Alienation is seen as endemic to the labour process and organizations. Put simply, if workers do not own the means, conditions and results of production they will remain alienated from their product, productive activity, species being and fellow human and non-human others. Some scholars have highlighted that, through their structures of democratic control and collective ownership of the means, conditions and results of labour, worker cooperatives reverse the capital-labour relationship to create a non-exploitative class process and therefore hold possibilities for ‘disalienation’. However, the idea that worker cooperatives can be ‘disalienating’ is by no means universally accepted, with others arguing that subsumption of labour to capital can only be partially addressed through a cooperative’s internal structure. Central to this debate is a worker cooperative’s position within the capitalist market, and we argue, their use of wage labour. This article, based on an 18-month ethnography with 2 worker cooperatives, addresses the question: To what extent are members of worker cooperatives, engaged in wage labour, able to resist the forces of alienation?

This article critically examines the complex dynamics related to dignity at work (DAW) in contemporary precarious employment in the United Kingdom. It argues that current DAW frameworks are typically focused on workers with one job, but what about the experiences of those who need to work in multiple jobs to make ends meet? To consider this, the article focuses on the complex experiences related to dignity when navigating between and participating in different workplaces, presenting the notion of ‘dignity in, out and between work’. It provides a four-dimensional framework to renew DAW debates. The first two reflect original DAW frameworks revealing ‘work intensification’ and ‘poor management, exploitation and abuse’. However, this article expands these conceptually and empirically by presenting a thematic broadening of work intensification and extensification across a mixture of jobs, with fragmented and complex temporal and spatial aspects of work. The third and fourth dimensions contribute two significant elements to DAW discussions. ‘Stigma, humiliation and shame’ incorporates issues such as in-work poverty and foodbank use. Finally, we emphasise tensions related to ‘the value of work’, where workers’ contribution was not appreciated even if they held socially significant jobs.

Why do so many attempts to distribute authority fail—even in organizations deeply committed to decentralization of authority? In this article, I argue that the answer lies in the cognitive, motivational, and emotional residues of learned helplessness shaped by prolonged exposure to hierarchical conditioning. From this perspective, I conceptualize the adoption of distributed authority as a process of unlearning the learned helplessness . Drawing on ethnographic action research into the adoption of Holacracy as a specific form of a self-managing organization, my study demonstrates how learned helplessness inhibits individuals from acknowledging, internalizing, and enacting the authority embedded in distributed authority frameworks—and how this cycle can be broken through deliberate practices. I identify three human-centered boundary conditions— clarity of role boundaries and responsibilities, purpose-driven proactive behavior , and complex social interaction —that interrupt habitual patterns of deference and managerial intervention. These conditions enable the overarching process of unlearning the learned helplessness, allowing self-organization to emerge. Theoretically, the study reveals why distributed authority so often collapses in practice and outlines the human-centered boundary conditions required for its long-term viability. Practically, it highlights the need to address the psychological effects of learned helplessness—not just redesign formal structures—to implement and sustain distributed authority.

Why do low-skilled gig workers remain stuck in work they originally intended as temporary? Although gig work is widely portrayed as flexible and temporary, our study shows that platforms can gradually trap workers in place. Drawing on grounded theory and fieldwork—including 70 interviews with 42 food delivery riders and 14 ride-hailing drivers, 30 hours of firsthand riding experience, and observations of online communities totalling 820 riders—this study develops a conceptual framework of career development lock, identifying four interrelated forms: lock-out, lock-in, lock-up, and lock-down. We find that career development lock stems from a structural conflict between workers’ long-term aspirations, grounded in a continuous temporal narrative, and platform algorithms’ need for flexible, on-demand labor that operates through a fragmented temporal logic. This conflict generates short-term person–career fit but long-term misfit. Under the structural constraints of algorithmic management, workers turn to adaptive self-exploitation, intensifying short-term fit while undermining long-term misfit, which ultimately traps them in their roles. The study advances understanding of non-linear careers in non-standard employment and reframes algorithmic control as a career-structuring force beyond a day-to-day control mechanism. It also offers practical implications for platforms and policymakers to prevent new forms of career entrapment in the gig economy.

How can leaders guide diverse organizations to work together on society’s biggest challenges when power is unevenly distributed? Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) bring together companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to address complex problems, yet their success hinges on how leaders navigate competing interests and shifting power dynamics. This study examines a high-profile CSP involving a Fortune 500 company, two international development organizations, and an NGO. Drawing on Mary Parker Follett’s ideas about “power-with” and “power-over,” I show how NGO leaders combined collaborative and more coercive tactics to move the partnership forward. My analysis reveals that responsible leadership (RL) in CSPs is not a static trait or style but evolves through a dynamic choreography of power as challenges and priorities change. The findings offer practical lessons for leaders seeking to balance ethics, inclusion, and influence in multi-stakeholder collaborations, and they extend theory by reframing RL as a shifting, context-sensitive process rather than a fixed style.

