Charlene Zietsma

To confront the climate crisis requires fundamental system change in order to break the convention of relentless economic exploitation of nature. In this Special Issue we extend understanding of the opportunities for an organizing perspective on sustainability in order that organization studies might contribute more effectively to the challenges of organizing sustainably. This organizing perspective is particularly sensitive to (1) a variety of forms and practices of sustainable organizing in different societal spheres and on different levels, (2) the social institutions, logics and value systems in which these forms and practices are embedded, (3) the power and politics of promoting (or blocking) sustainable organization, and (4) the ways in which work, voice, participation, and inclusion are organized and contribute to developing societal capabilities. These features formed the basis of our original call for papers and we review selected literature on sustainability, including the contribution of organization studies and the articles in this Special Issue, through this organizing perspective. In so doing we identify four key themes of a future research agenda that builds from the foundations of existing research and addresses key current limitations in both theory and practice: sustainability requires social justice; connecting local and global scale shifts; democratizing governance; and acting collectively. We conclude with some implications for our own scholarship in organization studies if we are to meet the twin challenges of the need for new theorizing in combination with devising practically relevant support for change.

I describe three types of inequalities that benefit “good apples” and harm women in Academe: inequality of recognition, inequality of effort required, and inequality in societal institutions around home and career. I then describe three hard things that “good apples” can do, focusing on the institutional level: building awareness, changing structures and adapting social norms.

Changes in societal logics often leave firms’ policies and practices out of step. Yet when firms introduce a change that brings in a new societal logic, employees may resist, even though they personally value the change, because the incoming logic conflicts with existing organizational logics. How can change agents handle logic-based resistance to an organizational initiative that introduces a new logic? We studied elite law firms that introduced a new role into their traditional up-or-out career path in response to associates’ anonymously expressed desire for better work–life balance, which associates resisted because expressing family concerns was illegitimate within the firms. Change agents responded to three forms of resisters’ logic-based concerns—irreconcilability, ambiguity, and contradiction—with three tailored responses—redirecting, reinforcing, and reassuring—using contextually legitimate logic elements. Over time logic elements of each concern–response pair harmonized to enable individuals to enact their logics seamlessly and organizations to update the existing logic settlement to assimilate the societal change. We demonstrate that the way available logics are accessed and activated between pluralistic change agents and resisters can enable logic settlements to be updated in response to societal change. We draw insights about how logics do or do not constrain agency.

Boundaries are a popular topic among organizational researchers, many of whom argue that over the past decade we have witnessed a trend toward permeable boundaries and in some cases a blurring between organization and environment. Contrary to received wisdom, we argue that the question as to whether organizational boundaries have become more permeable or not cannot be decided empirically but is mainly a theoretical issue. Whether or not data indicate permeability or impermeability depends on the theoretical lens employed. Against this backdrop, we review how two prominent approaches to the study of boundaries, sociological systems theory and new institutionalism, not only arrive at different conclusions but also mandate diverging avenues of research. We focus in depth on several empirical trends: advances in information and communication technologies, increasingly dynamic fields and markets, invasive transparency regimes, and meta-organizations. We then introduce the contributions in this volume, showing how they elaborate on these and other empirical trends, drawing on different theoretical perspectives, to advance our understanding of the importance of boundaries within and around organizations.

Disruptive innovation changes the basis of competition within an industry and poses substantial threats for market incumbents. While researchers have focused on whether incumbents can successfully adapt, we know little about how potentially disruptive innovation may be avoided. Studying clean technology in Canada, we examine incumbent resistance when potentially disruptive technologies are seen as socially beneficial. We identify actions taken by incumbents and other socio‐technical regime actors to respond to the issue while simultaneously enacting legitimate stabilizing mechanisms within the regime’s institutional infrastructure. Specifically, temporal and resource‐based actions led to temporal complexity for disruptive cleantech entrepreneurs, and evaluation structuring work led to latent control of the cleantech category, privileging incumbents and resulting in unobtrusive maintenance. Our findings contribute to the disruptive innovation and institutional theory literatures by showing how disruption may be stalled by the enactment of legitimate elements of the institutional infrastructure rather than direct institutional defence.

Emotions shape our lives and experiences as institutional actors, yet neo-institutional theorizing has paid scant attention to them until recently. In this introduction to the Special Themed Section, we explore why this blind spot has existed in past theorizing and aim to push scholarship further to elucidate the role that emotions play in institutional life. Drawing insights from the emerging literature and the four papers in this issue, we emphasize specific themes of interest for research on emotions and institutions. Specifically, we highlight the need for a focus on the role of emotions as: value-laden, constitutive of institutions, and energetic. We argue that foregrounding emotions promises a myriad of opportunities for future work and promises rich theoretical rewards.

In a longitudinal qualitative study of a water stewardship council, we build theory about how and why actors embedded in disparate logics across multiple fields can overcome the constraints of their home logics to construct a new, shared governance logic together. Our findings suggest a recursive model of new logic construction in which council members mobilize three emotional facilitators (social emotions, moral emotions, and emotional energy) to affect three logic construction cycles (agreeing on values, shared learning, and enacting shared values). Emotional facilitators work through three agentic mechanisms: enabling actors to become open and reflexive about their home logics and simultaneously increase their commitment to and engagement in constructing a shared governance logic. Ongoing interactions involving emotional facilitators, agentic mechanisms, and logic construction cycles are essential in sustaining the new logic. The process model foregrounds the role of emotions in enabling dually embedded agency, extending extant theory that has tended to focus narrowly on cognitive dynamics. We discuss implications for our understanding of institutional agency, the role of emotions and values in new logic construction, and the role of microlevel interactions in the formation of macrolevel structures.

In this paper we explore how emotions influence organizations in situations of institutional complexity. In particular we study members' and leaders' emotive responses and influence activities in response to a disruptive event that led to a violation of expectations. Our findings show that when people's expectations of an organization's actions are violated it can trigger a process of emotional escalation that leads to the destabilization of the organization through the emotional-laden influence activities of shaming and shunning. The violation in our case resulted in strong negative emotions expressed on Facebook. Facebook acted as an emotional echo chamber where negative emotions were amplified and led to members' emotion-driven influence activities eventually triggering regret and adaptation by the organization. We discuss implications for the study of emotions in institutional dynamics.