Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although ...commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.
This essay responds to, largely concurs with, and extends the concerns Jerry Davis expressed in his June 2015 editorial essay in ASQ about the state of research in organizational theory. In ...particular, it discusses the reasons novelty has become such a valued commodity in organizational theory and its unintended consequences. Fault lies with the way students are trained, the reward system that most universities implicitly or explicitly use to promote faculty, and the role that editors and reviewers play in wittingly or unwittingly rewarding the quest for novelty in the peer-review process. One way to revitalize organization theory while also addressing such problems would be for the researchers to begin to focus on the myriad ways that organizations shape our society and for organizational theorists to begin to collaborate with engineers and researchers in schools of public policy who are more aware of and interested in addressing problems that organizations, especially profit-making firms, create as they seek to shape their own environments.
Although organizational theorists have given much attention to how environments shape organizations, they have given much less attention to how organizations mold their environments. This paper ...demonstrates what organizational scholars could contribute if they were to study how organizations shape environments. Specifically, the paper synthesizes work by historians, political scientists and students of corporate political action to document how corporations systematically built an institutional field during the 1970s and 1980s to exert greater influence on the US Federal government. The resulting network, composed of nine distinct populations of organizations and the relationships that bind them into a system, channels and amplifies corporate political influence, while simultaneously shielding corporations from appearing to directly influence Congress and the administration.
E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress Barley, Stephen R.; Meyerson, Debra E.; Grodal, Stine
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
07/2011, Volume:
22, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people's lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford ...people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, this paper builds theory that unravels this apparent contradiction. As the literature would predict, we found that the more time people spent handling e-mail, the greater was their sense of being overloaded, and the more e-mail they processed, the greater their perceived ability to cope. Contrary to assumptions of prior studies, we found no evidence that time spent working mediates e-mail-related overload. Instead, e-mail's material properties entwined with social norms and interpretations in a way that led informants to single out e-mail as a cultural symbol of the overload they experience in their lives. Moreover, by serving as a symbol, e-mail distracted people from recognizing other sources of overload in their work lives. Our study deepens our understanding of the impact of communication technologies on people's lives and helps untangle those technologies' seemingly contradictory influences.
The Lure of the Virtual Bailey, Diane E.; Leonardi, Paul M.; Barley, Stephen R.
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
09/2012, Volume:
23, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Although organizational scholars have begun to study virtual work, they have yet to fully grapple with its diversity. We draw on semiotics to distinguish among three types of virtual work (virtual ...teams, remote control, and simulations) based on what it is that a technology makes virtual and whether work is done
with or
on
,
through
, or
within
representations. Of the three types, simulations have been least studied, yet they have the greatest potential to change work's historically tight coupling to physical objects. Through a case study of an automobile manufacturer, we show how digital simulation technologies prompted a shift from symbolic to iconic representation of vehicle performance. The increasing verisimilitude of iconic simulation models altered workers' dependence on each other and on physical objects, leading management to confound operating
within
representations with operating
with or
on
representations. With this mistaken understanding, and lured by the virtual, managers organized simulation work in virtual teams, thereby distancing workers from the physical referents of their models and making it difficult to empirically validate models. From this case study, we draw implications for the study of virtual work by examining how changes to work organization vary by type of virtual work.
Interesting papers usually transgress the status quo, but there are limits on how far transgression can go. Papers that break too many substantive, methodological, or theoretical rules are more ...likely to be called flaky or wrongheaded than interesting. At minimum, interesting papers need to conform to genre constraints. Empirical papers need to flow from introduction to problem statement to methods to data and then to a discussion and conclusions. Theoretical papers need to work through implications of propositions and consider counterarguments. In both cases, readers expect authors to warrant their claims in ways that scholars find legitimate: with logic, mathematical models, data, and counterfacutals, for example. Without such warrants, a paper too closely resembles opinion, and when it seems to be mere opinion, a paper is unlikely to survive academic skepticism long enough to have a chance to be considered interesting.
Organizational theorists have had much to say about how environments affect organizations but have said relatively little about how organizations shape their environment. This silence is particularly ...troubling, given that organizations, in general, and corporations, in particular, now wield inordinate political power. This article illustrates three ways in which corporations can undermine representative democracy and the public good: promoting legislation that benefits corporations at the expense of individual citizens, the capturing of regulatory agencies by those whom the agencies were designed to regulate, and the privatization of functions that have historically been the mandate of local, state, and federal governments.
Researchers have had difficulty accommodating materiality in voluntaristic theories of organizing. Although materiality surely shapes how people use technologies, materiality’s role in organizational ...change remains under-theorized. We suggest that scholars have had difficulty grappling with materiality because they often conflate the distinction between the material and social with the distinction between determinism and voluntarism. We explain why such conflation is unnecessary and outline four challenges that researchers must address before they can reconcile the reality of materiality with the notion that outcomes of technological change are socially constructed.
Bringing Work Back In Barley, Stephen R; Kunda, Gideon
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
01/2001, Volume:
12, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory ...to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginalized or ignored. We then discuss methodological requirements for reintegrating work studies into organization theory and indicate what the conceptual payoffs of such integration might be. These payoffs include breaking new conceptual ground, resolving theoretical puzzles, envisioning organizing processes, and revitalizing old concepts.
We argue that because of important epistemological differences between the fields of information technology and organization studies, much can be gained from greater interaction between them. In ...particular, we argue that information technology research can benefit from incorporating institutional analysis from organization studies, while organization studies can benefit even more by following the lead of information technology research in taking the material properties of technologies into account. We further suggest that the transformations currently occurring in the nature of work and organizing cannot be understood without considering both the technological changes and the institutional contexts that are reshaping economic and organizational activity. Thus, greater interaction between the fields of information technology and organization studies should be viewed as more than a matter of enrichment. In the intellectual engagement of these two fields lies the potential for an important fusion of perspectives, a fusion more carefully attuned to explaining the nature and consequences of the techno-social phenomena that increasingly pervade our lives.
