Knowledge that Transforms

Job titles communicate occupational role and status in a form readily understood within and across organizations. However, popularization of a new class of job titles challenges the extant theoretical understanding of job titles as standardized categorization tools. Titles such as “chief storyteller” or “happiness hero” raise questions about why organizations would assign such titles. In this paper, I take a strategic human resource management perspective and develop theory to explain how organizations use unconventional job titles to signal: (a) the re-bundling of new tasks into novel roles, and (b) the rebranding of a role to reflect the organization’s symbolic attributes. Drawing on these two signals, I differentiate four types of titles: “conventional,” “elastic,” “semantic,” and “transfigured.” I then link these job title types to both intended and unintended outcomes in the hiring process. I identify two downstream signal cost mechanisms—(1) legibility costs at attraction and (2) verification costs at selection—that reveal the costs organizations bear when they deploy signals outside established institutional infrastructure. As a whole, I seek to revitalize dormant theory on job titles and offer a timely lens into how titles function as some of the first signals of a broader human resource management system in a dynamic labor market environment.

Workplace envy is a socially embedded experience with important personal and relational implications. Yet, not all workplace relationships provide the same context for experiencing and regulating envy. In contemporary organizations, work is increasingly carried out within multiplex relationships that span both professional and personal domains. These relationships broaden the dimensions along which social comparisons occur and heighten the self-relevance of others’ successes, advantages, and favorable life circumstances, making envy especially likely. At the same time, friendship obligations, professional norms, and ongoing work responsibilities can constrain how envy is managed and expressed. Drawing upon emotion regulation theory and research on workplace relationships, we develop a theoretical model that explains how individuals regulate envy within multiplex relationships. We argue that envy simultaneously makes salient personal and relational motives—the desire to reduce the sting of envy and the desire to preserve a valued workplace relationship. These motives, in turn, activate a dual-motive appraisal process through which individuals arrive at key decision points that culminate in one of three regulatory pathways—experience-, situation-, or expression-level regulation—with each pathway producing distinct emotional and relational trajectories. In laying out this model, we seek to advance research on workplace envy and multiplex relationships.

Managerial phronesis involves first-hand experience that helps managers make moral and context-specific judgments at work in pursuit of the common good. Yet, as managers increasingly rely on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) at work, many of these first-hand experiences are replaced by synthetic outputs. While past research has investigated how human–AI interactions alter managerial agency, we do not know why, how, and under which conditions GenAI affects the development of managerial phronesis. Answering these questions is important because phronesis underpins much of knowledge use in organizations. Consequently, we develop a baseline model that advances our understanding of how phronesis emerges in the absence of GenAI, introducing conceptual innovations that explain how new experiences are generated. We then extend this model by explaining why and how GenAI shapes the development of phronesis. Specifically, we theorize how GenAI can shift the development of phronesis toward what we term epistemic de-skilling, when conditions of perceived time pressure prompt cognitive offloading of tasks, and toward epistemic up-skilling, when conditions of accountability activate managerial reflexivity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our model, and articulate an agenda for future research.

Organizations increasingly pursue multiple objectives, yet we know little about how boundedly rational firms search for better strategies when performance is multidimensional. We use corporate social responsibility—pursuing social and financial outcomes simultaneously—as a motivating context. We distinguish multi-objective decision-making (choosing among known alternatives) from multi-objective search (discovering alternatives through path-dependent local moves), and argue that preferences matter through the heuristics that implement them during search. In a dual-landscape NK simulation, we compare five prominent heuristics: Maximize (improve financial performance only), Combine (raise the sum of financial and social performance), Alternate (pursue one goal until stuck, then switch), Penalize (maximize financial performance while deducting shortfalls below a social threshold), and Satisfice (prioritize financial performance only after meeting a social threshold). Across varying complexity, goal correlation, and thresholds, these heuristics produce systematically different trajectories and joint outcomes. Importantly, by escaping local financial optima, Alternate often discovers “oblique” strategies that match or exceed the financial performance achieved by profit-only local search while also improving social performance. We conclude that implementing the same multi-goal preferences through different search heuristics steers firms toward different regions of the social–financial frontier, shaping both the compromises they reach and the opportunities they discover.

Organizations face mounting pressure from stakeholders to change practices and policies, yet scholarly understanding of how organizations manage this pressure remains incomplete. While existing research has examined various organizational responses to stakeholder pressure—including acquiescence, neglect, collaboration, and resistance—these responses have been predominantly reactive and discrete, with research overlooking a more systematic approach organizations can employ to neutralize stakeholder pressure before it emerges, and end it if it materializes. To address this gap, this paper introduces organizational repression as an integrated strategy aimed at preventing, controlling, or constraining stakeholder collective action from evolving. Drawing on the social movements and state-based repression literatures, we theorize how organizations can effectively undermine collective action by targeting its enabling conditions across three distinct phases: emergence, coalescence, and formalization. We propose five key repressive tactics—manipulating threat perceptions, closing opportunity structures, restricting resources, selectively disincentivizing recruits, and fragmenting coalitions of members and allies—and explore how organizations can implement each. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the social movements and nonmarket strategy literatures by theorizing organizational repression as a stakeholder management strategy and revealing how organizations can undermine stakeholder efforts to produce organizational and societal change.