emlyon PhD Alumni theses

Moral markets are value-laden sectors that offer solutions to social and environmental issues. However, the formation of these markets is fraught with socio-cognitive uncertainty. For instance, in their nascent stages, technologies, products, or processes are often untested and not fully understood; product definitions may be unclear or unknown, and product market categories are characteristically ambiguous or ill-structured. These uncertainties are resolved once market categories emerge and audience perceptions of their positioning become stable. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to study how proponents of moral markets strategize to promote market formation. This dissertation comprises three essays about the formation of the market for plant-based meat alternatives (PBMA). In the first paper, I join the conversation on category formation, which examines positioning as a critical choice between aligning with or opposing established categories, with high penalties for ambiguous or mismatched positioning. However, I show that recent empirical cases, such as the emergence of PBMA, suggest that seemingly ambiguous positioning is more common than the literature indicates. Thus, in the second paper, I explore how producers use seemingly ambiguous positioning strategies involving active opposition and alignment with established categories. In the second essay, I join the conversation on hybrid product categories—those combining features of multiple categories—which has examined how membership in multiple categories increases the risks of penalties on social evaluation and legitimatization of these product categories. However, I argue that the literature has focused on how hybrids trigger ambiguity and misalignment with audience expectations while overlooking the specific study of what shapes those expectations. Thus, in this paper, I study the effect of framing—the use of rhetorical devices to mobilize support and minimize resistance—on the positioning and subsequent resonance—the extent to which a frame is shared and how it mobilizes other actors—of hybrid product categories. In the third essay, I join the conversation on the formation of moral markets, which examines the critical role of developing organizational capabilities and functional prototypes in the uptake of these markets. However, while proponents of moral markets use normative arguments related to the unsustainability of established markets to justify their emergence, they must strategically position new product categories conforming to some degree, with functional expectations—socially derived beliefs about a given category—of established categories. This inherently creates tensions with the normative expectations that audiences may have regarding these markets, where shortcuts and externalities are not tolerated. Thus, in the third paper, I explore the tradeoffs producers face in maintaining consistency in category positioning and expectations.

The past few years have witnessed many resistance movements outside organizations, emerging in response to precarization not only as a widespread feature of employment but also as a social condition resulting from the penetration of market dynamics in every dimension of life and the prevalence of principles of accumulation in governance relationships. These mobilizations have shed light on the permanence of public and oppositional collective resistance, despite the fragmentation of social forces and the exclusion of dissident voices from the political scene characteristic of the neoliberal regime. Yet, because actors in these movements have refused to self-discipline, they have also often unsurprisingly faced repression—actions from other groups meant to increase the costs of collectively protesting—deployed to preserve business interests, and, more broadly, neoliberal hegemonic assumptions. In fact, research showed that overtly opposing and disrupting the dominant system tend to go with retaliation and sanctions, whether economic, social, or physical. While an important body of literature has documented the effects of repression on mobilization and framed repression as a determining constraint for resistance movements, this dissertation takes another stand and concentrates on resisters' responses to repression. Building on a fifteen-month ethnography of the French yellow vest movement, this dissertation examines how, once they have publicized their dissent, people answer sanctions and pushback against their resistance and even sometimes can manage to seize backlashes in ways that serve and fuel their struggle. My contention is that protesters are not just recipients of repression with limited possibilities of action. Instead, I argue that they can counter, reappropriate, divert, and use some elements of repressive apparatuses to fuel their struggle.

By venturing into the field of electric guitars, my thesis investigates over a century of cultural history and spotlights the intertwinedness of the instrument with zeitgeisty values and beliefs. Therein, it aims to crystalize the co-constitution between the artifact and the institutional arrangements as well as the shifts in meanings and structural relations that the diverse interpretations of the electric guitar both shaped and have been shaped by. Building on the philosophical considerations of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the thesis casts novel conceptual and theoretical perspectives on the material dimension within institutions, which highlight the intertemporal dynamics within the practical and symbolic understanding of artifacts as well as the strategic leeway these dynamics convey.

