Journal of Organizational Sociology

About this journal

Aims and scope

The objective of the Journal of Organizational Sociology is to offer a specifically sociological perspective on organization(s) by publishing outstanding and original peer-reviewed articles, which advance the sociological understanding of organization(s), enquiring into their ever-changing internal workings and their relations with each other, as well as examining how organization(s) and society shape each other. It will especially foster sociological debate around this relationship at a global level in a way that is sensitive to regional as well as local specifics. It is intended to be a worldwide forum for scholarly debate that encompasses everything pertaining to the nexus between organization and society.

The journal understands society in a broad sense spanning face-to-face settings, intimate relationships, friendships, and families, fields, markets, and networks, social classes and inequalities, as well as social domains like politics, civil society, media, culture, religion, science, sports, economy, social work, arts, kinship, ecology, health, love, and so on. It cuts across the different sociological sub-disciplines and is open to the whole diversity of organizations and organizational phenomena – including but not limited to corporations, public administrations, IGOs and other political organizations, NGOs, NPOs, social movements, grassroot initiatives, mass media, platforms, schools, art galleries, churches, sports clubs, courts, and other non-conventional and alternative forms of organization. The journal is published in association with the Research Committee "Sociology of Organizations" of the International Sociological Association (ISA RC17) (https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/research-networks/research-committees/rc17-sociology-of-organizations/), and regards itself as a vehicle for the promotion of the ISA’s general conception of a global sociology.

The uniqueness of the Journal of Organizational Sociology is its dual focus on (1) the sociology of organizations, but also (2) the organizational aspects of forms of social life more generally. The journal thus intends to explore the full spectrum of the organizational dimensions of sociology. It covers the full range of sociological theory traditions and writing styles; no tradition in sociology or organizational theory is favoured above another.

We seek papers that advance sociological theories on organization(s) or that use organizational sociology to provide a better understanding of social phenomena. Submissions featuring mainstream perspectives in organizational sociology are as welcome as articles that advance or apply alternative sociological perspectives. In addition, submissions featuring psychological, managerial, educational, or other theories and themes are welcome, as long as they make a distinctive sociological argument and contribute to sociological debates with specific reference to questions of organizational structure, dynamics, processes, practices, interaction or culture.

Article types

The journal features four regular sections:

Standard papers are full-length research articles that can be either based on empirical research findings or conceptual in nature. Articles must be between 6,000-10,000 words in length (including abstract, references, notes, tables, and figures). Over-length submissions will be returned without review.

Essays are shorter pieces pursuing a distinctive argument and/or using sociological theory to understand organizational phenomena and/or using organizational sociology to understand other social phenomena. Essays are peer reviewed and must be between 2,000-6,000 words in length (including abstract, references, notes, tables, and figures). Over-length submissions will be returned without review.

Review Essays provide the opportunity to offer detailed interrogations of key and original published works. Review Essays can engage with one or several works (books, articles, movies, art pieces, etc) or the works of an outstanding scholar and must make an original argument. Review essays are peer reviewed and should be between 3,000-5,000 words. Sole book reviews won’t be accepted.

Beacons of Organizational Sociology occasionally cover English translations of outstanding papers that can inform the worldwide debate on organizational sociology or the works of an outstanding scholar. Beacons are normally commissioned, but you are welcome to send proposals to the editors (no self-nominations).

Please have a look at the ratings, the Journal of Organizational Sociology (JOSO) has achieved:

level B with the "German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB)"
level 1 with the "Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers"
level 1 in the Finnish Publication Forum

Please have a look at the call for papers for upcoming Special Issues:

Special Issue on Technology and the Organization of Fields

Open Access
From Close Cooperation to Its Unravelling: A Political View of the COVID Crisis Management in Hospitals

October 1, 2025

Henri Bergeron, Patrick Castel, Nicolas LOT

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In France, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was marked by intense cooperation between hospitals and a high level of job satisfaction, both of which declined in subsequent waves. How can these dynamics be explained? This paper demonstrates that the collective mobilisation cannot be accounted for solely by an injection of financial resources and the strength of a shared professional ethos; it claims instead that relations of cooperation must be understood as relations of power. Drawing on a qualitative study in 14 French hospitals (139 interviews), it shows that the initial wave created conditions and mechanisms that greatly enabled cooperation, but which then waned with ensuing waves. The paper argues that cooperation is related to three types of relationships that had improved during the first wave: those between healthcare professionals, between healthcare staff and top hospital management, between healthcare professionals, patients and their families. It identifies the mechanisms behind these relationships, respectively: the suspension of competition between doctors and departments, the greater autonomy given to healthcare professionals in management decision-making, and the absence of patients’ families, which enabled caregivers to reassert their professional authority. Conditions conducive to cooperation were no longer present during subsequent waves, making cooperation more difficult.
Open Access
Organising for Social Sustainability in Urban Housing: Hitting the Target but Missing the Point

September 30, 2025

Linda Soneryd, Elena Bogdanova, Thomas Grinderslev

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Social sustainability has become a widely known term, not least in the area of housing and urban development. While the literature has improved our understanding of the various meanings and interpretations of the concept, there is still a need for studies that explore processes of organising for social sustainability as processes of translation that can take into consideration several dimensions of translation, i.e. shifts in meaning, as well as agency and interests. This paper aims to address this issue-complex by exploring how social sustainability is conceived and translated into practice in urban renovation projects. The contribution of our analysis is that we show how resources within organizational theory and research can contribute to a more general understanding of how popular but vague concepts are or are not transformed into action and the implications of this.
Open Access
“The System Sucks”: Computer Programs and Technical Control in Entry-Level White-Collar Work

