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16 results in Cambridge Elements

Organizational Stigma

Organizational Stigma
  • Bryant Ashley Hudson, Karen D. W. Patterson, Lin Dong
  • Published online:
    20 October 2025
    Print publication:
    13 November 2025
  • The purpose of this Element is to provide a comprehensive overview of organizational stigma research development and to identify future research directions, focusing specifically on the organization as the level of analysis. It provides a historical and contemporary review of the organizational stigma literature, identifies the most essential topics of discussion when researching organizational stigma, and moves through them to highlight the most salient topics for future research. Organizational stigma is a multidimensional and multidirectional conception. While attached to the organization, organizational stigma is developed based on the evaluation of an attribute, characteristics, or behavior of the organization by an organizational audience. In other words, the stigma is in the eye of the beholder, a result of the sociocognitive processes of heterogenous audiences. The authors hope to illustrate the important role that stigma and other social evaluations play in organizations and their inherently inseparable role in society.
A Connected World

A Connected World
  • Social Networks and Organizations
  • Martin Kilduff, Lei Liu, Stefano Tasselli
  • Published online:
    26 June 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023
  • This Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational social networks from its early foundations to contemporary debates. It highlights the characteristics that make the social network perspective distinctive in the organizational research landscape, including its emphasis on structure and outcomes. It covers the main theoretical developments and summarizes the research design questions that organizational researchers face when collecting and analyzing network data. Then, it discusses current debates ranging from agency and structure to network volatility and personality. Finally, the Element envisages future research directions on the role of brokerage for individuals and communities, network cognition, and the importance of past ties. Overall, the Element provides an innovative angle for understanding organizational social networks, engaging in empirical network research, and nurturing further theoretical development on the role of social interactions and connectedness in modern organizations.
Family Firm

Family Firm
  • A Distinctive Form of Organization
  • Evelyn Micelotta, Carlotta Benedetti, Paola Rovelli
  • Published online:
    30 January 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • This Element reinvigorates calls to explore avenues to further integrate the research fields of Organization Theory (OT) and Family Business (FB). It presents the family business literature in management journals and categorizes these papers based on four types of theoretical contribution: Embedded, Integrative, Challenger and Generalized. It discusses opportunities for dialogue between FB and OT for each type in three research domains: (i) managing hybridity, (ii) mastering tensions, dualities, and paradoxes, and (iii) modelling time and temporality.
Ambiguity in Organization Theory

Ambiguity in Organization Theory
  • From Intrinsic to Strategic Perspectives
  • Giulia Cappellaro, Amelia Compagni, Eero Vaara
  • Published online:
    12 January 2023
    Print publication:
    02 February 2023
  • This Element presents and discusses the main trajectories in the evolution of the concept of ambiguity and the most relevant theoretical contributions developed around it. It specifically elaborates on both the intrinsic perspectives on ambiguity as an inherent part of organizational decision-making processes and the more recent strategic perspectives on discursively constructed strategic ambiguity. It helps illuminate the path ahead of organizational scholars and offers new avenues for future research. This is important given the ever more pervasive presence of ambiguity in and around organizations and societies.
Organizational Paradox

Organizational Paradox
  • Medhanie Gaim, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Marco Berti
  • Published online:
    13 September 2022
    Print publication:
    22 September 2022
  • Paradoxes, contrary propositions that are not contestable separately but that are inconsistent when conjoined, constitute a pervasive feature of contemporary organizational life. When contradictory elements are constituted as equally important in day-to-day work, organizational actors frequently experience acute tensions in engaging with these contradictions. This Element discusses the presence of paradoxes in the life of organizations, introduces the reader to the notion of paradox in theory and practice, and distinguishes paradox and adjacent conceptualizations such as trade-off, dilemma, dialectics, ambiguity, etc. This Element also covers what triggers paradoxes and how they come into being whereby the Element distinguishes latent and salient paradoxes and how salient paradoxes are managed. This Element discusses key methodological challenges and possibilities of studying, teaching, and applying paradoxes and concludes by considering some future research questions left unexplored in the field.
Optimal Distinctiveness

