Relational pressures across multiple levels push organisations to behave socially responsibly or sometimes irresponsibly. But how do relational pressures across multiple levels influence social responsibility of small nonprofit organisations working with marginalised groups? Nonprofit organisations are increasing in importance owing to their role in development and representation of marginalised groups’ interests, yet their social responsibility is little understood. Using the lens of standpoint theory, we explore social responsibility of small disability arts organisations in the nonprofit sector in Australia drawing on 53 interviews involving actors at multiple levels, supplemented by site visits and observations. We find small nonprofit organisations’ social responsibility in a state of flux, influenced by differing priorities, expectations, and demands from various actors across levels. We provide insights into organisational social responsibility dynamics, identifying three major tensions that small arts organisations face – formality versus informality, agency versus representation, and access versus excellence – in seeking to be socially responsible. Our findings have relevance for organisations in the wider nonprofit sector, underscoring the need to explore their social responsibility from a relational perspective. Further, the resultant tensions from relational pressures, as identified in our study, provide important implications for organisational social responsibility advancing theoretical and practical knowledge in this emerging field.

Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual reviews, narrative reviews, historical reviews – and critical essays that are original, innovative, of high-quality and contribute to theory building in the social sciences. The main purpose of this essay is to sketch out our current broad expectations for reviews and essays as a guide for authors and reviewers. As Editors of the journal, we do not wish to be overly prescriptive. After all, reviews may be integrative and focus on synthesis and integration to generate new concepts, frameworks and perspectives, or they may be more problematizing and contribute by identifying problematics, tensions and contradictions in a literature. Furthermore, consonant with its heritage, Human Relations invites scholarship from all research traditions across the social sciences that focus on social relations at work. It is a pluralistic, heterodox journal that will continue to publish a range of reviews and critical essays so long as authors have clear objectives and contribute meaningfully to the field. This will generally involve writing reviews and essays that seek to maximize what we see and are sufficiently complex to deal adequately with the richness and variety of the literatures and ideas considered.

Workers in the low-wage service sector represent a sociodemographically heterogeneous and particularly vulnerable group in terms of job security, job quality and health implications. However, organizational inclusion research has largely neglected this group. In contrast, this article builds on a qualitative study of a Dutch aircraft cleaning company in order to assess the ‘inclusivity of inclusion approaches’ for less privileged groups of employees. By reconstructing how managers and cleaners draw/rework boundaries, we identify certain configurations of inclusion and exclusion that can unfold more or less ‘inclusive’ consequences for historically disadvantaged group members, and more or less exclusionary repercussions for particularly privileged and/or majority group members. We stress the need to say goodbye to a linear narrative of organizations becoming ‘inclusive as such’. Furthermore, we argue that the presence of decent working and employment conditions and the absence of steep differences in those conditions between groups represent the ‘silent foundation’ of creating inclusivity. Consequently, we ask: does inclusion research reach its ‘natural limits’ by tiptoeing around the topic of equality?

We extend research on goal-contingent rewards and bottom-line mentality (BLM) by drawing on goal-shielding theory to examine BLM as a goal-shielding process that explains the link between goal-contingent rewards and pro-self, unethical behavior. We also examine future orientation as a first- and second-stage moderator and suggest that the detrimental effects of goal-contingent rewards and subsequent BLMs are weakened for employees who have high future orientations. We tested our hypotheses with two field studies and found general support for our predictions. Overall, our findings suggest rewards that are contingent on goal attainment prompt organizational members to solely focus on their bottom-line outcomes, which in turn drives their pro-self, unethical behaviors, but these indirect effects are less likely for those who are high on future orientation, because they approach their work with a longer-term perspective. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.

