The literature on help-giving behavior identifies individual-level factors that affect a help-giver's decision to help another individual. Studying a context in which work was highly interdependent and helping was pervasive, however, we propose that this emphasis on the initial point of consent is incomplete. Instead, we find that workplace help-seeking and help-giving can be intertwined behaviors enacted through an organizational routine. Our research, therefore, shifts the theoretical emphasis from one of exchange and cost to one of joint engagement. More specifically, we move beyond the initial point of consent to recast help-seeking and help-giving as an interdependent process in which both the help-seeker and the help-giver use cognitive and emotional moves to engage others and thereby propel a helping routine forward. In contrast to the existing literature, an organizational routines perspective also reveals that helping need not be limited to dyads and that the helping routine is shaped by the work context in which help is sought. Finally, we extend these insights to the literatures on routines and coordination and debate how our results might generalize even if helping is not part of an organizational routine.
We investigate the emergence and growth of ''green chemistry''-an effort by chemists to encourage other chemists to reduce the health, safety, and environmental impacts of chemical products and processes-to explore how occupational members, absent external triggers for change, influence how their peers do their work. Using extensive interviews, archival data, and observations, we find that advocates simultaneously advanced different frames that specified the utility of making the change: (1) a normalizing frame, positioning green chemistry as consistent with mainstream chemistry innovation; (2) a moralizing frame, positioning it as an ethical imperative; and (3) a pragmatizing frame, positioning it as a tool that could help chemists tackle problems they encountered in their day-today work. Each frame resonated differently with chemists in their various occupational roles. Though this pluralistic approach generated broad acceptance of the change effort, it also exposed tensions, which threatened the coherence of the change. Advocates' diverse responses to these tensions contribute to a persistent state of pluralism and dynamism in the change effort. We uncover a process through which occupational members generate and sustain change, show how occupational heterogeneity can enable and delimit change, and show how wellmeaning efforts to ''moralize'' occupational work can heighten resistance, inhibiting the very changes that enable experts to address urgent societal problems.
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