This review identifies the defining features of rituals and their functions in organizations, culminating in two key claims. First, organizational rituals can be described on a spectrum based on the fullness and degree of their expression. Complete or 'full' organizational rituals possess a greater number and intensity of ritual features than 'ritual-like' activities. The efficacy of an activity corresponds to its alignment with the features of full rituals. Ritual-like activities are therefore less powerful and more frequent organizational events than full rituals. Second, it is theorized that rituals work through three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: cognitive capture, emotional anchoring and behavioural prescription. It is proposed that rituals work by channelling (1) cognitive content, (2) affective responses and (3) behavioural activity toward the cultural expectations of organizations and their members. Organizational rituals may be characterized as standardized, rule-bound, predictable and repetitive behaviours undertaken in conditions demanding explicit performance expectations. Rituals are physically enacted to conform to a specified and invariable sequence, and are invested with added significance through a combination of formality and symbolism. Nine inter-dependent functions of rituals are specified, which are to: (1) provide meaning; (2) manage anxiety; (3) exemplify and reinforce the social order; (4) communicate important values; (5) enhance group solidarity; (6) include and exclude others; (7) signal commitment; (8) manage work structure; and (9) prescribe and reinforce significant events. These functions underline the role that rituals play as communication and learning systems, drawing attention to what is important and helping to funnel the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of organizational members. Organizational rituals are particularly important because they not only illuminate organizational behaviour, but also entrench or challenge existing cultural values.

No abstract

After a decade of rising costs and technical challenges, project financial data indicates that offshore wind may finally be on a downward cost trajectory while the industry logged its best deployment year ever in 2015. Historically, rising offshore wind costs have been attributed to a myriad of hindrances, including increasing siting challenges (e.g., deeper water, greater distances from shore) and a wide range of installation and operational difficulties that have frustrated developers and offset gains made in technology, learning, and experience. The resilience of the European offshore wind industry to overcome these daunting cost challenges can be attributed to stable European policy commitments, the introduction of new offshore-class turbine and substructure technologies, and the creation of an offshore wind industry supply chain.

In this article, we examine how to give objects a voice in organizational narrative. We track our encounter with a 914 Xerox copier, a redundant technological object that was scripted into a desired historical narrative within a corporate exhibit. Despite the 914’s apparent mnemonic and institutional efficacy, we questioned whether it might constitute more than a narrative repository. Might material objects in organizations also participate in narrative production? In this article, we advocate a post-social approach to narrative methodology that recognizes objects—such as the 914—as non-human actors in organizational sense-making. After reviewing post-sociality’s central premises, we propose three domains through which an object narrative can be elicited: object materiality, object practices and object biography. First, we suggest that object materiality can highlight the significant, networks of forces, materials and people—and therefore episodes and actors—that engage with and through objects. Second, we argue that people and objects are enmeshed in sequenced, workplace activities, and therefore through object practice humans define what stories objects can tell while objects reciprocally influence the latitude of human performance. Third, we propose that object biography provides a strategy to map the connections and transitions that occur over the life-course of an object, which can, in turn, unravel a changing web of organizational relations. Our aim is to provide methodological guidance to narrative researchers seeking to augment their organizational analyses by scrutinizing human–object enmeshment.

A substantial body of literature on new forms of organizing has forecast the end of bureaucracy. More recent empirical studies, however, indicate that high-performing organizations are adopting dual forms of organizing in which the controllability advantages associated with traditional forms work to complement and support the responsiveness attributes of new forms of organizing. The paradox is that, if organizations discard the key planning, co-ordinating and direction-setting mechanisms of traditional forms of organizing, they also remove the stabilizing dimensions of organizational form that are essential in periods of uncertainty and change. The challenge for organizations lies in learning how to manage the tensions or dualities between traditional and new forms of organizing, a process demanding the arbitration of continuity and change. This paper explores the concept of dualities and its salience in the management of organizing forms. First, the nature of dualities is explained; secondly, a set of characteristics is developed to describe the behaviour of dualities; and thirdly, suggestions are presented for arbitrating the tensions that exist in organizing form dualities. These three contributions are relevant because they signal the route to the effective creation and management of organizing form dualities, the benefit of which is the constructive combination of dynamic capabilities (underpinning innovation and responsiveness, the hallmarks of new forms of organizing) and operational capabilities (underpinning stability and efficiency, the hallmarks of traditional forms of organizing).