Jean-Pascal Gond

Measuring the Unmeasured: An Institutional Entrepreneur Strategy in an Emerging Industry

The organizational literature on emerging industries has emphasized the need for institutional entrepreneurs - actors who give the new activity legitimacy and determine its patterns of behaviour. However, little empirical research has been carried out on the strategies that institutional entrepreneurs employ in order to achieve legitimacy for their activity. In this article, we suggest that an institutional entrepreneur can use the development of measurement tools as a strategy to develop its own legitimacy and power. By looking at a French entrepreneurial company’s development of tools to measure corporate social performance, we analyse how measurement tools influence the legitimacy of an industry and the systemic power within it. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for research into measurement tools in the areas of management or business and society.

The government of self-regulation: On the comparative dynamics of corporate social responsibility

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and government. CSR is often viewed as self-regulation, devoid of government. We attribute the scholarly neglect of the variety of CSR-government relations to the inadequate attention paid to the important differences in the way in which CSR has ‘travelled’ (or diffused), and has been mediated by the national governance systems, and the insufficient emphasis given to the role of the government (or government agency) in the CSR domain. We go on to identify a number of different types of CSR-government configurations, and by following empirically the CSR development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia in a comparative historical perspective, we derive a set of propositions on the changing dynamics of CSR-government configurations. In particular, we highlight the varied role that the governments can play in order to promote CSR in the context of the wider national governance systems.

Rational Decision Making as Performative Praxis: Explaining Rationality's Éternel Retour

Organizational theorists built their knowledge of decision making through a progressive critique of rational choice theory. Their positioning towards rationality, however, is at odds with the observation of rationality persistence in organizational life. This paper addresses this paradox. It proposes a new perspective on rationality that allows the theorizing of the production of rational decisions by organizations. To account for rationalitys eternel retour, we approach rational decision making as performative praxis---a set of activities that contributes to turning rational choice theory into social reality. We develop a performative praxis framework that explains how theory, actors, and tools together produce rationality within organizations through three mechanisms: rationality conventionalization, rationality engineering, and rationality commodification. This framework offers new avenues of research on rational decision making and points to the factors that underlie the manufacture of rationality in organizations.

Standardization as Institutional Work: The Regulatory Power of a Responsible Investment Standard

This paper conceptualizes standardization as institutional work to study the emergence of a standard and the deployment of its regulatory power. We rely on unique access to longitudinal archival data for exploring how the FTSE4Good index, a responsible investment index, emerged as a standard for socially responsible corporate behavior. Our results show how three types of standardization work – calculative framing, engaging and valorizing – support the design, legitimation and monitoring processes whereby a standard acquires its regulatory power. Our findings reveal new facets in the dynamics of standardization by approaching standardization as a product of institutional work and in showing how unintended consequences of that work can be recaptured to strengthen the regulatory power of the standard.

The human resources contribution to responsible leadership : An exploration of the CSR-HR interface

The purpose of this article is to investigate how Human Resources (HR) contributes to responsible leadership. Although Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices have been embraced by many corporations in recent years, the specific contributions of HR professionals, HR management practices and employees to responsible leadership have been overlooked. Relying on the analysis of interviews with 30 CSR and HR corporate executives from 22 corporations operating in France, we specify the HR contributions to responsible leadership at the functional, practical, and relational levels of analysis. We analyze whether and how HR support employees’ involvement in CSR, and highlight areas of collaboration and tension between HR and CSR functions around emerging practices of responsible leadership. Our findings uncover the multiple yet often implicit roles of HR in responsible leadership as well as the interrelation between functional, practical and relational dimensions of these roles. Finally, this study suggests that the organization of the HR–CSR interface can enable or undermine the HR contributions to responsible leadership and points to underlying cognitive factors that shape the HR–CSR interface.

Corporate Social Performance Disoriented: Saving the Lost Paradigm?