Optimal Distinctiveness
  • A New Agenda for the Study of Competitive Positioning of Organizations and Markets
  • Eric Yanfei Zhao
  • Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    05 May 2022
  • Optimal distinctiveness – being both 'similar to' and 'different from' peers – is an important imperative of organizational life and represents a common research question of organizational scholars across various disciplinary domains such as strategy, organization theory, entrepreneurship, and international business. This Element reviews the historical grounding and recent development of optimal distinctiveness scholarship, based on which an orienting framework is proposed to stress the highly contextualized and dynamic nature of optimal distinctiveness. The orienting framework provides several powerful and unique angles for understanding organizations' competitive positioning in various types of markets, for applying optimal distinctiveness research to different levels of analysis, and for nurturing a more cross-disciplinary and mutually generative conversation on optimal distinctiveness theory.
The Search for the Virtuous Corporation

The Search for the Virtuous Corporation
  • A Wicked Problem or New Direction for Organization Theory?
  • Justin O'Brien
  • Published online:
    13 September 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021
  • The corporation is the most complex, adaptive, and resilient model of organizing economic activity in history. In an era of globalization, the transnational corporation has significant power over society. While its rights are specified through private ordering, and choice of jurisdictional home, in the event of conflict of laws, the corporation's duties and responsibilities remain contested. Notwithstanding the argument in institutional economics that all transactions take place within governance and legal frameworks, underpinned by a 'non-calculative social contract,' the terms are notoriously difficult to define or enforce. They are made more so if regulatory dynamics preclude litigation to a judicial conclusion. This Element situates the corporation – its culture, governance, responsibility, and accountability – within a broader discourse of duty. In doing so, it addresses the problem of the corporation for society and the corporation's problem in aligning its governance to changing community expectations of obligation.
Health Care Research and Organization Theory

Health Care Research and Organization Theory
  • Trish Reay, Elizabeth Goodrick, Thomas D'Aunno
  • Published online:
    18 June 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021
  • In this Element, we examine how organizational researchers have published articles contributing to organization theory in high quality organizational journals, and we examine how healthcare researchers have drawn on organization theory in healthcare management journals. We have two main aims in writing this Element. The first is to motivate scholars working in the field of general organizational and management studies to increasingly use healthcare settings as an empirical context for their work in theory development. Our second aim is to encourage healthcare researchers to increase their use of organizational theory to advance knowledge about the provision of healthcare services. Our investigations revealed a growing number of organizational studies situated in healthcare. We also found a disappointing level of connection between research published in organization journals and research published in healthcare journals. We provide explanations for this division, and encourage more crossdisciplinary work in the future.
Organizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Multiple Goals

Organizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Multiple Goals
  • A Multiple Goals Perspective
  • Pino G. Audia, Henrich R. Greve
  • Published online:
    28 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • This Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational learning from performance feedback and develops a new perspective that deals with the influence of multiple goals. In keeping with the centrality of motives in Cyert & March's influential model, this new perspective rests on a foundation of individual level behaviors that are responsive to mechanisms at the organizational and environmental level of analysis. A key aim is to lay out an agenda for a new wave of empirical research on the interconnections of decision-makers, organizations, and the environment that influence organizational responses to performance.
Professional Occupations and Organizations

Professional Occupations and Organizations
  • Daniel Muzio, Sundeep Aulakh, Ian Kirkpatrick
  • Published online:
    20 December 2019
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • This Element engages with fundamental questions concerning the future trajectory of professions as a distinct occupational category and of the formal organizations, which represent, employ or host professionals. It begins with a literature review that identifies a functionalist, power and institutionalist lens for the study of professional occupations and organizations. It then reviews a series of challenges which face the contemporary professions. Finally, the Element explores contemporary developments in the worlds of professions applying three units of analysis: macro (professional occupations and their associations), meso (professional organizations) and micro (professional workers).
Emotions in Organization Theory

