For new ventures in contested fields, securing legitimacy is a paramount challenge. In the platform economy, firms often enter with a potent entrepreneurship rhetoric, but as they face contestation over their labor and regulatory practices, this rhetoric can devolve into a calculated misrepresentation—a legitimacy lie. Yet, the process by which such lies are performed and defended over time as a form of institutional work remains undertheorized, leaving a gap in our understanding of how platform firms achieve institutional entrenchment. Uncovering this process, we theorize the legitimacy lie as a form of dark institutional work. Using 47 driver interviews, extensive archival materials, court documents, and leaked internal communications (the Uber Files), we analyze the contested operations of Uber and Ola in India (2013–2020). Our analysis reveals a recursive two-phase process. In Phase 1 (Proactive Framing), platforms construct the legitimacy of the “micro-entrepreneur.” In Phase 2 (Reactive Escalation), legitimacy threats trigger a defensive escalation of dark work, including sharp increases in symbolic rhetoric, the material imposition of opaque algorithmic control, and the relational co-optation of powerful stakeholders. This dark work, in turn, provokes driver resistance, which constitutes a new legitimacy threat that refuels the cycle. This recursive process functions as the mechanism that enables the platform's institutional entrenchment. We advance institutional work scholarship by theorizing this process, explaining how the successful performance of a legitimacy lie allows a venture to cross a critical threshold from a fragile reliance on normative legitimacy to a state of durable structural power.

This study advances the field of organisational trust repair by foregrounding a critical yet overlooked dimension: organisational space. While prior research has focused on behavioural and structural strategies – such as apologies, leadership changes or governance reforms – little attention has been paid to how space supports trust repair. Drawing on a qualitative case study of an art auction house recovering from fraud-induced bankruptcy, we explore how organisational space helps rebuild employees’ trust. We identify three spatial practices that restore credibility, legitimacy, and emotional connection. Importantly, our study helps better understand the emotional and sensory aspects of trust repair and shows that organisational space does not merely signal change; it supports healing. We demonstrate that space can act as a symbolic, material and affective resource. This study offers a novel conceptual lens and practical implications, urging scholars and practitioners to view space as an active medium in trust repair.

Despite the growth of qualitative research, we lack a systematic understanding of the lived experiences of qualitative scholars themselves. Our study is motivated by the intuition that by shedding light on the “map makers behind the maps” we may gain a novel view of the field: of the assumptions, emotions, fears and hopes that anchor extant qualitative theorizing. In this spirit, we solicited personal letters from a sample of North American and Western European management and entrepreneurship scholars, inviting them to reflect on their experiences as bases for articulating insights and advice for future researchers. Our letters revealed three distinct “maps of the field”: “roadmaps”; “political maps”; and “pictorial maps.” These maps stressed different features, distinct temporal orientations (past or future), emotions (positive, negative, or mixed), and “navigation advice.” Based on these various “maps” and insights, we draw theoretical and practical implications for future qualitative research.

Caregiving and career have been primarily studied by management scholars for their incompatibility. Largely ignored have been the consequences of this approach for the lives of workers. Yet the need for both childcare and eldercare is on the rise, women are increasingly integrated into the workforce, and, for many, retirement is being delayed. Particularly in the United States, workers and their families are experiencing a crisis of care. In this curated piece, we identify—and aim to dismantle—four myths that have allowed management research and practice to segment care and work. Contributors bring economics, feminist theory, sociology, organizational behavior, and careers perspectives to provide a broader vision both of the problem and of how management research might advance toward theoretical and practical solutions.

While individuals intuitively understand what pet peeves are, academic research lacks a full explanation of their nature and consequences. We begin addressing this issue by adopting a sensemaking perspective in an inductive interview-based study providing a foundation for future research in two significant ways. First, we establish a more precise definition of pet peeves as a self-centered annoyance containing personalized cognitive and affective components. The cognitive component is grounded in individuals’ values and expectations and defines the “what” of a pet peeve. The affective component defines the latent aversion attached to prospective violations of those values and expectations. Second, we develop a theoretical model of the pet peeves sensemaking process that incorporates the four sensemaking types described by Sandberg and Tsoukas. As a whole, this work represents an important first step toward establishing pet peeves as formal academic concept.

After receiving a diagnosis of a rare form of blood cancer in my mid 30s, in the midst of my first year working full-time as an assistant professor, I reflect on the ways such a life-altering event gave me a new vantage point on my own career as a management scholar. I highlight ways that both a) the nature of the cancer treatment I had to receive and b) being forced to mentally face prospects of a reduced life expectancy, had the unforeseen value of giving me specific insights on effective ways to conduct research in our field, while still appreciating deeper issues of personal values and relationships. I specifically utilize the conceptual framework of the ‘protean’ career in my narrative essay to elucidate important truths about the nature of management scholarship which I propose all my colleagues should personally consider as they pursue their own career goals.

This study explored “how strategic improvisation (SI) enables agile and creative responsiveness in dynamic organizations recognized as complex adaptive systems.” We highlight “what” constitutes SI, “why” it is strategic and “how” it allows for agile and creative responsiveness. We advance the conceptualization of SI proposing it as “ an improvised deliberate practice that combines coupling unconventional ideas with emergency actions seeking new strategic patterns to indeterminacy. ” This is the case of firefighters, with unique features, such as operating continuously in experimental conditions, exposure to failure, risk, and unpredictability, despite strict protocols to guide operations. Furthermore, agile and creative responsiveness in a complex system is the rule rather than the exception and, therefore, requires new adaptive managerial practices. Our findings provide the SI framework based on four main dimensions such as (i) resolvability; (ii) experimentation; (iii) interactivity; and (iv) sensemaking, composing a SI mechanism. Practical implications and future perspective were proposed.

Temporary organizations (TOs) can be viewed as a collection of narratives about the past and the future that can potentially shape organizational outcomes. An in-depth, longitudinal study of a time-bound inter-organizational project that served rural India's educational needs shows how multi-authored narratives and practices in temporary organizations influence each other. When the narratives are coherent with respect to the past and the future, the actors engage in mitigative practices, and the project develops. If the narratives diverge, the actors engage in self-serving practices hindering the project. The narrative view affords us a novel lens to understand the dynamics that shape practices and outcomes within temporary organizations. Our findings also have practical implications for TO management—understanding the plurality of narratives and emphasizing the importance of aligning them.

What drives the entrepreneurial imagination of unknown client markets? Based on a multi-case study of tech entrepreneurs operating out of Boston, this study examines this under-researched question. Findings suggest that tech entrepreneurs imagine unknown client markets in increasingly sophisticated ways, starting from envisioning primary users of the product, to considering multiple parallel client populations, to imagining interdependent client groups using the product in complementary ways. This evolution in thinking seems to be driven by product utility gaps - perceived gaps between the range of product uses and client constellations in which the product can create value. Importantly, at an early stage of the entrepreneurial process, these product utility gaps do not result from market feedback, but from ongoing reciprocal imagination of client markets and underutilized product value. Findings inform research on entrepreneurial imagination and opportunity idea formation, and the strategizing of business ecosystem relationships.