Symposiums

1.15PM - 2.45PM CT (UTC-5), Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile (Lakeview)

Title: Beyond the Facade: Corporate Greenwashing and Ways to Address It (18427)

Divisions: ONE - Organizations and the Natural Environment, STR - Strategic Management, IM - International Management

Session: 850

Organisers

• Svetlana Flankova – University of Liverpool Management School
• Valentina Marano – Northeastern University
• Ruth V. Aguilera – Northeastern University
• Pete Tashman – UMass Lowell

Panelist

• Ioannis Ioannou – London Business School
• Eun-Hee Kim – Fordham University
• Thomas Peyton Lyon – University of Michigan
• A. Wren Montgomery – Ivey Business School
• Maurizio Zollo – Imperial College Business School

Summary

Organizations worldwide are increasingly pressured to act more responsibly. A key strategy they are using to address these pressures is disclosing their efforts and impacts in the environmental and social arenas. Firms’ efforts to communicate their environmental and social performance and practices have increased in recent years, but so have instances of greenwashing. The United Nations identified greenwashing as a major barrier to achieving a sustainable future because it misleads stakeholders and detracts from genuine, impactful action in this realm. In response to the growing issue of greenwashing, governments and supranational organizations worldwide have started to implement legislation to curb this practice. These regulatory changes pose both challenges and opportunities for companies. Our panel symposium brings together leading scholars on this topic to engage in a dynamic discussion on management theory and practice related to greenwashing and corporate miscommunication issues more broadly. The purpose of this panel symposium is to explore existing research on greenwashing and to stimulate further investigation into this critical global issue.

5PM - 6.30PM CT (UTC-5), Fairmont Chicago - Millennium Park (Ambassador Room)

SYMPOSIUM (PANEL)

Title: Agency at the Crossroads: New Paths, Problems, and Perspectives for a Central Concept (19727)

Divisions: OMT - Organization and Management Theory, SAP - Strategizing Activities and Practices

Session: 1053

Organisers

• Ibrat Djabbarov – Imperial College London
• Daniel Milner – Oklahoma State University
• Andrey Pavlov – Cranfield School of Management

Panelist

• Maria Jose Murcia – IAE Business School & CESIS, Austral University
• Mike Zundel – University of Liverpool Management School
• Mary Uhl-Bien – Texas Christian University
• Sebastiano Massaro – Surrey Business School

Summary

Our assumptions of agency characterize how we as scholars understand and research leadership, strategy, entrepreneurship, and technological changes, to name just a few. The concept of agency is central to creating, changing, and dealing with challenges ranging from minor issues to societal grand challenges. Although ubiquitous in organization research and an undercurrent in management theory and practice, agency remains largely under-theorized. As societies and organizations face wicked problems – e.g., societal grand challenges, inequity, mental health – bringing agency into the foreground can help scholars develop new perspectives and conceptual insights about how actors can be creative agents, change and enact change, and respond to challenges (Battilana, Yen, Ferreras, & Ramarajan, 2022; Sewell, 1992). Furthermore, the stories we pay attention to and the angles from which we study organizations as management scholars often favor agentic elements. For example, how peripheral and central actors instigate change at organizational or field levels (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), how entrepreneurs develop intentions, or managers strategize (Hengst, Jarzabkowski, Hoegl, & Muethel, 2020; Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, Chalkias, & Cacciatori, 2018) are all tightly connected to what it means to be an agent. Our interpretations and lenses may propel a particular view of agency. Scholars advancing the agential realism perspective argue that how we measure and observe shapes our perception of agency (Barad, 2007). For example, actor- network theory highlights that agency is not limited to humans and can extend to non-human entities such as objects and technologies (Latour, 2005). These perspectives are underpinned by researchers’ assumptions and their ontological, epistemological, and methodological orientations (Gioia, 2022). Moreover, separate from the nature or ontology of agency are its causes and consequences. The diversity of organizational research examining a wide range of phenomena of creativity, change, and challenges across different contexts and theoretical lenses can yield new insights about the nature, causes, and consequences of human agency. As organization scholars, we can leverage the diversity of organizational research streams to develop fresh perspectives and nuances on agency. For this symposium, we invited scholars representing a broad range of perspectives to offer diverse insights on agency from different research streams in management and organization studies. Our expert panel will provide insights from processual and relational ontology, leadership and complexity, strategy and technology, and neuroscience.