August 13, 2025

Corey Moss-Pech

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Researchers often examine how technology controls the labor of precarious workers while demonstrating the limits of technology on controlling professional workers. Drawing on a subset of 46 in-depth interviews pulled from a larger sample, I uncover how technical control operates in entry-level office work. Technical control takes one of two forms. First, workers conduct all their tasks in a computer program. I call this task-oriented technical control. Second, workers must log all their offline work into a computer program. I call this social-oriented technical control. The types of jobs controlled by the latter are often done by women and are jobs where control routinizes social interaction. Social-oriented technical control is also experienced more negatively than task-oriented technical control. I therefore show how technical control transforms gendered disparities in work tasks into gender inequality in workplace experiences. I also expose that work has become less autonomous higher up the occupational hierarchy than most researchers observe.
Open Access
A Shift in Perspective: Refugee Voices and Agency in the Labor Market Entering and Workplace Integration Process

June 18, 2025

Vedran Omanović, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Andrea Spehar

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Labor market entering and workplace integration of marginalized migrant groups remain a pressing challenge for policymakers and one of the central topics in the research. Yet, as researchers with migrant backgrounds, we have become increasingly frustrated over dominant discourses, both in the research and in the public sphere that rarely center the voices of those who are the subjects of integration on an equal footing. In this essay, we call for a change of perspective, arguing on why refugee voices should be centered in studies of labor market entering and workplace integration in the management and organizational literature. In doing so, we highlight how their voices are prevailingly absent in this literature and how this omission prevents refugees from being understood analytically as actors with agency. We also suggest and illustrate how the use of biographical interviews and solicited diaries, while not commonly used in the organizational and management literature, have, despite some limitations, the potential for redressing this problematic shortcoming and give greater attention to the choices made by refugees, and their own voices.

Submission

You can easily submit your manuscript online. Simply go to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/joso and you will be guided through the whole peer-reviewing and publishing process.

Your benefits of publishing with us

All articles published open access with a CC BY 4.0 license without costs for the author.

High quality manuscript processing.

Every article easily discoverable because of SEO and comprehensive abstracting and indexing services.

Secure archiving by De Gruyter and the independent archiving service Portico.

Submission process

The journal offers free format of submission.

After your manuscript is conditionally accepted, please format your manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors.

The journal operates a double-blind peer review process.

The reviewing process takes on average two months. Submissions are sent to at least two reviewers. You will be informed by e-mail if your manuscript has been accepted or rejected or if it requires further attention. Every effort is made to respond to authors in a timely manner.

Please note

Before submitting your article please have a look at our Publication Ethics Statement and our License to Publish.

If you have any general questions please visit our FAQ page for journal authors.

We look forward to receiving your manuscript!

Editors-in-Chief

Michael Grothe-Hammer, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Robert Jungmann, Trier University, Germany

Associate Editors

Nadine Arnold, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Henri Bergeron, Sciences Po, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, CNRS, Paris, France
Stewart Clegg, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Lucius Couloute, Suffolk University, USA
Damian O’Doherty, University of Liverpool & University of Manchester, UK
Talia Esnard, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago
Ulla Forseth, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Mary Godwyn, Babson College, USA
Ming-Sho Ho, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Lars Klemsdal, University of Oslo, Norway
Robert van Krieken, University of Sydney, Australia
Sean Lauer, University of British Columbia, Canada
Thiago Duarte Pimentel, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil
Maria Victoria Sanagustín Fons, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Kathia Serrano Velarde, Heidelberg University, Germany
Maria Manuel Serrano, University of Évora, Portugal
Mikaela Sundberg, Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, (SCORE), & Stockholm University, Sweden
LaTonya J. Trotter, University of Washington, USA

Advisory Board

Göran Ahrne, Stockholm University, Sweden
Paul du Gay, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, & Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy
Raimund Hasse, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Michael Lounsbury, Alberta School of Business, Canada
Arnold Windeler, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Xueguang Zhou, Stanford University, USA

Social Media Editor

Dzifa Ametowobla, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

Editorial Board

Cristina Alaimo, LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy
Rafael Alcadipani, FGV-EAESP - ADM, Brazil
Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Cristina Besio, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany
Patricia Bromley, Stanford University, USA
Nabo Chen, Remin University of China
Tsuo-Yu Cheng, Nanjing University, China
Robert Cluley, University of Birmingham, UK
Michal Frenkel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Ronald Hartz, TU Ilmenau, Germany
Kazuhito Isomura, Chuo University, Japan
Rob Jansen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Jannis Kallinikos, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Brayden King, Northwestern University, USA
Stefan Kirchner, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany
Heiko Kleve, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany
Hanne Knudsen, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Alwyn Lim, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Annalisa Murgia, University of Milan, Italy
Martin Qvist, Stockholm University, Sweden
Victor Ray, University of Iowa, USA
Jake Rosenfeld, Washington University-St. Louis, USA
Theodore Schatzki, University of Kentucky, USA
Katherine Sobering, University of North Texas, USA
Isabell Stamm, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany
Siri Øyslebø Sørensen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Kai Tian, Peking University, China
Miraç Savaş Turhan, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, Turkey
Jeroen Veldman, Nyenrode Business Universiteit, The Netherlands
Signe Vikkelsø, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

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Journal information

Additional information

eISSN:

2752-2997

Language:

English

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Additional information

First published:

April 20, 2023

Publication Frequency:

3 issues per year

Journal of Organizational Sociology

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