The operation of criminal governance within formal-legal industrial contexts connected to global supply chains remains insufficiently theorized in management and organization studies (MOS). How such governance legitimizes violence against marginalized workers both within and beyond organizational boundaries also remains critically underexplored. By analysing the paradoxical normalization of criminality and violence within Bangladesh’s garment industry, this study exposes the systemic embeddedness of mastans , politically connected criminals, within export-oriented industrial governance. We conceptualize this entanglement as mastanocracy , a hybrid political formation of violent criminal governance that operates legitimately at the nexus of corruption, democratic erosion, elite power and social polarization, advancing the neoliberal economic and political agendas of dominant actors. This research extends MOS by broadening the boundary conditions under which criminal governance is legitimized in a formal-legal industrial environment in the Global South. It also advances the discourse on violence in contemporary organizations by revealing the broader cultural, social and political dynamics that normalize violence within and beyond organizational boundaries, compelling millions of marginalized workers to live and work under regimes of criminal governance.

Despite frequent anecdotal accounts and media portrayals of unpredictable and/or inconsistent leaders, scholarly understanding of such leadership remains limited, mostly due to ambiguity surrounding its conceptualization and operationalization. Rather than focusing on employees’ direct experiences with unpredictable and inconsistent leaders, prior research has primarily measured changes in specific leader behavior over time or the interactive effects of seemingly opposing leader behaviors. Yet, this is not the same as perceiving that a leader has a consistently erratic style. Here, we conceptualize and systematically operationalize capricious supervision , defined as an employee’s perception of their leader’s frequent changes in decisions and treatment toward them. Across three studies with five employee samples, we develop a scale of capricious supervision (Study 1) and establish its discriminant and predictive validity by differentiating it from abusive supervision, justice variability (Study 2), and ambivalent leadership (Study 3) and examining its impact on employee outcomes (Study 3). Grounded in the stressor-strain model, we find that employees experiencing capricious supervision perceive their work as uncertain and frustrating, leading to emotional exhaustion, poor sleep quality, and counterproductive work behavior. Together, we provide a clear understanding of capricious supervision as a distinct leadership style, opening a conversation on its role in the workplace.

How do fathers navigate work and family in light of the conflicting ideals associated with breadwinning and involved fathering? Utilizing an ethnographic methodology and drawing upon Goffman’s work concerning dramaturgy and secrecy, we answer this question. We discover how fathers employed within the high-pressure UK legal profession develop a suite of strategic tactics to mislead colleagues into assuming that they are not fathers at all. We untangle and reveal how fathers achieved these impressions, highlighting the complex nature of covering and counter-uncovering moves that men used to conceal their paternity. We show how, when performing on the organizational front stage, fathers adopt the role of job-oriented ideal-worker, casting fathering, in Goffmanian terms, into the shadows as a dark secret (Jaworski, 2021). As a result, men restrict ‘involved fathering’ to the backstage of their home settings. In offering new perspectives on the choices that fathers make in relation to how they navigate the contradictory ideals of traditional and involved fatherhood, our paper challenges prevailing notions of workplace fatherhood, illuminating how fathers experience and respond to workplace glorification of the ideal-worker image, with important implications for theory and future research on work and family, and fathering practices.

Scholarly interest in refugee employment often centers on the barriers faced by this group of jobseekers. This study shifts focus to employers, exploring how their practices address recruitment challenges. Our qualitative investigation of 39 Australia-based employers identifies two sets of barriers—proximal and distal—and the corresponding practices employers adopt to overcome them. We find that these barriers differ in the assumed scale, locus of influence, and the nature of impact. Through a practice theory lens, we demonstrate how employers’ responses to these barriers have the capacity to reproduce or alter the socio-structural conditions in which refugee employment takes place. While most employers focus on adaptive practices targeting proximal barriers, transformative practices aimed at tackling the distal barriers play a key role in rectifying structural disparities in the recruitment of disadvantaged groups. Our study advances refugee employment literature by demonstrating how employers’ assumptions around the barriers can deter employer engagement and limit impact. We highlight the managerial implications by demonstrating how employers can drive meaningful change in areas traditionally considered the domain of other actors, effectively addressing challenges in the employment landscape.

Does emphasizing an organization’s bottom line have to come at the expense of its employees? This question has intrigued scholars and business leaders alike, prompting a great deal of research into strategies for increasing the financial returns of organizations while balancing other competing interests. Though helpful in providing answers to part of the question, less is known about how employees respond to supervisors who prioritize the bottom line over other concerns. What research that does exist provides mixed perspectives, with some findings suggesting that prioritizing the bottom line helps focus employees on critical aspects of the workplace while other findings indicate that doing so harms employees as they mimic “succeed at all costs” mentalities. To expand knowledge in this area, we draw from socioanalytic and social exchange theories to develop a multi-stakeholder model between supervisors’ self-ratings of bottom-line mentality (i.e., identity) and employees’ judgments about their supervisors’ bottom-line mentality (SBLM; i.e., reputation) as it relates to two forms of collective performance. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis indicate that congruence between SBLM (i.e., SBLM identity) and employees’ aggregated ratings of their SBLM (i.e., SBLM reputation) relates to collective task and contextual performance via employees’ perceptions of their supervisors’ benevolence-based trustworthiness (BBT). Further, employees’ aggregate group bottom-line mentality moderates the congruence effect between SBLM identity and SBLM reputation on supervisors’ BBT.