Purpose This paper aims to address the research question: How did the State transform sanitation behavior in India within five years? It examines the Swachh Bharat Mission, India’s national sanitation campaign (2014–2019), as a case of systemic behavioral transformation. The analysis adopts an interdisciplinary lens spanning institutional theory, institutional entrepreneurship, public policy and management history to explain how the state orchestrated and sustained large-scale behavioral change within a tightly bounded timeframe. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts a critical realist orientation, integrating abductive and retroductive modes of reasoning and interpretation. A case study design is used, drawing on 104 documents (67 peer-reviewed articles and 37 primary sources). A theory-informed thematic dictionary was developed across five domains – entrepreneurship, logic, isomorphism, community engagement and governance – and applied to the source materials to unearth the interrelated processes underlying a nation’s sanitation behavioral transformation. Findings The study identifies five interrelated processes of institutional entrepreneurship, institutional logic, institutional isomorphism, community engagement and institutional governance that provide insights into the behavioral transformation of a nation impacting 550 million people and led to the construction of nearly 110 million toilets within five years. Research limitations/implications This study draws on primary and secondary sources from a single country and a bounded time period. Future research can extend this work through direct observation and longitudinal tracking, comparing state-led reforms across diverse historical, geographical, political and cultural contexts. Multimethod designs – particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments – can advance understanding into how institutional entrepreneurship unfolds and how behavioral change becomes embedded over time. Practical implications The findings offer actionable lessons for policymakers: empower leaders to act as institutional entrepreneurs; craft compelling change narratives; allocate resources strategically; build operational programs that translate vision into practice; align incentives with systemic goals; integrate top-down leadership with grassroots mobilization; and embed accountability cultures and governance mechanisms that dismantle entrenched practices and institutionalize new norms to drive behavioral change at scale. Social implications This study demonstrates how government-led initiatives can evolve into nationwide social movements, reshaping public norms, transforming behaviors and improving health, dignity and civic engagement within a tightly bounded timeframe. Originality/value This paper contributes to management history by demonstrating how temporal reasoning, sequencing and historical causation shape state-led institutional entrepreneurship. It advances institutional theory, including institutional entrepreneurship, beyond firm-level contexts to large-scale, state-driven public-policy initiatives and reforms that reconcile stability with disruption within a bounded timeframe. The five interrelated processes identified in this study offer a granular understanding of how government can act as an institutional entrepreneur to achieve systemic change.

Purpose Even though the values of George Pullman’s porters were incongruent with those embodied by their founder and organization, many porters zealously consented to performing the imposed role of dutiful servant for decades. The purpose this paper is to utilize their respective life-stories and autobiographical memories to help us better understand their compliance in sustaining a façade of conformity, while simultaneously resisting an eclipsing internalization of their work roles into their personal identities, allowing the porters to remain true to themselves. Design/methodology/approach The authors performed a form of historical retrospective case analysis of the Pullman porters as an organizational collective to elaborate a theory of how coping with values incongruence through façades of conformity may be sustainable in conjunction with the fusion of personal and counter-institutional identities to buffer deleterious employee effects. Findings A review of the extant literature suggests that maintaining such a dissonant enacted role over time can engender negative employee stress-related consequences, including increased turnover, reduced job commitment and diminished personal well-being. Yet, the Pullman porters appear to tell a different story regarding their enduring façade in the face of organizational values misfit. As recounted by the porters, their narratives of constructing difference as a productive resource to underpin their counter-institutional group identity is one of coping via the co-constitution of consent and dissent. Originality/value Research exploring the ways in which coping, consent and dissent simultaneously invoke constructions of identity and difference among groups and in juxtaposition with race-ethnicity is particularly under-explored in the extant literature. Exploring the complexities of how employees conform, comply and resist organizations with which they ethically and emotionally disidentify, from a race-ethnicity perspective that is underrepresented in the extant literature, helps extend knowledge from a new vantage point.

Purpose Ichak Adizes has developed original and practical conceptions of executive interaction, change management and corporate development, collectively referred to as “symbergetic organisational therapy”. Although his name is celebrated in some executive circles, it is not widely known within mainstream management academia. Further, Adizes’ insights into what organisations are and how they achieve optimal performance are not routinely dealt with in Western business schools. After exposing his ideas, this paper aims to investigate reasons for such neglect. Design/methodology/approach The approach adopted is textual analysis of Ichak Adizes’ publications. Findings The argument made is that reflection on the case of Adizes illustrates consequential problems in academia and, in particular, the disconnect between what happens in the academy and that which occurs when managers have to do their job. Originality/value The article features the work of Ichak Adizes, whose work is not well known within Western business school. It also highlights the disconnect between what happens in the academy and that which occurs when managers have to do their job.

