This study shows how institutional work contributes to institutional resilience in extreme operating environments. The authors draw from a longitudinal analysis of the operations of Desjardins International Development, a French Canadian nongovernmental organization that, both before and after the major earthquake of 2010, supported the implementation of cooperative banking in Haiti. Building on a unique access to DID’s internal documents as well as on 49 interviews with DID employees, the authors highlight the ways in which political, technical, and cultural forms (...) of institutional work triggered the emergence of social capital, which in turn supported the rise of new forms of institutional work that enabled institutional resilience. The results show how organizational activities focused on shaping institutions may have unintended effects that enable institutional resilience in EOEs, and demonstrate how the accumulation of institutional work by an organization contributes to the enhancement of its social capital. (shrink)

In a recent contribution to this journal, Arjaliès (J Bus Ethics 92:57—78, 2010) suggests that the emergence of socially responsible investment (SRI) in France can be best described as a social movement with a collective identity that aimed to challenge the dominant logic of the financial market. Such an account is at odds with a body of empirical studies that approaches SRI in the French context as a process of market creation led by loosely coordinated actors with contradictory and conflicting (...) interests and values, who have mainly complied with—rather than opposed—the existing dominant financial logic of the asset-management field. In this comment, we build on this prior research to contest Arjaliès' perspective on both theoretical and empirical grounds, with the aim of highlighting the shortcomings of conflating social movements and other forms of collective actions in understanding the building of new markets in organization theory and SRI studies. We contend that in mistaking for social movement forms of collective actions that underpin the emergence of markets, scholars of organization theory may confuse distinct mechanisms in their explanation of SRI emergence across countries, overlook the complex dynamics and interactions of markets and social movements, and, most importantly, fail to evaluate the real political significance of SRI as an empirical phenomenon. We propose that future research on SRI distinguishes carefully "social-movement research as a theoretical framework" from "social movement as an empirical phenomenon" in order to avoid such drawbacks while benefiting from recent advances in social-movement research. (shrink)

Ethical aspects of management control systems are attracting increasing attention among scholars and practitioners. Much of the work centers on their aims. We complement this scholarship by applying the ethical principle of “no harm,” i.e., non-maleficence, to examine how those aims are achieved. We illustrate this approach by exploring the effects of four MCS designs on job-related stress drawing on the differentiation of stress into two dimensions: a challenge and a threat dimension. Results from a lagged field-survey with 471 managers (...) and employees from the UK and the U.S. support key predictions and offer first insights into designing MCS based on a “no harm” ethics. Our study highlights the benefits of interdisciplinary research in business ethics and hopefully encourages more work on MCS from a perspective based on the non-maleficence principle. (shrink)

Section I: Introduction -- Section II: Managing organizational pluralism: how individuals navigate moral contradictions and compromise -- Section III: Looking at organizations critically: rhetoric, justification and criticism-as-practice -- Section IV: Reconsidering valuation and evaluation in organizations -- Section V: Pushing the boundaries of pragmatic sociology's theoretical agenda.

AbstractEnduring unethical behavior in trading has generated much research interest, and scholars disagree on the reasons for this situation. According to MacIntyre (2015), this has to do with the personal traits of traders, whereas Rocchi and Thunder (2019) argue this is due to permissive work environment that can potentially be changed to favoring ethical trading. We contribute to this debate by exploring how interactions between organizational culture and management control systems (MCSs) may affect the enduring unethical behaviors of traders. We (...) conceptualize this with the concepts of organized hypocrisy (Brunsson 1986, 1989, 1993) and decoupling (Meyer and Rowan 1977). An in-depth case study of fraud (Jerome Kerviel at Societe Generale), informs the empirical inquiry. We develop the concept of organized decoupling to characterize how the MCSs are articulated with the organizational culture favoring unethical behavior, while being used as a ‘safety mechanism’ to manage the legal and reputational risk of the bank. The analysis highlights three key features of the organized decoupling of MCS: physical distance, technical distance and social distance. The study contribution lies in showing that decoupling is not only emergent but might be intended and therefore organized. The findings also raise doubts on the role of MCSs in monitoring trading activities as presented by investment banking institutions and regulators, suggesting more organized hypocrisy, and raising significant concerns regarding the creation of tolerable work environment welcoming ethical behaviors in the investment banking sector. (shrink)