Analytical technologies that structure and process data hold great promise for organizations but also may pose fundamental challenges for how knowledge workers accomplish tasks. Knowledge workers are generally considered experts who develop deep understanding of their tools, but recent observations suggest that in some situations, they may black box their analytical technologies, meaning they trust their tools without understanding how they work. I conducted a two-year inductive ethnographic study of the use of analytical technologies across four groups in an investment bank and found two distinct paths that these groups used to validate financial analyses through what I call “validating practices”: actions that confirm whether a produced analysis is trustworthy. Surprisingly, engaging in these practices does not necessarily equate to understanding the calculations performed by the technologies. In one path, validating practices are partitioned across junior and senior roles: junior bankers engage in assembling tasks and use the analytical tools to perform analysis, while only senior bankers interpret the analysis. In the other path, junior and senior members engage in co-construction: junior bankers do both assembling and interpreting tasks, and senior bankers engage in interpreting and provide feedback on junior bankers’ reasoning and choices. Both junior and senior bankers in the partitioning groups routinely black boxed the algorithms embedded in their technologies, taking them for granted without understanding them. By contrast, bankers in the co-construction groups were conscious of the algorithms and understood their potential impact. I found that black boxing influenced the knowledge outputs of these bankers and constrained the development of junior members’ expertise, with consequences for their career trajectories.

This two-year inductive study of a refugee-resettlement agency examines how employees navigated a workload surge caused by a refugee crisis and sustained the perceived meaningfulness of their work during and after the surge. Employees shifted their conceptualization of meaningfulness from quality to quantity during the surge; post-surge, they again redefined meaningfulness, to encompass both quality and quantity. During these transitions, employees changed how they worked to resettle refugees via three subprocesses: negotiating emotional tension (“how I feel”), adopting a situational purpose (“what my work is for in this situation”), and adjusting their work practices (“what to do to achieve the situational purpose”). Though some refugees who arrived during the surge reported worse outcomes, those who had been told the rationale for employees’ quantity approach to work reported well-being and employment outcomes similar to those of refugees who had arrived during non-surge conditions. I offer a process model that elucidates how aid workers adapt their enactment of meaningful work in crisis conditions, highlighting finding a situational purpose—the provisional “why” or “for what” of their work in light of a new situation—while navigating a changing work environment.

Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos. But this process can be particularly challenging for movements that are explicitly opposed to using a market mechanism as a means of scaling up. Our analysis of yoga between 1975 and 2016 reveals how a countercultural movement fundamentally opposed to a capitalist market economy but seeking to grow can paradoxically become syncretic with or infiltrated by concepts and beliefs that are core to the market system but incompatible with the movement’s original ethos. We show how, before such a movement can be commodified, it must be de-essentialized, a process that requires stripping away key aspects of its history, context, and religious commitments and transforming collective goals into individual ones. This process involves not only external entrepreneurs looking to mine the movement but also movement leaders seeking wider enrollment of resource-rich actors to scale the movement up. We show how codes borrowed from parallel movements and templates borrowed from markets can be instrumental in driving such a movement’s transformation. Through this extreme case of the yoga movement, we advance understandings of how movements can become syncretic with values and practices they fundamentally oppose.

Researchers have explored in depth how social movement actors strive to pass laws to change organizations exogenously or to demand that they make commitments or policy changes. But ensuring that organizations implement such commitments or policies is challenging. Insider activists may be influential for implementation processes, and I explore how they can increase that influence. I contend that insider activists influence such processes by offering their organizations implementation resources, such as free and ready-to-use content and model programs that reflect changes the activists want to see. To develop this argument, I explore how, starting in the mid-2000s, LGBT activists developed resources to ensure that diversity policies were increasingly relevant for sexual minorities in France. Many diversity policies at the time expressed commitment to “gender, disability, age . . .” Activists contended that nothing was done for the minorities who were not named—those left in the ellipsis (. . .) of diversity. Using web archives and interviews, I show that LGBT rights activists increased their influence on French organizations by developing implementation resources that corporations could readily use to flesh out their diversity commitments and implement diversity programs to promote the inclusion of LGBT employees. I demonstrate how insider activists used these implementation resources to denounce organizations’ superficial commitments or employees’ homophobic practices, thereby compelling organizations to change.

The upward voicing of ideas is vital to organizational performance. Yet power differences between voicers and those with authority may result in valuable ideas being overlooked. In this ethnographic, 31-month longitudinal study of a multi-disciplinary team in the healthcare sector, we examine how upwardly voiced ideas can endure to reach implementation. Of 208 upwardly voiced ideas, most were rejected in the moment, but 49 reached implementation despite appearing to be initially rejected. These ideas were kept alive by other team members who later drew upon and revived the initial ideas through what we call the voice cultivation process. We detail this process and describe five pathways through which voiced ideas stayed alive to reach implementation by overcoming different forms of resistance. We illustrate how the allyship of others can help voice live on beyond its initial utterance to reach implementation and generate change, even when the person who initially spoke up is no longer on the team or advocating for the idea. By reconceptualizing voice as a collective, interactional process rather than a one-time dyadic event, this paper develops new theory on how employees can help one another’s voice be heard to positively impact their teams and organizations.