Research in sociology and organization studies has consistently documented the tendency for organizations to develop wrongdoing practices that are at odds with the legal and moral frameworks of society. Often, this wrongdoing acquires a degree of normalization where it is endorsed, encouraged, and accepted throughout the organization. Such normalized wrongdoing can have severe negative effects on the whistleblowing opportunities of employees. While these effects are intuitively easy to understand, we still lack an understanding of the significant variation that exists across (...) situations of normalized wrongdoing and how that variation may affect potential whistleblowers. To advance such an agenda, the paper analyzes 14 whistleblower autobiographies. Building on work on normalized wrongdoing within corruption, fraud, and management studies and Niklas Luhmann’s theories on organization, the analysis finds that normalized wrongdoing in the autobiographies appears in different intensities that depend on the role of management, the benefits organizations obtain from wrongdoing, and the extent to which wrongdoing norms are internalized by employees. The paper builds on these distinctions to suggest a continuum of normalized wrongdoing from ‘weak’ to ‘strong.’ Understanding this variation offers a new set of tools to assess the organizational realities that concerned employees must navigate in when they attempt to resist and address situations of normalized wrongdoing. (shrink)

The ethical behavior prevalent in an organization often determines business success or failure. Much research in the business context has scrutinized ethical behavior, but there are still few insights into its roots; this study furthers this line of inquiry. In line with identity work theory, we examine how employees’ identification with a family business shapes internal ethical decision-making processes. Because it is individuals who engage in decision-making—be it ethical or not—our research perspective centers on the individual level. We followed an (...) inductive, qualitative approach and conducted interviews with 19 employees in seven family businesses. We found that individuals engage in identity work when they identify as individual family firm employees and when they identify with the perceived characteristics of the family firm. These processes of identification, in turn, influence how employees cope with ethical situations. Our findings contribute to ethics and family business research, as well as to identity theory. (shrink)

Institutional resilience refers to the capacity of institutions to deal with adversity. Crises are a major source of adversity. However, we poorly understand the relations between institutional resilience and crises. Through a comparative process tracing across three European countries, I investigate how multistakeholder partnerships in work integration contributed to institutional resilience in response to the economic and the refugee crises. I present these foremost as moral crises, where public, private, and nonprofit actors choose to engage or not engage out of (...) a sense of responsibility. I develop a framework and research propositions on how multistakeholder collaboration may increase institutional resilience when it is affected by moral crises and make three contributions: First, in contrast to the destructive effects of crises often stressed, I identify pull and push factors triggered by moral crises that may galvanize fragmented efforts into joint action. Second, I conceptualize nested contingencies of institutional resilience, by explaining how resilience is affected by interaction between (1) the capacity of existing institutions and the level of adversity produced by crises and (2) institutional precursors that new actor constellations can build on and crises challenge existing institutions directly or indirectly. Third, I conceptualize which type of actor is likely to take the lead, and under which context conditions, when multiple stakeholders engage in increasing institutional resilience. I derive implications on how anticipatory embedded agency can prevent crises and how moral pro-activity may not only benefit institutional resilience, but also the organizations who choose to act. (shrink)