This feminist thesis aims at stripping food-delivery platform work. Departing from the existing treatments of platform work that often view platforms as technologically-based organizations and examine the relation between work practices and the technology, I chose to focus on food-delivery platform couriers as embodied workers. Synonymous with deconstructing, stripping refers to the process of progressively taking off layers of taken-for-grandness. The choice of words is deliberately evocative of a sexualized performance associated with women's bodies consisting of progressively taking off layers of clothes. Yet, while these performances generally aim at pleasing a masculine gaze, the performance I engage into does not share such an objective. Rather, I propose stripping as both a theoretical and a methodological tool for understanding social phenomena. Theoretically, my thesis explores the tension between the structural heterogeneity of the working crowd and platforms' structural tendency toward homogenization of work conditions to understand the surprising lack of collective endeavors in an otherwise heavily castigated industry. I follow a stripping process to analyze the effects of this tension on work practices, workers identities and structures, progressively getting at the core of the phenomena under study, from an empirical, theoretical, and methodological perspective. Thus, the first empirical and theoretical chapter (1.2) addresses aspects of food-delivery platform work that are more easily observable: practices and exchanges on digital groups of workers. The second empirical and theoretical chapter (2.2) dives deeper in food-delivery platform work since it addresses identities and takes into account workers' personal and social trajectories. The third empirical and theoretical chapter (3.2) dissects food-delivery work and exposes its flesh and bones through an examination of a developing organizational structure.
Methodologically, my thesis illustrates the becoming of a feminist ethnographer as a stripping process along which I progressively take off layers to reveal a vulnerable but powerful nakedness that was previously dressed and policed. The chapter 1.1 exposes my ethnographic methodology: while I give minute details about the data collection and the overall research journey, I present a dressy version of the story. In contrast, to write the chapters 2.1 and then 3.1, I progressively take off some clothes to finally propose a naked version of this ethnography. In the chapters 1.3, 2.3 and 3.3, I discuss the insights of the two preceding chapters and conclude the corresponding part.
Along with traditional critical literature, I explain that platform capitalism engenders relations of domination and potentially harmful working conditions and explain how workers find ways to compensate for organizational voids. Yet, departing from a widespread white and masculine tendency to fantasize over the resistance of oppressed populations and to subsequently associate political dimensions of the studied phenomenon with the resisting efforts of individuals who seek empowerment, I develop in this thesis a different approach on how organization studies could tackle the political dimension of new forms of work. Political shades of platform work materialize through the tension between a digital and deemed neutral algorithm that guarantees homogenization of treatment between individuals and the strong atomization of highly different, and sometimes even hostile one towards another, workers. I shed light on the micropolitical mechanisms that atomize food-delivery platform crowd: suffering from precarious working conditions and an associated low status, socially heterogeneous workers dissociate from collective formulations of shared grievances and contribute to an individualization of trajectories structurally induced by algorithmic management. Political shades of platform work are deeply inscribed in working bodies: racialized, gendered and classified depending on their social origin and financial capacity, bodies inspire the mechanisms of fragmentation that concur to maintain a corporeal capitalist industry that nourishes from workers' precariousness.

Market identities affect the development of behavioral norms, perception of categorical demarcations, appropriate ways of doing business, and choice of strategic behavior. Identities however, are not always fixed guideposts informing market interactions, rather they can be fragmented and oppositional among producers. This leads to a competition of identity where co-existing belief structures, norms and cultural understandings are in conflict with each other. The dissertation is structured around the following research question: How do producers, who are competing on identity, strategically position themselves in order to influence the extent to which their identities are perceived as legitimate by audiences of co-producers or consumers?

The first study, empirically set in Lyon's silk-manufacturing guild (1700-1788), examines the dilemma of gatekeepers trying to maintain professional identity norms amidst the emergence of a new creative occupation that threatens to disrupt existing social structures. The study uses the theoretical framing of relational work (Zelizer, 2012) to understand how gatekeepers choose creative partners while grappling and negotiating the cultural and political dimensions of creative workers' social ties. Findings suggest that during times of occupational identity conflict, gatekeepers privilege social ties that reinforce cultural and political social ties aligned with their own professional identity. When occupational identity conflict diminishes, gatekeeper selection of partners is less focused on cultural and political homogeneity of partners.

The second study examines how location choice is strategically used by producers to contest opposing ontological understandings of taken-for-granted traditional practices, norms and values of an occupation. Set in Lyon's bakery market (1998-2017), the study investigates how locations are chosen among 177 producers representing two opposing classes of bakeries, the traditional (i.e., purist) and non-traditional (i.e., pragmatist) bakery. I find that producers wishing to maintain traditional practices (i.e. purists) choose locations to contrast differences with their ontological rivals (i.e. pragmatists). In doing so, purist producers expect to direct consumers’ attention towards the authenticity differential that sets them apart from non- traditional producers located within their vicinity. To the extent that colocation emphasizes such differences, purist producers expect that their ontological rivals will be perceived as inauthentic and insincere to categorical expectations. Inversely, pragmatist producers with an intention to modify existing cultural models chose discrete locations so as to not be noticeably different from traditional producers, whereby they gradually adapt expectations “under-the- radar” of the producer community.