Corporate social performance (CSP) has been a prominent concept in the management literature dealing with the social role and impacts of the corporation; it has been promulgated as a unifying paradigm for the field. However, the concept of CSP is still lacking strong theoretical foundations and empirical validity, suggesting that the paradigmatic status of CSP might be lost. In this paper, the authors draw on Hirsch and Levin’s (1999) life cycle approach to explore the development of CSP as a concept, explain why it has so recurrently failed to deliver on these dimensions, and offer possible routes for future research that may potentially ameliorate this problem.

Decision Theory as Practice: Crafting Rationality in Organizations

This paper explores the underlying practices whereby rationality — as defined in rational choice theory — is achieved within organizations. The qualitative coding of 58 case study reports produced by decision analysts, working in a wide range of settings, highlights how organizational actors can make decisions in accord with the axioms of rational choice theory. Our findings describe the emergence of ‘decision-analysis’ as a field and reveal the complex and fragile socio-technical infrastructure underlying the craft of rationality, the central role of calculability, and the various forms of bricolage that decision analysts deploy to make rational decisions happen. Overall, this research explores the social construction of rationality and identifies the practices sustaining the performativity of rational choice theory within organizations.

How Do Employees Perceive Corporate Responsibility? Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Corporate Stakeholder Responsibility Scale

Recent research on the microfoundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has highlighted the need for improved measures to evaluate how stakeholders perceive and subsequently react to CSR initiatives. Drawing on stakeholder theory and data from five samples of employees (N = 3,772), the authors develop and validate a new measure of corporate stakeholder responsibility (CStR), which refers to an organization’s context-specific actions and policies designed to enhance the welfare of various stakeholder groups by accounting for the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental performance; it is conceptualized as a superordinate, multidimensional construct. Results from exploratory factor analyses, first- and second-order confirmatory factor analyses, and structural equation modeling provide strong evidence of the convergent, discriminant, incremental, and criterion-related validities of the proposed CStR scale. Two-wave longitudinal studies further extend prior theory by demonstrating that the higher-order CStR construct relates positively and directly to organizational pride and perceived organizational support, as well as positively and indirectly to organizational identification, job satisfaction, and affective commitment, beyond the contribution of overall organizational justice, ethical climate, and prior measures of perceived CSR.

Critical Essay: Reconsidering critical performativity

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of ‘critical performativity’, a concept designed to debate relationships between theory and practice and encourage practical interventions in organizational life. Notwithstanding its laudable ambition to stimulate discussion about engagement between critical management studies researchers and practitioners, we are concerned that critical performativity theory is flawed as it misreads foundational performativity authors, such as Austin and Butler, in ways that nullify their political potential, and ignores a range of other influential theories of performativity. It also overlooks the materiality of performativity. We review these limitations and then use three illustrations to sketch out a possible alternative conceptualization of performativity. This alternative approach, which builds on Butler’s and Callon’s work on performativity, recognizes that performativity is about the constitution of subjects, is an inherently material and discursive construct, and happens through the political engineering of sociomaterial agencements. We argue that such an approach – a political theory of organizational performativity – is more likely to deliver on both theoretical and practical fronts than the concept of critical performativity.

Building Critical Performativity Engines for deprived communities: : The construction of popular cooperative incubators in Brazil

Although worker cooperatives offer an organizational model that critical management scholars could adopt to demonstrate the utility of their normative ideals, little is known about how academia can contribute to the creation of worker cooperatives. Building on the concept of performativity and the case of the Technological Incubators for Popular Cooperatives in Brazil, we provide an account of constructing incubators for worker cooperatives across multiple universities. Our study uncovers the challenges that scholars face in performing the model of worker cooperatives by cognitively embedding actors within both economic and cooperative principles through teaching. Our results clarify the role of feedback loops, knowledge circulation, and the building of ‘chains of translation’ in the concrete manufacturing of worker cooperatives, and we show how universities can help develop a multilevel, flexible, and complex support network that enhances the performativity of the worker cooperative model. We advance the concept of a ‘critical performativity engine’ to describe the process whereby the first method for incubating cooperatives was developed and then translated across settings.