Purpose This paper aims to offer a critical biography of labor union organizer Rose Pesotta (1896–1965) as a case study attempt to extend management history’s boundaries of who is considered a model in the field to a woman who worked as a labor union organizer and who developed innovative inclusion strategies to bring new people into her union. The biography has importance to the field because it shows how contemporary concepts such as intersectionality and inclusion can help explain historical organizational conflicts and difficulties motivating workers. Design/methodology/approach The primary methodology involved close reading and analysis of unpublished primary sources such as letters and memos dealing with Rose Pesotta’s 1933–1941 career as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) as well as contemporary analyses of garment unions and gender relations in the interwar period. Findings While positionality, intersectionality and inclusion are relatively new research terms, this analysis of ILGWU organizing in the 1930s and early 1940s shows the importance of these concepts in understanding the union’s politics at that time. Originality/value This paper, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is one of the first in the management history literature to present a biography of a labor leader who returned to the ranks at some point in her adult career and earned her living as a sewing machine operator. It thus expands the representativeness of the people whom the field sees as important for students of management to study and learn from.

How many different ways can we tell stories about business?" is the question posed by this book, one of several belonging to A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling. This particular book is edited by Albert Mills and Nicholous Deal, and the series is edited overall by David Boje. I review this book as someone with an interest in storytelling, which is an art rather than a precise science. It is about stories that foster the idea of business storytelling over the context of history, and each of the 11 chapters of this book reflects the variety of ways a story can be told. As Mills and Deal note in their introduction, stories give substance to the past, orient the present and shape the future. The stories here showcase the potential of a new storytelling paradigm for business historians. They feature stories about the process of history; tales of history-as-method; and narratives of history through business opportunity. Actor-network theory, hereafter ANT, is commonly used across all these narratives as well. Since each story is different, I review the chapters in order. The four chapters are stories about processing history. The first chapter, by Donna Sears and Terry Weatherbee, examines how wineries in Nova Scotia use historical marketing narratives to localize themselves in a province that does not have a historically storied wine and grape sector. They put forward new forms of introducing narrativesplanting, grafting and pruningrepurposing terms used in the wine industry. The second chapter by Gabie Durepos and Amon Barros addresses archival silences in business storytelling and is very useful for anyone engaged in archival studies. Archives are haunted by ghosts, "Specters of truth that has been repressed" Archives are haunted by ghosts, "Spectres of the truth that has been repressed" (Derrida, 1996) , the silenced narratives of those who are excluded, hidden, dispossessed and made invisible. They expand on Trouillot (1995) by showing who is silenced (Archivists themselves, women, indigenous people and other minorities) and make the point that dealing with silencing means dealing with our present societal dysfunctions to identify lost presences. The third chapter by Clara Bullock, Tasha Richard and Nicholous Deal complements the previous chapter by exploring marginalizationin this case, the narratives surrounding women in agribusiness. Women have been present in agribusiness throughout but they have JMH 30,4

PurposeBuilding on previous historical works, this study aims to develop a framework to represent chambers as meta-organizations and present the case of Dersaadet Chamber of Commerce (DCC), based on this framework, during its emergence and evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Design/methodology/approachIn the study, a historical narrative was constructed from primary and secondary data. To complement data collected from the archives a systematic content analysis was used to explore the discourse of the chamber within its serial magazine.FindingsIt was found that the first chamber of the Ottoman Empire, DCC, was established according to the public law model as an extension of the economic context and the guild order, and it was observed that it increasingly conformed to this model between 1882 and 1929.Originality/valueIn this study, chamber models are examined for the first time according to the designated features of meta-organizational forms, built on the historical work on chambers. The case of DCC suggested that it adopted a public law model and displayed much continuity, even when significant transitions were observed during the modernization process from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to present ANTi-microhistory of social innovation in education within Robert Owen’s communal experiment at New Harmony, Indiana. The authors zoom out in the historical context of social innovation before zooming into the New Harmony case.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used ANTi-microhistory approach to unpack the controversy around social innovation using the five-step procedure recently proposed by Mills et al. (2022), a version of the five-step procedure originally proposed by Tureta et al. (2021).FindingsThe authors found that the educational leaders of the New Harmony community preceded proponents of innovation, such as Drucker (1957) and Fairweather (1967), who viewed education as a form of social innovation.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to the history of social innovation in education by exploring the New Harmony community’s education society to uncover the enactment of sustainable social innovation and the origin story of humanistic management education.