The third study, also set within Lyon’s bakery market, illustrates how producers’ choice of organizational naming is evaluated based on identity expectations of consumers. This study interrogates the likelihood of organizational mortality on consumers evaluation bakery’s usage of “boulangerie” conditioned on whether the owner is French or an immigrant. The third study argues that some institutionalized names are culturally-evocative, affecting who can legitimately claim them. Findings suggest that entrepreneurs who use organizational names reflecting a collective social identity, to which they are not affiliated, are perceived as illegitimate and are more likely to experience business failure. However, when incongruency with the collective is overtly signaled in an organizational name, audience evaluations are more tolerant and organizations are more likely to be accepted as legitimate. This conclusion contributes to our understanding of how buyer communities may shift their expectations of producers on the basis of cultural in-group and out-group identity perceptions.

There is no doubt that we live in a time of Climate Emergency (Gills and Morgan, 2019). The recent dynamics of protest of the last few years show the reemergence of civil disobedience as a privileged strategy of action among grassroots' climate movements. Using non-violent collective action, these actors are reconfiguring the way we understand the role of the body in social movements' organizing.

Acknowledging the critical dimension of the orchestration of bodies in non- violent activist organizing where activists collectively experience the world, the self and the other through embodiment (McDonald, 2007), this dissertation offers some insights into the bodily regimes that inform the construction of collective action. Based on the ethnography of an activist movement' organization in becoming, I argue that collective action’ organizing relies -for its efficacy and sustainability- on the articulation between reflexive coherent activist selves and the inter-corporeal relations they create with others in the environment.

First, I examine the relation between corporeality and space in order to understand how multiple bodies synchronize their movements so as to function as one during collective actions. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, this study advances practice-based research on inter-corporeal learning by investigating the underexplored role of lived space in the emergence of a collective body in non-violent performances. It therefore shows how the spatiality of movements unfolds as new ways of inhabiting one’s body as a non-violent activist, allowing for the creation of new forms of relations with others, based on body potentialities but also recognizing its limits.

Second, I discuss the culture of self-sacrifice through which activists’ identity is regulated and reveal the everyday tensions between passionate commitment and vulnerable bodies. More specifically, this study explores how body breakdowns lead activists to separate their passion for a cause from the organizational culture and ultimately make their exit. It thus contributes to research on identity regulation by highlighting the precariousness of this process and demonstrating the political potential of bodies to resist controlling regimes. It thereby shows that the construction of coherent reflexive selves is necessary for sustaining collective action.

Third, reflecting on my ethnographic journey as an apprentice activist- ethnographer, I examine the relevance of putting one’s body on the line(s) and attending to one’s vulnerability in the field. Through an exploration of my own embodiment while immersed in this movement’ organization, I show how the evolution of my carnal posturing shaped the dynamic of the research situation. In other words, this essay fleshes out the process through which my body guided the way research was problematized and data analyzed, hence crafting my understanding of activism as it was lived, felt and expressed. Shedding light on the cultural dynamics at play and the connections between identity and embodied practice, I end by laying out the implications of a carnal approach to research through bodily engagement in the field.

Professionals and professional organizations are important actors to focus onto, in order to better understand how complex processes of institutional change unfold. I start from the consideration that a better integration between the sociology of profession and new institutional theory is desirable. With the subsequent chapter I aim to show how exploiting the synergies deriving from using these two powerful theoretical frameworks we can advance in our understanding how professionals impact the way in which take- for-granted practices, organizational setting and inter-personal arrangement are defined and redefined in a context of institutional change.