In this article, we elaborate on the significance of suffering in processes of embodied identity construction. Drawing on interviews with 62 chefs employed in elite kitchens around the world, we make two main contributions. First, we extend our understanding of suffering as a traumatic, alienating experience by theorizing it as a distinctive form of embodied identity work. We show how suffering can function as a mechanism through which people forge an understanding of who they are. Our second contribution extends the first by elaborating on what we call the aesthetics of suffering. We show how suffering can be perversely appreciable, distinguishing and endured in culturally significant, identity-implicative ways. Via this theorization, we progress our understanding of how identities are forged through (and read from) suffering bodies, and add an additional layer of interpretation to research in which matters of embodied identity and suffering are nascent but largely neglected.

The power literature’s focus on criticizing power relations comes at the cost of deliberate attempts to improve organizational practices. How can critical performativity and other scholars address power as an enabling force, thereby also allowing for more engagement with practitioners? We integrate the literature on power in and around organizations with studies of organizational change and behavior. By focusing on enabling instead of restrictive power, we draw attention to the potentially pivotal role of key actors—managers, other practitioners, and scholars—in fostering empowerment and emancipation within organizations. Our review points at four social mechanisms that drive enabling power: formal authority, language-shaping-action, community formation, and the dynamics of safety and trust. Furthermore, we identify various types of actions that can trigger these mechanisms that, in turn, may give rise to outcomes such as empowerment and emancipation. The main contribution of this article involves an integrated framework of power as an enabling force. By synthesizing various separate discourses, this framework extends prior reviews focusing on power-over, resulting in a systemic understanding of enabling power and thereby creating novel avenues for research on power. The integrative framework also provides a foundation for an intervention-oriented body of knowledge on enabling power.

It is said that all the world is a stage. But how do organizations physically stage performances such as sales pitches and research presentations? Drawing on a 14-month-long ethnographic study at a Fortune 500 strategic research company, this article explains how. Emphasizing the active role of human and non-human actors, it uncovers three staging practices that organizations use to transform spaces into stages. Organizations theme stages by populating them with certain objects. They produce a style of performance by arranging relationships between performers and audiences. Finally, they order movements from one stage to others so that plots emerge. Theorizing these staging practices through a materialist dramaturgy, the article challenges existing organizational theory that tends to focus on the ways organizations control and script performances. The article shows that organizational performances in service and knowledge organizations can be improvisational. They are not preordained but they are organized.

Can an exploration of managers’ real-time organizational talk make way for a profoundly revised theory of reflexivity? Indeed, our analysis of the reflexivity literature reveals four significant points of contestation – the subject/object distinction, temporality, representation and agency – all of which revolve around the interplay of an ‘I’ (at least one reflexive agent) and an ‘it’ (something to be reflexive about). The focus of this inquiry lies in how the ‘I’ and the ‘it’ are constituted communicatively and what generates, sustains and animates them in interaction. Such interactions are sourced from a post-experience master programme for practising managers, thus providing naturally occurring data amendable to a ventriloquial analysis. We identify and demonstrate three types of reflexive moments: conflating, bifurcating and animating. We subsequently theorize these as instances of ventriloquial reflexivity, using the terms conflating, bifurcating and animating to express the different moments in which speakers co-orient to the communicative constitution of the ‘I’ and the ‘it’. Ventriloquial reflexivity allows us to explore reflexivity as an interactional and situated accomplishment, thus further pointing to how reflexive practices can be understood and enhanced.

Irving Janis’s concept of ‘groupthink’, the idea that a collective desire for consensus overrides the realistic appraisals of alternatives and leads to poor group decision making, is a staple of social science textbooks. Despite gaining little support in empirical studies, Janis’s eight symptoms of groupthink remains a popular framework. What has been forgotten, however, is that nearly 20 years before Janis’s supposed invention, groupthink was coined by social critic William H Whyte, author of one of the 1950s, most influential books on management. Adding to the growing interest in a historical turn in Management and Organization Studies, we investigate how and why Whyte’s groupthink was over-written by a history that found Janis’s ideas more useful, and outline how recovering Whyte can add value to our thinking now.