Timothy Morris

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.

Drawing on evidence from a unique data set of in‐depth qualitative interviews with 12 female CEOs (and 139 male CEOs) of global corporations, we explore what enables some women to become CEOs. By drawing on our data from male and female CEOs, we set the scene by comparing the advice they would give to young women as they start their careers. We then focus the rest of our article on the experiences and career trajectory of the 12 female CEOs. We make three theoretical contributions: We identify, at the individual level, how women cantake active ownershipof their careers as part of a self‐acceptance process; how they canembrace gynandrous leadershipas part of a self‐development process wherebothfeminineandmasculine leadership behaviors are embraced, with the feminine being dominant to help move beyond gender stereotypes, and finally, how theytranslate leadership—rather than combine—gender‐based behaviors as part of a self‐management process to develop their unique leadership style. For each of these theoretical contributions at the individual level, we also provide two practical recommendations for HR practice and policy, one relating to the intraorganizational context and the second having institutional‐level implications. We conclude by discussing implications for future research.

Diversification into innovative domains through new practice area creation is a critical imperative for professional services firms. Using theories of organizational territoriality and corporate charters, we conceptualize professional firms as federations of distinct practice areas and argue that the chartering of a new practice is an inherently political act. New practice area founders need to engage in appropriate legitimacy‐mobilizing efforts in order to sustain diversification efforts. Our analysis of 46 cases of new practice area creation efforts in consulting and law firms shows that the mix of legitimacy required for new practice areas created through radical diversification is very different from that required for incremental diversification efforts. Our findings have important implications for studying how innovation is structurally accomplished in professional firms. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite the frequent assertion that knowledge management is an important strategic activity, there have been relatively few empirical studies of the processes involved in this, particularly in knowledge intensive firms. The paradox inherent to codification projects is that they are dependent on professional staff willingly transferring the knowledge that often underpins their status. My purpose in this article is to examine whether and how this paradox is resolved by presenting a case study of a knowledge codification project under- taken by a professional service firm (PSF). I argue that the successful assertion of property rights relates, ironically, to its limitation. Codification takes place in a way that does not nullify the consultants’ expert role in front of the client. That there appear to be limits to how far such a reductive exercise can capture the activities of the consultants has implications for grammatical models that aim to describe and theorize about organizational processes or sequences of actions. I discuss these in the latter part of the article.