With that purpose in mind, in chapter two we analyze institutional change at the field level, focusing on the emergence of a new profession, the professional winemaker, in the Italian wine industry. We find that, following local and international pressures, incumbent wineries brought in non-competing new entrants, i.e., professional winemakers, to access key resources. In the process of defining their professional jurisdiction and their network of relations, these new entrants brought new material skills, which accelerated the transformation of the field. Our setting is the Italian wine industry between 1997 and 2006 and our data cover 74,000 wines, 2,000 winemakers and 3,000 wineries. We focus on the evolution of higher status denomination wines (DOCG), and compare the network of already institutionalized DOCG producers with the network of emerging DOCG producers to understand the impact of the professional winemakers and their role in the spreading of the barrique oak barrel. Our findings contribute to institutional and professions literatures, unveiling how the emergence of a new profession, together with its practices and skills, can accelerate the pace of institutional change in a field.

In chapter three, I concentrate on the process of organization and re-organization of an established profession: the general practitioner. I investigate how a pioneering group of professionals foster change in a particularly resilient Institutional field: the Italian Primary Healthcare system. The in-depth qualitative analysis composed of 81 interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015, and 417 documents covering a 40 years' period, show how these groups of general practitioners, first created and then utilized their professional organization – the cooperative – to re-establish their relevance in the field. Three macro-processes are proposed to capture the proactive role of professionals in the field: Serving their community, which connected their original motivations; and, innovating and diffusing, which related to the institutionalization of the new organizational model throughout the field.

In chapter four, I focus on inter-professional collaboration and, especially, how field level institutional logics permeate professional service firms. I argue that the different mix or constellation of logics influence, impede or favor inter-professional collaboration in multi-professional organizations. Drawing on a case study focused on an experimental Italian medical home managed by a cooperative of physicians, I analyzed 36 semi-structured interviews with the different professionals who inhabited the medical home during its 18 months' project duration. The results of this analysis point to the presence of a specific logic mix, composed of the Professional Logic and two blended logics (Corporate for Professional Logic and Market for Community Logic), which deeply influenced the collaboration pattern inside the multi-professional setting.

I conclude highlighting how these three distinct empirical studies answer the overarching research question guiding this study and how generally this dissertation contribute to our theoretical understanding of the roles and effects of professionals and professional organizations in processes of institutional change.

How do micro-entrepreneurs negotiate the requirements of formalization rules that at times conflict with the demands of their commercial activities and their ability to provide for the basic needs of their family? We use the case of the rehabilitation of the city of Yaoundé, Cameroon to examine efforts from meso level institutions to build market infrastructures that are expected to boost local entrepreneurship and contribute to the overall development to the city. Our inductive qualitative study explores the dynamism of the responses to the pressure to formalize at the micro-level. We raised three research questions that enable us to tackle three different but related aspects of the meaning of formalization on the ground level: How do actors respond to the removal of institutional voids in a market? How do actors whose behaviors are singled out as immoral resist and develop or render explicit alternative moralities, based on other kinds of orders of worth? How does the political environment constraint resurgence within an abeyance structure?

Our data consist of primary data such as 52 tape-recorded interviews lasting about an hour each, 26 spontaneous interviews lasting about 10 minutes each that were not recorded, as well as ethnographic observations notes taken during a combined 45 days of field work between 2014 and 2015. The field work occurred at the Yaoundé City Council (YCC) and at six carefully selected marketplaces. In addition, we have secondary data such as newspapers from the local press dating from 2004 to 2015 that we collected using FACTIVA. We also collected press releases, work documents and reports, and entrepreneurs data from the YCC‘s document center. Altogether, the secondary data amount to over a thousand pages. The data analysis followed an inductive approach, which was relevant for interesting and unexpected findings to emerge from the data.

In response to our first research question, we find that informal micro-entrepreneurs respond to the removal of institutional voids following three main categories: some street vendors and peddlers accept the new rules, some reject them, while others try to negotiate them daily as they go about their commercial activities. Our findings show that such responses are associated with different profiles of entrepreneurs which can be linked to how street vendors and peddlers originally adapted to the institutional voids. Finally, we show how the realized formalization rules differ from the enacted ones after they are “inhabited” and thereby negotiated by the entrepreneurs. We contribute to the literature on institutional voids by pointing to the importance of the understudied phenomenon of the removal of the voids. We also contribute to the literature of informal entrepreneurship by linking the choice to formality or informality to different profiles of informal micro-entrepreneurs.

