Into the realm of organizational folly: A poem, a review, and a typology of organizational stupidity

This ‘Provocation essay’ is aimed at triggering reflection and fostering renewed research into organizational stupidity and its intersections with management learning. It opens with a critical poem evoking diverse aspects of our daily encounters with the idiocy, nonsense, and absurdity that pervades organizations. It continues with a more comprehensive review of the still diffuse research literature to reveal a typology of three approaches to studying organizational stupidity (systemic-mechanistic, critical-sociological and cultural-functionalist). It closes with a discussion of how stupidity detracts from reflexivity but can also play useful roles in organizations, which ultimately invites more management learning research on the topic.

The political dynamics of opening participation in strategy: The role of strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness

Practices of open participation in strategy-making share assumptions that enlarging participation outside the traditional circle of strategy specialists ensures a larger set of strategic options and a stronger commitment to strategy implementation. However, a greater variety of participants belonging to different organizational fields implies that different ways of understanding and doing strategy encounter during open participation processes and are likely to generate political struggles. We build on practice theory to conceptualize the enactments of open participation practices as the sites where more or less autonomous and powerful organizational fields encounter and where practices of open participation ‘mesh’ with other strategy, management and occupational practices and the local organizational context. Because ‘opening’ participation suggests that strategy used to be closed, we first focus on the organizational field of strategy and strategy specialists—who are expected to welcome the participation of people from other fields. We explain why strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness play a key role in patterning enactments of open participation practices. Then, we build on these two dimensions to stylize the political aspects of opening participation along with four ideal-typical enactments, namely exclusion, domination, conversation and controversy. Eventually, we discuss how management practices—such as dividing labour, coordinating and controlling—and provisional material arrangements orientate ‘actual’ enactments of open participation towards those four ideal-typical forms of enactments and how the participants’ learning during enactments affects subsequent enactments and cumulatively contributes either to the reinforcement or the decline of the strategy field in the organization’s hierarchy of power. Our article then provides a conceptual framework for analysing the political aspects of the enactments of open participation in strategy-making and contributes to a ‘post-processual’ understanding of strategy.

Art, culture and paradox pedagogy in management learning: The case of Portuguese fado

We propose a reawakening of interest in the role of artistic knowing for managerial education, presenting a pedagogy that is sensitive to cultural context and aimed at enabling the phronetic management of paradox. Inspired by fado, the iconic Portuguese popular music, especially the ways in which it embodies the stresses of society, we develop strategies for management learning based on engagement with art that fosters sensitivity to paradox. We contribute to management learning by inviting practitioners to be sensitive to the complexity of competing tensions in the cultures and language in and through which everyday lives are lived by bringing attention to the potential of artistic knowing for highlighting and navigating management paradoxes, to develop phronesis.

This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale (OBPS) using two samples of employees of organizations in various sectors. The scale is designed to gauge perceptions of the extent of organizational bullshit that exists in a workplace, where bullshit is operationalized as individuals within an organization making statements with no regard for the truth. Analyses revealed three factors of organizational bullshit, termed regard for truth, the boss and bullshit language. The three factors are consistent with existing literature in the field of organizational bullshit and offer further insight into how employees view workplace bullshit. The OBPS constitutes three subscales measuring these factors. Future researchers should seek to validate the OBPS and further develop the identified factors of organizational bullshit.

Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations

Why is bullshit so common in some organizations? Existing explanations focus on the characteristics of bullshitters, the nature of the audience, and social structural factors which encourage bullshitting. In this paper, I offer an alternative explanation: bullshitting is a social practice that organizational members engage with to become part of a speech community, to get things done in that community, and to reinforce their identity. When the practice of bullshitting works, it can gradually expand from a small group to take over an entire organization and industry. When bullshitting backfires, previously sacred concepts can become seen as empty and misleading talk.

Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations

Even though organizational activities have always been future-oriented, actors’ fascination with the future is not a universal phenomenon of organizational life. Human experience of the future is a rather young product of modernity, in which actors discovered the indeterminacy of the future, as well as their abilities to ‘make’ and, in part, even control and de-problematize it through ever-more sophisticated planning practices. In this essay, we argue that actors have recently ‘rediscovered’ the future as a problematic, open-ended category in organizational life, one that they cannot delineate through planning practices alone. This, we suggest, has been produced through a pluralization of what we refer to as ‘future-making practices’, a set of practices through which actors produce and enact the future. Based on illustrations of the experienced problematic open-endedness of the future in prevalent discourses such as climate change, digital transformation and post-truth politics, we invite scholars to explore future-making practices as an important but under-appreciated organizational phenomenon.

Talk–Action Dynamics: Modalities of aspirational talk

This paper investigates talk–action dynamics in the context of organizations, focusing in particular on situations where the talk concerns complex organizational aspirations, that is, situations where the implied action takes considerable effort to unfold and therefore extends into an unknown future. Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) as recurrent exemplar, we address talk–action dynamics in four different modalities of aspirational CSR talk: exploration, formulation, implementation and evaluation. By conceptualizing the precarious relationship between talk and action in each of these modalities, the paper disentangles talk and action, all the while acknowledging that the two are mutually intertwined. Hereby, the paper extends theories of communicative performativity, recovering the perlocutionary dimension and focusing on uptake beyond the moment in which the speech act is uttered.