, organizational practices, and people processes. The study identifies twelve antecedents of OR. The resultant interpretive hierarchical model helped decipher internal relationships among the antecedents. The proposed model helps determine how organizations move through different phases (before, during, and after) of turbulences and how organizational resilience helps overcome negative spirals.

This research is original and refreshing in its attempt to necessitate resilience as a processual characteristic needed to survive, thrive, and transform amidst business tensions. The hierarchical model of antecedents garners a better understanding of how their interactions and interdependencies help organizations enhance their capacity to adapt and build resilience in organizational systems and processes. It answers questions of “what,” “how,” and “why” relevant to theory building in OR.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), recognized as the father of philosophical pragmatism, has been described as a philosopher’s philosopher. Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt (1947–2011), considered the father of the management philosophy theory of constraints (TOC), has been described as being, first and foremost, a philosopher. The TOC body of knowledge is mainly preserved as concrete methodologies used in the management discipline. By examining the foundational elements of synechism and the TOC, the purpose of this study is to investigate the intellectual connections between the arguments and legacies of Goldratt and Peirce. Although this connection is worthy of much further investigation, the research emphasizes the possible implications from a management philosophy perspective.

Based on a “review with an attitude,” the authors first examined the foundations of Goldratt’s TOC through the lens of Peirce’s synechism. Next, the authors then examined how the study of Peirce combined with a selection of contemporary research in the management and organizational studies domain could point out a direction toward completing Goldratt’s unfinished intellectual work to establish a unified science management while addressing some of the current gaps in the TOC body of knowledge.

Major findings show that synechism’s growth may extend TOC knowledge, improving managerial practice in organizations. Findings on the convergent ideas of both also reveal that Goldratt valued all synechism categories, emphasizing the importance of not overlooking Firstness. Furthermore, the study analyzes the abductive inference demonstrated in the two use cases, introducing an additional metaphor to the management of organizational systems inspired by Peirce’s philosophical concepts. The research concludes that incorporating TOC and synechism principles can enhance management and organizational practices and enrich management philosophy and theories.

This pioneering research opens promising opportunities to draw parallels between Peirce and Goldratt. Interdisciplinary collaboration will enhance the rigor and validity of integrating synechism and TOC. Experts in organizational behavior, systems theory and complexity science can provide valuable insights into this debate, while practitioners and consultants could help identify barriers and opportunities for integrating synechistic principles.

The study proposes a novel abductive approach using Peirce’s cable metaphor as an initial framework to build a unified science of management based on evolutionary stages: TOC, common sense and connectedness.

This research reinforces the argument that contemporary management practices need philosophical thinking. The authors argue that re-evaluating the foundations of management thought enriches the decision-making process in organizations and the understanding of contemporary theories in management and organizational studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the efficacy of knowledge management (KM) based systems and best practices that could be used to address operational issues in the oil and gas sector.

Given little was known empirically about the strategies and practices which contribute to improved performance, innovation and continuous improvement in the oil and gas sector qualitative method was used. Semi-structured interviews were used to derive senior managers’ constructs of project delivery efficiency and KM based systems. The interviews were analysed through the use of a qualitative analysis software package NUDIST NVivoTM. Participants were selected using purposive sampling. Validity and reliability were achieved by first assessing the plausibility in terms of already existing knowledge on some of the operational issues raised by participants.

These were synthesised into a framework capturing seven well-defined stages. All these steps emerged as being related; they are comprised of independent variables. These steps were found to comprise of knowledge management technology approaches, knowledge management people approaches, KM strategies and value enhancing practices.

Although the findings are pertinent to oil and gas organisations, it will be important to conduct follow-up research validating the potential for using the results of this study to establish frameworks for knowledge and information management in different organisations and contexts. This will provide not only data about the validity of the framework in generic terms but will also generate additional data on the application of KM strategy.

As shown in this study, successful KM based systems requires the aligning of business strategy, technology for KM, project management operations with an enterprise knowledge-sharing culture. Such sharing requires managing the behaviour of project personnel such that knowledge transfer becomes part of the organisation’s norm.

The implementation of KM based systems requires deliberate planning and action to create the conditions for success and put in place the strategy, leadership, goals, process, skills, systems, issue resolution, and structure to direct and exploit the dynamic nature of project work. The strategies proposed in this research cannot be expected to resolve all KM issues in the oil and gas sector. However, their use defines an approach that is superior to the traditional approaches typically adopted and consequently merits far wider application.

The proposed framework presents a better way of optimising the performance of project-based operations thus enabling oil and gas organisations to reform their poor performance on projects and empower them to better manage emerging cultural challenges in their future projects. Reflecting on their experiences, the participants confirmed that the proposed KM framework and its seven well-defined stages were central to the effectiveness of KM in oil and gas operations. Although the scope of this research was restricted to projects in Nigeria and the UK, the geographical focus of this research does not invalidate these results with respect to other countries. The fact is that the oil and gas sector globally shares some common fundamental characteristics.

The article builds upon recent developments in feminist theories as they were adopted in organization studies to review the state of research into women in MNCs and to offer new directions for the study of MNCs as “gendering organizations,” both as they are shaped by gender relations and are active agents in constructing gender categories, division of labor, images, and inequalities. Juxtaposing insights from gender studies and International Business and Management, the article offers a new agenda for the studies of corporate internationalization and its social consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of where the course of the collective efforts in historical research on business and organizations has taken this discipline. By raising two key contributions that have sought to reshape the contours of management and organizational history, the authors trace the work of their field since their inception and, in doing so, critique the utility of these typologies as representative of diverse historical knowledge in management and organization studies (MOS).

Drawing on elements of an integrative review that seeks to critically appraise the foundation of knowledge built in a scholarly field, the authors interrogate the historical knowledge that has been (and is being) produced in three leading management and organizational history journals by synthesizing the posture history takes as an object and subject of study in MOS. Over 400 articles were closely examined and categorized using Rowlinson et al.’s (2014) research strategies in organizational history and Maclean et al.’s (2016) four conceptions of history. Then, this research was used to examine the integrity of these two typologies and their practice by management historians.

The bulk of the work our field has produced mirrors an analytically structured history feel – where “doing history” straddles careful divide between data analysis and narrative construction. Narrating as a conception of history used in organization studies research remains the most subscribed representation of the past. It was found that while some work may fit within these typologies, others especially those considered peripheral of mainstream history are difficult to confine to any one strategy or conception. The authors’ examination also found some potential for a creative synthesis between the two typologies.

Because only three management history journals are used in this analysis, bracketed by the choice of the periodization (between 2016 and 2019 inclusive), this study must not be viewed as being wholly representative of all historical research on business and organizations writ-large.

This research attempts to demonstrate the recent direction management and organizational historians have taken in crafting history. The authors embrace the opportunity to allow for this paper to act as a tool to familiarize a much broader audience to understand what has been constituted as historical research in MOS to-date and is especially useful to those who are already contributing to the field (e.g. doctoral students and junior scholars who have demonstrable interest in taking up historically inspired dissertations, articles, chapters and conference activities).

The research conducted in this article contributes to the debates that have sought to define the scholastic character of management and organizational history. The authors build on recent calls to take part in creating dialogue between and among each other, building on the collective efforts that advance history in both theory and practice.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.