For our second research question, our analysis suggests a set of formalization rules that have direct relevance for moral regulation in the observed markets. Our results show that the local government acts as a moral entrepreneur and devises three sets of activities to moralize marketplaces: building moral infrastructures, dividing practices, as well as educating and controlling. We find out that that markets actors use tactics such as: making the fix, which a temporary solution to save face, making the pass, which is a tactic to transfer blame to other groups, accepting immorality by embracing the given status as well as its associated consequences as long as it allows them to make ends meet. They use claiming strength as a final tactic that enabled them connect their street vending status to greater societal changes and issues. This paper contributes the literature on the morality of the market by showing how a project of moral regulation of market behavior is lived by entrepreneurs and how they resist daily in order to create an alternative morality.

Finally, we look at the path to social movement abeyance so as to better understand the dynamism within abeyance as well as the likelihood of future insurgency. We find that abeyance structures are inhabited by the remnants of past struggles, which translate into backstage resistance by the activists and backstage repression by their challengers. This backstage confrontation is the pillar of what we refer to as abeyance order; which is a system in equilibrium but with cracks that carry the hopes of future insurgency. We contribute to social movement literature by shedding lights on the understudied phenomenon of the decline of social movements. We show how the external political environment practically constrains the ability of activists in engaging in collective action.

This thesis research project shows the role of formalization in removing institutional void, in moralizing markets and settling conflicts at the marketplaces. Our findings show that the micro-entrepreneurs negotiate the requirements of formalization rules that at times conflict with the demands of their commercial activities and their ability to provide for the basic needs of their family by accepting, rejecting or negotiating new rules that clash with their traditional arrangements based on their profiles and aspirations. Secondly, they play around rules that question their morality and values by pushing forward and alternative order of worth. Finally, despite the official settlement of the negotiations and conflicts between the formalizers and the formalized, individual and collective small acts of resistance that sow the seeds for the possibility for future insurgency. This study contributes to the literature on market creation by showing the role of formalization in establishing new markets infrastructures and rules of the game. Our study conducted in Yaoundé, Cameroon also contributes empirically to the socio-political dynamics of market creation in institutionally different contexts.

Drawing from the rich heritage of studies of exclusion in studies of organizations, this dissertation focuses on exclusion and the institutional structures that sustain and reproduce it. Addressing this relationship between institutions and exclusion inherently involves factoring in questions about power, vested interests and agency as institutions invariably reflect and reproduce the interests of powerful actors (Levy & Scully, 2007; Seo & Creed, 2002;Clegg, 2010). Different social orders create different forms of power in relation to different issues (Haugaard, 2003), hence enabling empowerment or inclusion as well as disempowerment and exclusion via structural constraints. From this perspective institutions are not to be seen as politically neutral monoliths but as outcomes of negotiations, power struggles and differently embedded interests (Fligstein 2001; Lawrence, 2008: p. 173; Oliver, 1992: Schneiber, 2013). As such, in this dissertation, we shed light on how actors with different interests may influence the institutional arrangements around them, in process either escaping or propagating different forms of exclusion embedded in the institutions around them.

We center our study on the former system of racial segregation in South Africa, Apartheid. Apartheid was a system designed to systematically exclude non-white South Africans from all spheres of life. Whilst apartheid officially ended in 1994, its influence continues to be felt in some spheres of life. Specifically, we study two aspects of the continued exclusion in South Africa, public spaces and land ownership. We are interested in understanding how some apartheid era practices and institutions prevail despite the formal end of apartheid. We want to better understand the preservation of such vested interests in a context of change. Thus, the broad research question that guides the inquiry of this dissertation is: how do dominant actors who benefit from existing institutional arrangements react to preserve their interests in the face of impending institutional change?

To address these questions, we draw on a mixture of methods and sources of data including participant observations, interviews and documentary analysis. Our findings point out several things. First, we illustrate how incumbent actors may preserve their interests via actions of agenda setting when institutional change becomes inevitable. We show this with the case of the continued skewed land ownership in South Africa. Second, we show that sometimes actors may temporality escape institutional pressures and situations of exclusion without necessarily any strategic action or calculation. In some moments institutions are simply “put on pause”. We show this with our analysis of interactions in a public space. Finally, we highlight the challenges facing postcolonial theory's attempts to give voice to previously silenced non-Western perspectives. We argue for the importance of paying greater attention to questions about epistemology to create an even basis for the inclusion of previously excluded perspectives in OMT. We introduce the notion of “epistemological third spaces” as an initial step in this direction.

