Knowledge that Transforms

Newly appointed CEOs often enter office with a mandate to initiate strategic change, yet such change disrupts established routines and interests, frequently provoking resistance from organizational stakeholders. This creates a fundamental leadership transition dilemma: the strategic change new CEOs are expected to undertake may also threaten their early survival. We argue that strategic change increases the likelihood of CEO early dismissal because boards, facing uncertainty about a new CEO's competence, may interpret negative stakeholder reactions as signals of weak leadership or poor fit. Drawing on the strategic communication literature, we propose that new CEOs can mitigate this tension by building resonance, defined as alignment between their communication and stakeholders' emotional concerns and cognitive frames. In particular, charismatic visions and expressions of optimism generate emotional resonance by reducing anxiety and uncertainty and strengthening affective commitment to change; linguistic simplicity and language concreteness create cognitive resonance by making change initiatives clearer and more credible. Through these communication tactics, new CEOs can build stakeholder support for strategic change even before they have established a firm power base. Using a sample of CEO successions in S&P 1500 firms from 2002 to 2015, we find support for these predictions.

While ethnographers recognize vulnerability as revelatory, we have yet to understand how it generates embodied knowledge. This paper reconceptualizes vulnerability as the open exposure to affect and be affected by the world and others. Rather than treating vulnerability as a methodological risk or by‐product of immersion, I argue that it constitutes a way of knowing: a practice for accessing the unspoken, visceral and embodied aspects of social life. I introduce the figure of the vulnerable performer: a researcher who does not merely observe but enacts field practices under conditions of open exposure. Through this figure, I theorize how such exposure produces carnal knowledge – practical, sensuous, affectively grounded knowing. Drawing on a two‐year enactive ethnography in a hospice, I identify three dimensions through which vulnerable performance generates carnal knowledge – sensorial openness, visceral reactions and the intersubjective experience of time and space – showing how each renders organizing perceptible. Yet, the same exposure that enables such knowledge also carries ethical and methodological costs that cannot be treated as secondary to its gains. I therefore clarify when vulnerable performance is warranted, what it can reveal about the bodily and ethical dynamics of organizational life, and under what conditions such exposure can remain ethically sustainable.

Private transnational governance institutions increasingly acquire regulatory authority in contexts of weak or inactive state regulation, yet their capacity to exercise it remains contested. We extend Poulantzas' concept of relative autonomy, understood as the capacity to act with organizational independence from specific fractions of capital while reproducing capitalist relations, to the transnational context. We develop this framework through a longitudinal case study of the Bangladesh Accord and its transition to the ready‐made garments (RMG) Sustainability Council (RSC) (2013–2024). We identify three institutional conditions enabling relative autonomy: joint governance between labour and capital, organizational independence, and legally enforceable commitments. Under these conditions, transnational initiatives can move beyond symbolic compliance to discipline global brands and exert credible regulatory power. However, such autonomy is inherently unstable, provoking resistance from domestic capital and state actors, particularly in Global South contexts where such initiatives are contested as external impositions. We show that relative autonomy is not static but emerges from political contestations between capital and labour, and between global and domestic actors. While private governance featuring relative autonomy can temporarily constrain capital, it ultimately reproduces the capital‐labour and North–South power asymmetries of global supply chains.

Gender disparities in career success – who earns more, advances faster, and feels more satisfied about their jobs and careers – persist across societies, yet how societal cultures shape the magnitude and direction of such disparities remains less understood. Drawing on social role theory, which recognizes the influence of cultural contexts on the enactment of gender roles, our meta‐analysis examines how cultural levels and changes moderate the relationship between gender and career success. We consider both objective career success (salary, promotions, and rank) and subjective career success (career and job satisfaction) across 1115 studies spanning several decades and multiple countries. We find that the gender–career success relationship is influenced by a society's levels of power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and motivation towards achievement and success. Unexpected patterns also emerged, illuminating the distinct role of each cultural dimension, differences between objective and subjective career outcomes, and meaningful variation across specific indicators of career success. We further highlight the importance of distinguishing between static cultural levels and their change over time. Overall, our findings offer implications for social role theory and gender gap research, as well as for multinational organizations seeking to promote and monitor gender equity.

Strategic reorientation entails justifying new directions in light of the past. While organizations invoke their past when facing strategic shifts, these invocations can yield divergent outcomes, enabling renewal in some cases while constraining change or producing stagnation and even decline in others. Why do organizations that invoke their past in similar ways follow different trajectories? We develop a process theory of organizational legacy that locates the answer in evaluative authorization. Rather than treating organizational legacy as inherited historical content, we conceptualize it as a socially enacted process through which (re)interpretations of the past are activated, evaluated, and settled as normatively binding guides for action. This process determines whether and which interpretations acquire normative authority, remain contested, or fail to stabilize direction. By identifying evaluative settlement as the mechanism through which the past becomes binding, our theory explains why and how organizational legacy can enable adaptive renewal, constrain reinterpretation, or fail to organize action. This perspective repositions history as an active site of normative adjudication and clarifies how organizations make their pasts binding in ways that shape their futures. Organizations do not diverge because they inherit different pasts, but because they make those pasts binding in different ways.