3PM - 4.30PM CT (UTC-5), Swissotel Chicago (Zurich G)

SYMPOSIUM (PRESENTER)

Title: A change is gonna come: How life events shape changes in work orientation (13102)

Division: OB - Organizational Behavior, MOC - Managerial and Organizational Cognition, CAR - Careers 

Session: 1618 - Research on Meaningful Work: Planting the Seeds for the Future

Authors

• Greg Fetzer – University of Liverpool Management School
• Elise B. Jones – US Coast Guard Academy 

11.30AM - 1PM CT (UTC-5), Swissotel Chicago (Monte Rosa)

Title: History, Memory and Ethics (14282) 

Division: MH - Management History, SIM - Social Issues in Management, OMT - Organization and Management Theory

Session: 2054

Organisers

• William Foster – University of Alberta
• Diego Coraiola – University of Victoria

Panelist

• Francois Bastien – University of Victoria
• Andrew Crane – University of Bath
• Mollie Painter-Morland – Nottingham Trent University
• Daniel Wadhwani – University of Southern California
• Mike Zundel – University of Liverpool Management School

Discussant

• Christine Quinn Trank – Vanderbilt University

Summary

Despite the increasing interest in multitemporality, or how the past intersects with the present and the future to affect the way people enact social reality, the relationship between the past and (un)ethical behaviors has been typically overlooked in current debates. There is a lack of understanding of how history, memory and the past inform ethics, and a decided absence of normative direction about how managers should engage with the past. This symposium is intended to address our lack of understanding of how ethics shapes history and memory and how the past can inform our normative understanding of ethical behavior within and around organizations. 

1.15PM - 2.45PM CT (UTC-5), Swissotel Chicago (Grindelwald)

Title: New Forms of Work and Their Effects on Employee Experiences, Wellbeing and Performance (12193)

Division: HR - Human Resources

Session: 2162

Organiser

• Hoa Do – University of Leicester

Participant

• Jiatong Liu – Xiamen University, China

Presenters

• Stephen Wood – University of Leicester
• Helen Shipton – Human Resource Management
• Hoa Do – University of Leicester

Participant

• Xiaoshuang Lin – University of South Australia

Organisers

• Helen Shipton – Human Resource Management
• Xiaoshuang Lin – University of South Australia

Session Chair

• Margarita Nyfoudi – University of Birmingham

Discussant

• Pawan S. Budhwar – Aston University

Participant

• Xiaomin Xu – The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
• Mariella Miraglia – University of Liverpool Management School

Presenter

• Jin Cheng – Xiamen University

Participant

• Rory Donnelly – University of Liverpool Management School

Summary

New forms of work such as hybrid working, homeworking, alternative work arrangements have become a norm, and thus a strategic policy decision in organizations because of the advent of new technologies. The need for new forms of work has recently accelerated due to changes in societal attitudes, employee expectations, the need for flexibility and external factors such Covid-19. Despite their growing importance and research attention, research on new forms of work is still limited and imbalanced between these forms, i.e., more on homeworking but less on hybrid working. This lack of research and balance holds back understanding, meaning that scholarly insight as well as guidance to practitioners is limited. This symposium (consisting of 4 papers: two focused on hybrid working, one on alternative working arrangements, and another on homeworking) aims to address this important gap by shedding light on (1) the role of new forms of work and their effects on employee experiences of work, wellbeing and performance, (2) the variations of new forms of work from the perspective of different stakeholders, within different contexts and based on a range of methodologies, and (3) how the ‘rhetoric versus reality’ of new forms of work is challenged to understand their real effects. Collectively, the papers suggest that each form of work may have a differential effect on employee performance and wellbeing, depending on how and where it is implemented as well as how employees experience and perceive it. This symposium therefore has important implications for both academics and practitioners.

8AM - 9.30AM CT (UTC-5), Swissotel Chicago (Zurich D)

Title: Line managers’ implementation of pay for performance on unit-level outcomes in Chinese MNCs (10244) 

Division: HR - Human Resources, OB - Organizational Behavior

Session: 1810 - Revisiting and Advancing HR Process Research: Exploring New Horizons (10244)

Authors

• Chunyu Xiu – HR attribution research
• Huadong Yang – University of Liverpool Management School
• Rory Donnelly – University of Liverpool Management School

8AM - 9.30AM CT (UTC-5), Swissotel Chicago (Vvey 3)

Title: Presenteeism profiles and attendance (14071)

Division: OB - Organizational Behavior, MOC - Managerial and Organizational Cognition

Session: 1839 - Sick and Working: Innovation in Presenteeism Research

Authors

• Mariella Miraglia – University of Liverpool Management School
• Pietro Menatta – Sapienza University Di Roma Rome, Italy
• Laura Borgogni – University of Rome