We contribute to several ongoing discussions. We contribute to the growing questions being raised about over-rationalized notions of agency as the only sources of escape from institutional demands. In so doing we highlight blind spots in approaches such as institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship. We also highlight the role of power in influencing outcomes of conflicts over institutional forms. We highlight how agenda setting, power in the second dimension (Lukes, 2005), can be deployed to influence the directions in which challengers channel their efforts. Incumbents may do this to preserve their vested interests whilst allowing some components of the institutional fabric to be altered by challengers. Finally, we also contribute to the growing calls for the creation of a more inclusive management scholarship in general. With the notion of epistemological third spaces that we have advocated for, we contribute to calls to pay greater attention to epistemology

This dissertation adopts a behavioral approach on CEOs' decision-making at their last career stage. When CEOs are on the verge of retirement, their career horizon becomes shorter than their firm's investment horizon. Therefore, according to the agency logic in corporate governance, the period directly preceding CEOs' retirement is likely to incur conflicts of interests between themselves and their firm. This dissertation examines whether CEOs’ personal characteristics, including decision framing, cognitive abilities, risk preference, and organizational identification, influence their investment decisions at the end of their career, and provides more fine-grained understanding of their motivation than a traditional approach simply assuming a common behavior of CEOs’ self-interest.

The first essay adopts individual decision-making theories to develop a theoretical framework and propositions on near-retirement CEOs’ short-term decisions to provide a better understanding on their underlying motivation. The second and third essays empirically examine the influence of near-retirement CEOs’ personal characteristics on their long-term decisions. The sample used to test the hypotheses covers all near-retirement CEOs from non- financial firms in the Executive Compensation database, containing firms on S&P1500, during 1999-2010. The results suggest that CEOs’ cognitive abilities, risk preference, and other psychological factors influence their risky and/or long-term investment decisions toward the end of their career. However, these influences, in general, seem to still be dominated by their self-serving motivation. In other words, the strength of CEOs’ self-serving behavior when approaching retirement depends on their personal distinction. However, when CEOs strongly identify with their firm, their behavior seems to align with the firm’s interests.

This dissertation contributes to the CEO career horizon literature by shifting the research focus from the principal-agent relationship level to the CEO level. Examining the influence of near-retirement CEOs’ cognitive and psychological factors allows us to understand their decision-making in more fine-grained level, which is also of interest for corporate governance in practice. Decision makers are dispositional and bounded-rational. Therefore, to understand their decisions or behaviors, one needs to take into account their dispositions. This dissertation thus also adds new dimensions in a new research setting, supporting and simultaneously showing the limitation of the arguments of behavioral strategy and corporate governance literatures.

What we do and the environment in which we carry our work impact who we are. Our personal self and our social self are co-constructed (Kreiner et al, 2006; Watson, 2008). In this dissertation I take a symbolic interactionist perspective focusing on “the relationships among individuals and how people create meanings and social relations” (Hallett et al., 2009: 488), as well as how “the construction and negotiation of meanings and identities by individuals” (Davies and Thomas, 2008) are processed. To investigate these processes, I carried a 12-month ethnography during which I followed two operational squads of police officers specialized in investigation and intervention.

A great majority of the studies on identity work apprehends and explains the phenomenon within a narrative, ideational, and individual perspective (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Beech, 2008; Ibarra and Barbulescu, 2010, Snow and Anderson, 1989; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003; Watson, 2009). In this dissertation I propose a complementary approach that focuses on the embodied, carnal, and collective aspects of identity work. I contend that the construction of identities does not only occur at an ideational level but also at an embodied, carnal level that has been neglected in the literature. The body as a working tool and crucible of identity, and the body as a manifestation of resisting strategies appear as the cornerstone of identity work particularly in organizational settings that involve physical engagement, taint, and risk taking. The second dimension that is addressed in this study is the collective strategies that people developed to cope with and resist to identity tensions. I explain how at the group level, members craft and generate meanings and codes that are shared by the group and used as resources to buffer their preferred identity from threat.

After a chapter presenting my ethnographic experience, I introduce this collective framework on the identity work approach. Whereas the literature on identity work has mainly focused on an individual perspective, I provide an overall view of the work setting of my informants in analyzing the triggers of identity tensions that lead them to engage in identity work at the collective level. My focus here is on what Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock (1987: 121) called subcultural identity work, the creation of “signs, codes, and rites of affirmation that become shared resources for identity-making” (ibid.). My informants built a “body of meanings, signs, and signifying practices that are distinct from, yet linked to, a larger culture” (ibid.). These shared elements help them to protect and secure their preferred identity, defined in this study as the “good cop” and threatened by the emergence of a new work ethos (Weber, 1968) conveying new codes and values. The chapter addresses the clash between the preferred work ethos of police investigators implying action, risk, autonomy, physical strength and mastery, as well as a symbolic and mythical dimension, and the new work ethos dictated by the procedural and bureaucratic system that slows down and sanitizes their work environment.

