Volume 3, Issue 1

Economic inequality has been rising for a half-century in most countries, in some cases to levels not seen since the eighteenth century. It has severe negative consequences for many aspects of social life: interpersonal trust, status competition, happiness, participation in civic and political life, crime and corruption, and health. It is shaped by the actions of organizations because they are the most powerful forces in modern societies: ubiquitous, often quite large and well-resourced, and highly institutionalized. While there is a large literature on the impact of organizations on inequality within organizations, that work mostly focuses on demographic categories like gender and race. Far less has been done to study how organizations shape economic inequality at the societal or global level. Here, I discuss three ways organizations that shape economic inequality: as employers, as policy-setters, and as buyers/sellers. I review the scant organizational literature on societal and global inequality, and offer several suggestions for future research on this critical topic.

Judging from the steep rise in number of publications in organizational sociology and management studies about “hybrid organizations”, it would seem as if this is either something new or something that has grown in importance in the past decades. In this article, we make a thorough attempt to provide the concept a proper anchoring in sociology and organization studies. We demonstrate that hybridity – meaning that organizations combine two or more purposes, governance forms, or logics – is both a well-known and a natural feature of organizations. But we also demonstrate that the sociological understanding of society as composed of differentiated spheres or subsystems, and the blurring of boundaries between these spheres in the past half a century (described as postmodernity, late modernity or indeed “liquid modernity”) raises the relevance of the concept “hybrid organizations”. We therefore argue that “hybrid organizations” is neither a tautological nor redundant concept but is highly relevant to a range of studies of how organizations handle multiple goals, interests, and governance modes by interpreting and respecifying logics on the overall societal level. Thus, organizations can both suffer from hybridity and make it an asset in renewal and adaptation.

This article depicts the chemistry and trajectory of a street paper project involving people experiencing homelessness in Germany. More generally, it seeks to examine implications of hybrid approaches to prosocial organising which various initiatives throughout the Western world have adopted during the last decades to achieve social innovation in an entrepreneurial way. The analysis builds on an embedded case study and a distinctive conceptual framework which combines institutionalist and praxeologic perspectives on modern organisations. The focus lies on how, in the course of time, the project under study processes various institutional logics and how the latter become intermingled ‘in action’. It is shown that, with the enactment of references from different ‘social worlds’, hybrid prosocial organising can feed into a robust organisational model. However, the en route encounter of disparate logics has paradoxical implications and is prone to undermine the model’s effectiveness. With the enactment of hybridity, ‘first-order’ success in terms of organisational survival comes with severe limitations concerning the ambition of crossing institutional boundaries for meeting the project’s key mission. Ironically, dynamics in and around the organisation tend to stabilise a settlement which hybrid ‘prosocial organising’ seeks to tackle.

Discussions of flexibility in organisations generally focus on labour relations, corporate agility, and long-term survival. In much of this writing, flexibility is conceptualised as a feature of organisations and their environments, of organisational strategy and form, and an outcome of characteristics that can be defined and measured. By contrast, we argue that capacities to adapt depend on interpretations of ‘core business’ which is defined by institutional connections established both outside organisations and reproduced within them. This account is informed by social practice theory, the literature on strategy-as-practice, process studies of organisations, and by empirical research conducted in three secondary schools and three hospitals in Northern England. Interviews with thirty-three managers and employees help us to show how the scope for adaptation is constituted and reproduced in the ways that many organisations connect, and in related rhythms and patterns of social life. There are many contexts in which this insight will be important. We focus on the significance of this analysis for the need to modify the timing of energy demand in a lower carbon future. As we show, the relative ability of specific organisations to adapt depends on a broader nexus of interlinking social practices, temporal arrangements, and cross-cutting commitments.

As a consequence of a variety of dynamics that firms have to deal with, their structures are continually evolving. Some of the resulting patterns and structural properties, however, only become visible at a greater distance from the object of analysis. Thus, this paper analyzes organization structures – conceptualized as the way in which firms divide and institutionalize labor – in their long-term development and shapes the phenomenon of aggregating structural self-reference. This self-reference is decomposed into a taxonomy based on three orders of the division of labor (DoL), each with a corresponding division logic (efficiency , effectivity , and viability) and structural implementation method ( specialization, contextualization , and reflection ) that firms apply to cope with steadily-changing environmental conditions. Each of the three orders reflects a response to a distinct period of change conceptualized as different bundles of stimuli (the Taylorian , Schumpeterian , and VUCA ‘zeitgeist’) through which new orders of the division of labor emerged.

There is a growing interest in deepening our understanding of variations in professionals’ boundary work. How healthcare professionals work to change or maintain power and practice domains is embedded in their efforts to collaborate across organizational and professional boundaries. Drawing on a comparative interview study from the Danish eldercare sector, we explore how nurses and care workers in two different organizational contexts articulate their boundary work strategies. Our findings illustrate ways in which organizational context may influence boundary work. In one organizational context, nurses and care workers worked from separate functional units and had limited opportunities for interactions to collaborate and build trust across professional boundaries. This was linked to competitive boundary work strategies. In the other organizational context, nurses and care workers worked together in integrated units, providing opportunities to build trustful relationships and familiarity with each other. This was linked to collaborative boundary work strategies. Furthermore, we found that boundary work was not only influenced by the organizational context but also influenced the organizational context in return. The nurses in the functional units defended and created new boundaries that hindered engagement in collaborative-oriented strategies. Our study contributes by demonstrating how elements of the organizational context can influence boundary work through relational aspects, while boundary work, in turn, can influence the organizational context. This suggests an interplay between organizational context and boundary work that resembles a reciprocal relationship, potentially differing from previous assumptions in the boundary work literature. This interplay may help us better understand variations in professionals’ boundary work.