The Point by Wu advances a compelling framework for understanding algorithmic status inequality, demonstrating how computational beliefs and computational inequalities can interact to produce persistent status hierarchies within and across organizations. This Counterpoint accepts Wu's core observations while offering a complementary theoretical lens grounded in the dynamic capabilities framework and the economics of general‐purpose technologies. Where Wu emphasizes structural constraints that render algorithmic hierarchies resistant to isolated interventions, this Counterpoint highlights organizational agency, specifically, the sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities through which firms can detect, respond to, and potentially reshape algorithmic status dynamics. Rather than disputing Wu's diagnosis, this Counterpoint extends it by examining three complementary mechanisms: sensing capabilities (detecting status‐stratifying algorithmic effects), seizing capabilities (mobilizing resources toward more inclusive algorithmic development), and transforming capabilities (reconfiguring human‐algorithm relationships over time). These mechanisms work alongside the structural interventions Wu advocates rather than substituting for them. The dialogue between structural determinism and organizational agency in the context of algorithmic status inequality suggests a research agenda focused on the conditions under which dynamic capabilities are likely sufficient to overcome status‐stratifying structural forces, how institutions might democratize adaptive capabilities, and what governance arrangements best combine structural intervention with capability development.

Bifurcation bias, the preferential treatment in favour of family managers over non‐family managers, is prevalent in family firms, yet research on its performance implications remains inconclusive. We argue that this inconclusiveness reflects insufficient attention to the normative contexts that shape how non‐family managers interpret differential treatment. Drawing on justice and entitlement theories, we argue that non‐family managers' fairness judgments hinge on whether family membership is perceived as a legitimate basis for entitlement. Using longitudinal data on publicly listed Chinese family firms, we find that bifurcation bias in cash‐based compensation undermines performance, but that this relationship is contingent on normative context. Specifically, the negative effect is attenuated in regions with stronger traditional values and in firms with greater family involvement in management, whereas it is amplified in highly competitive industries. By demonstrating that entitlement judgments are socially embedded, this study offers a contingency‐based resolution to the debate over whether bifurcation bias harms family firm performance and provides practical guidance for family firms seeking to balance fairness with family‐centred goals.

This Counterpoint advances the study of organizational attention by proposing an ‘expansive’ rather than a ‘substitutive’ development of the attention‐based view (ABV) as proposed in the Point . While endorsing a richer understanding of attention, we caution against reinforcing unhelpful dichotomies between quality and quantity of attention. We argue that the ABV's perceived limitations, especially its treatment of attention as scarce and quantifiable, reflect Simon's legacy more than flaws in the ABV itself. We propose three directions for future research: rethinking resource allocation as emerging from competition among attentional sources; developing a thicker view of situatedness in which social dynamics shape attention beyond intentionality; and revisiting scarcity by examining why attention is limited, what kind of scarcity is involved, and when abundance rather than scarcity becomes problematic. By articulating a dialectical position that transcends the thesis of a complete turn to the quality of attending, as in the Point and the antithesis in Counterpoint 2 – stick to quantity and persevere in normal science, we offer a way forward that preserves the strengths of attentional research while enabling a more nuanced account of organizational attention.

Inspired by the Attention‐Based View of the firm, organizational research has illuminated how organizations learn, adapt, and perform, yet recent theorizing risks diluting attention's explanatory force by compromising its ontological integrity. In this Counterpoint , I argue that attention must be preserved as a scarce, selective, and situated mechanism linking cognition, structure, and behaviour. I clarify the ontological attributes that follow from the definition of attention and show how efforts to re‐ontologize attention as ‘crescive’ risk collapsing causal explanation into phenomenological description. I then argue that many persistent gaps in the literature are misdiagnosed as limitations of the Attention‐Based View when they in fact stem from the field's failure to fully exploit the ontology inherent in attention's definition. I develop this claim through two such gaps, limited normative theorizing and insufficient theorization of situations, and advance three research agendas: developing attention patterns that manage scarcity, revealing the costs of selective attention, and designing information environments that condition returns on attention. By preserving rather than dissolving its ontological core, this Counterpoint shows that attention's enduring power lies not in expanding its boundaries but in fully exploiting the scarcity, selectivity, and situatedness it already affords.

Whereas extant studies have mostly treated multi‐stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as instruments of private authority that interact with public governance in various spheres, this study offers an alternative view of MSIs as important regulatory intermediaries, specifically in times of regulatory flux. Building on an in‐depth case study of the German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles in the context of the emerging German Supply Chain Act, we explore how MSIs can support firms in navigating the transition from voluntary governance to mandatory due diligence legislation. Our analysis reveals the evolving and multi‐faceted intermediary roles that MSIs can enact, documenting the fine‐grained practices whereby MSIs can support firms in managing the challenges related to changing regulatory landscapes. We also highlight several role‐based tensions fuelled in this context and indicate how MSIs can manage those. Our findings contribute to theory on regulatory intermediation by illuminating a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between regulatory events, firm challenges, role‐based tensions, and role adaptation. Extrapolating from our case, we theorize MSIs as actors that can effectively mediate business–government interactions and help build constructive institutional relationships in emerging regulatory fields.