Michael Lounsbury

Drawing on my 2026 OMT Distinguished Scholar address, I address the question, what if organization and management theory (OMT) actually mattered? Amidst maladies including a growing publication treadmill, salami-sliced research, misconduct, and a peer-review crisis made worse by generative AI, I argue that we as scholars should ask bigger questions that matter for people and policy. In doing so, I argue that we should become more politically engaged, urging us to also become more inclusive of Global South scholars and scholarship. Using examples related to emancipatory entrepreneurship, alternative mental health treatments, stigmatized work, and AI's effects on inequality, democracy and warfare, I highlight the kinds of research questions we might address as a field, emphasizing the importance of theory alongside more practical and political engagement. I also call for reforms in scholarly evaluation to value quality and real-world impact over the number of papers published.

Cultural entrepreneurship research emphasizes the importance of storytelling and other cultural skills, yet recent work suggests that generative artificial intelligence (AI) levels the playing field for entrepreneurs lacking such skills. In this conceptual article, we challenge this view by outlining how the widespread use of AI tools likely leads to systematic changes in the institutional norms and expectations that shape entrepreneurial storytelling. Anchored in evidence-informed assumptions about average entrepreneurs’ use of AI, our theorization suggests that widespread AI adoption will lead to a homogenization in entrepreneurial storytelling—creating an evaluative environment that may require even greater cultural skills to navigate.

While cultural entrepreneurship research has highlighted how entrepreneurs craft stories to legitimize their ventures, we know much less about how entrepreneurs gain legitimacy for a novel organizational form. Drawing upon a detailed, historical examination of Japanese family mottos from the Edo period (1603–1868), we show how stories embedded in family mottos enabled legitimation by symbolically leveraging two core socio-cultural institutions of Edo Japan (religion and family), advancing our understanding of how broader cultural resources can be leveraged to legitimate a new organizational form. We discuss implications for scholarship on family business and cultural entrepreneurship.

Research Summary: When and why do producers change the categorization of their offerings? Prior categorization research assumes that producers engage in ongoing efforts to proactively optimize their categorical positioning, but this assumption may not hold for many producers due to their limited attentional capacity. Our theoretical account instead highlights the role of expectation violation cues—salient pieces of information indicating a violation of audience expectations—as triggers that can lead producers to revise their category choice. Our longitudinal study of 84,667 Airbnb hosts' categorization choices finds that negative customer reviews—an important form of expectation violation cue—significantly increase the likelihood of category‐switching, particularly in categories with heterogeneous expectations. Our study suggests that many producers might be less proactive about their category choices than previous research assumed. Managerial Summary: How businesses categorize their products and services influences their commercial success; yet, there exists very limited understanding of when, why, and how businesses revise their category choices. Our study, which tracked the category choices of over 80,000 Airbnb hosts over time, reveals that Airbnb hosts most commonly switch categories after receiving negative customer reviews, particularly when a review indicates that the accommodation did not meet customer expectations and if the previously chosen category lacks a clearly defined set of expected features. When switching categories, hosts tend to choose categories that are relatively similar to their prior choices and that seem to accommodate a wide variety of offerings. These patterns suggest that many businesses might be less proactive about their category choices than previous research assumed.

Studies examining the impact of social movements on organizations have focused primarily on what leads to initial concessions in response to movement targeting. A key remaining question is what comes next, or how do movement priorities become institutionalized within organizations and across fields via downstream processes? We argue that central actors in these downstream efforts are members of occupations that have been created out of movement pressure on organizations. In this study, we examine the longitudinal evolution of a movement-backed occupation: recycling coordinators in higher education. By conducting historical, processual analyses of 25 years of online conversations among over 1,000 recycling coordinators, we identify three key tensions they faced in trying to embed practices and an ethos from the environmental movement and in trying to progress their organizations toward evolving movement concerns (from recycling to sustainability). We uncover how the coordinators navigated these tensions, finding that while they succeeded in institutionalizing recycling and expanding their organizations toward a new wave of movement concerns regarding sustainability, their occupation nonetheless experienced demise. Our findings set the foundation for future research on the downstream efforts and occupational actors that are vital for institutionalizing movement demands.

Institutional scholarship on organizing in poverty contexts has focused on the constraining nature of extant institutions and the need for external actors to make transformative change interventions to alleviate poverty. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the potentially enabling nature of extant institutions in poverty contexts. We argue that more empirical work is needed to deepen our understanding of self-organizing processes that actors embedded in such contexts generate in their own efforts to survive. Drawing on the social worlds approach to institutional analysis, we shed light on how actors self-organize to produce enduring organizational arrangements to safeguard themselves against adverse poverty outcomes. Employing data from fieldwork and interviews collected in the urban neighborhood of Dagoretti Corner in Nairobi, Kenya, we examine the colocation of 105 largely identical auto repair businesses in close spatial proximity. We find that actors leverage an indigenous institution—the societal ethos of Harambee—to enable a process we identify as “survivalist organizing.” Based on our research, we argue that survivalist organizing incorporates four interlocking survival mechanisms: cultivating interbusiness solidarity, maintaining precarious interbusiness relationships, redistributing resources to prevent business deaths, and generating collective philanthropy to avoid personal destitution. We develop a new research agenda on the institutional study of self-organizing in poverty contexts focused on strengthening rather than supplanting urbanized indigenous institutions that catalyze collective self-organizing. Funding: This work was supported by the China National Science Foundation [Grants 72091310 and 72091315].

In this Concise Introduction, Michael Lounsbury and Joel Gehman set out an overview of organization theory that clarifies how to cultivate a robust scholarly identity in a field rich with diverse research traditions. Providing a summary of rationalist, pragmatic and co-constitutive theories, they highlight how scholars can meaningfully contribute to the academic conversation and maximize the practical relevance of their work.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of co-constitutive organization theories. Influenced by the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, co-constitutive theories problematize the nature of actors, drawing attention to the ways in which actorhood is itself an accomplishment shaped by an ongoing interplay with wider cultural processes. Phenomenologically speaking, context is endogenous with behavior and experience—co-constituted by the performative efforts of those involved. In this chapter, we consider several theoretical conversations that, at least in some of their variants, make use of phenomenological precepts. These include institutional theory, sensemaking, and practice theory.

In this chapter, we provide a broad introduction to the field of organization theory, focusing on the importance of ontology. We ontologically distinguish organization theories along two dimensions: how they conceptualize the institutional context and how they conceptualize organizational actors. Our novel mapping of the field unpacks broad similarities and differences among organization theories, revealing the landscape within which scholarly identities are constructed and scholarly outputs are appreciated. We identify three main types of theories—rationalist, pragmatic, and co-constitutive—which are undergirded by distinctive philosophical traditions—utilitarianism, pragmatism, and phenomenology. Our typology highlights contradictions within some theoretical conversations, and surfaces opportunities to bridge ontologies by engaging in scholarly conversations across our theoretical categories. Our central aim is to promote engaged scholarship and help organization theorists build robust scholarly identities, thereby enabling them to meaningfully contribute to multiple academic conversations and maximize real-world relevance—including scholarship that addresses various grand challenges.