Emotions in Organization Theory
  • Charlene Zietsma, Madeline Toubiana, Maxim Voronov, Anna Roberts
  • Published online:
    19 March 2019
    Print publication:
    11 April 2019
  • Emotions are central to social life and thus they should be central to organization theory. However, emotions have been treated implicitly rather than theorized directly in much of organization theory, and in some literatures, have been ignored altogether. This Element focuses on emotions as intersubjective, collective and relational, and reviews structuralist, people-centered and strategic approaches to emotions in different research streams to provide one of the first broad examinations of emotions in organization theory. Charlene Zietsma, Maxim Voronov, Madeline Toubiana and Anna Roberts provide suggestions for future research within each literature and look across the literatures to identify theoretical and methodological considerations.
Cultural Entrepreneurship

Cultural Entrepreneurship
  • A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities
  • Michael Lounsbury, Mary Ann Glynn
  • Published online:
    13 January 2019
    Print publication:
    24 January 2019
  • This Element provides an overview of cultural entrepreneurship scholarship and seeks to lay the foundation for a broader and more integrative research agenda at the interface of organization theory and entrepreneurship. Its scholarly agenda includes a range of phenomena from the legitimation of new ventures, to the construction of novel or alternative organizational or collective identities, and, at even more macro levels, to the emergence of new entrepreneurial possibilities and market categories. Michael Lounsbury and Mary Ann Glynn develop novel theoretical arguments and discuss the implications for mainstream entrepreneurship research, focusing on the study of entrepreneurial processes and possibilities.
Re-engaging with Sustainability in the Anthropocene Era

Re-engaging with Sustainability in the Anthropocene Era
  • An Institutional Approach
  • Andrew J. Hoffman, P. Devereaux Jennings
  • Published online:
    23 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 August 2018
  • Re-engaging with Sustainability in the Anthropocene Era applies organization theory to a grand challenge: our entry into the Anthropocene era, a period marked not only by human impact on climate change, but on chemical waste, habitat destruction, and despeciation. It focuses on institutional theory, modified by political readings of organizations, as one approach that can help us navigate a new course. Besides offering mechanisms, such as institutional entrepreneurship, social movements, and policy shifts, the institutional-political variant developed here helps analysts understand the framing of scientific facts, the counter-mobilization of skeptics, and the creation of archetypes as new social orders.
Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder Theory
  • Concepts and Strategies
  • R. Edward Freeman, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Stelios Zyglidopoulos
  • Published online:
    18 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 August 2018
  • The stakeholder perspective is an alternative way of understanding how companies and people create value and trade with each other. Freeman, Harrison and Zyglidopoulos discuss the foundation concepts and implementation of stakeholder management as well as the advantages this approach provides to firms and their managers. They present a number of tools that managers can use to implement stakeholder thinking, better understand stakeholders and create value with and for them. The Element concludes by discussing how managers can create stakeholder oriented control systems and by examining some of the important stakeholder-related issues that are worthy of future scholarly and managerial attention.
Starting Points

Starting Points
  • Intellectual and Institutional Foundations of Organization Theory
  • Bob Hinings, Renate E. Meyer
  • Published online:
    27 July 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018
  • This Element reviews the first 120 years of organization theory, examining its development from the sociology of organizations and management theory. It is initially organized around two streams of thought. The first is found in political economy and the sociology of organizations, with an emphasis on understanding the new organizations that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second derives from practitioner–scholars, whose aim was to provide theories and approaches to managing these new organizations. The Element then shows how each of the streams of understanding and managing came together to produce organization theory. In doing this, it also describes how the institutional frameworks in academic associations, academic centres and journals came out of these approaches and how they strengthened the development of organization theory.
Comprehending the Incomprehensible

Comprehending the Incomprehensible
  • Organization Theory and Child Sexual Abuse in Organizations
  • Donald Palmer, Valerie Feldman
  • Published online:
    21 July 2018
    Print publication:
    26 July 2018
  • This Element describes child sexual abuse and the formal organizations in which it can occur, reviews extant perspectives on child abuse, and explains how an organization theory approach can advance understanding of this phenomenon. It then elaborates the main paths through which organizational structures can influence child sexual abuse in organizations and analyze how these structures operate through these paths to impact the perpetration, detection, and response to abuse. The analysis is illustrated throughout with reports of child sexual abuse published in a variety of sources. The Element concludes with a brief discussion of the policy implications of this analysis.