The last chapter focuses on an identity work dimension that is often missing in the literature: the corporeal and carnal dimension. We contend here that the identity of police investigators is framed through and by the body, whether it is the police officer's body or the Other's body. Thanks to the appropriation of their body as an efficient tool and trough the distancing with the body of the Other, our informants deal with the taint associated with their occupation (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999; Bittner, 1970; Hughes, 1951; Kreiner et al., 2006). Furthermore corporeal identity work is manifested in particular physical spaces that police investigators appropriate to live their preferred identity. Drawing from Wacquant (2000) carnal sociology, we show that bodies are intelligent and transient assemblages of shared skills, enabling the creation of individual corporeal proficiency and its relation to the occupationally constituted power held by many police officers despite growing pressures to change their work image. Through their bodies, police officers define who they are and who they want to be. It is the main component to which they anchor meanings and practices that support their preferred identity and stabilize a work environment from which they feel more and more estranged. To sum up, this doctoral dissertation addresses the question of identity work at two different but intertwined levels: a collective level and a corporeal level. I also show that the nature of the methodology participated in the way findings were discovered and analyzed.

This thesis explores the ability of temporal storytelling to reshape the understanding of entrepreneurship and opportunity. It is comprised of an introduction, a methods paper, two empirical papers, and a conclusion. Each of these papers depicts different components of temporality and storytelling in entrepreneurship. The introduction provides an in-depth theoretical background designed to support the residual papers of the thesis. The methods paper, A Case for Autoethnography, explores the methodology employed in this thesis and explains why it is pertinent to a temporal understanding of entrepreneurial opportunity. The first empirical paper, A Bureaucrat's Journey from Technocrat to Entrepreneur through the Creation of Adhocracies, illustrates how temporal stories emphasize future potentiality and, thus, represent an opportunity for entrepreneurship. The second empirical paper, How Temporality Saved Christmas at the Military Post Office, illustrates the power of past potentiality, or the opportunity to revive previous entrepreneurial opportunities. The conclusion voices the story of this thesis in an informal way and leaves the reader with closing thoughts.

The introduction commences with a story of the inspiration behind the thesis and proceeds with a description of the empirical setting. The work includes an overview of the current debate in entrepreneurial opportunity, in particular a discussion as to whether opportunities are discovered or created, and introduces a temporal explanation of opportunity. In lieu of teleological perspectives of entrepreneurship, the introduction proposes that opportunity is merely a moment in time, and more importantly, a moment where there is an alignment among the abstract, the entrepreneur/entrepreneurial organization, and the context. The role of the entrepreneur is, therefore, to articulate a potentiality-laden story designed to advance or reverse the passage of process-based time. This paper also introduces the overall research question of the thesis of how entrepreneurs can use a storytelling approach to articulate opportunities. Lastly, the introduction outlines the balance of the thesis and provides the adhesive binding the remaining papers. The principle contribution of this section is the elaboration of the theory contained within this thesis so that the outstanding papers do not require the same degree of theoretical discussion.

The second paper, A Case for Autoethnography, outlines the methodology used in this thesis. This work elucidates why autoethnography is particularly relevant to the study of entrepreneurship, especially with respect to the constraints of binary epistemology. If one rejects the binary epistemology for the study of entrepreneurship, then alternate methods must also be proposed, such as autoethnography. This paper introduces a definition of autoethnography that revolves around a critique of the self within a specific context, which delineates autoethnography as an orientation instead of a rigidly defined set of practices. This work proceeds with a comparison of two approaches to autoethnography: the analytic autoethnography and the evocative autoethnography. The composition introduces an alternate approach, the organizational autoethnography, which is the methodology likewise employed in this thesis. Finally, it contributes to the overall thesis by liberating the remaining papers from lengthy methodological discussions.

The third paper, A Bureaucrat's Journey from Technocrat to Entrepreneur through the Creation of Adhocracies, is empirical and illustrates the power of future potentiality. This writing elaborates on the empirical setting described in the introduction, the Camp Humphreys Post Office. This article describes an important duty of the military post office: to ensure that unit mail rooms are handling mail in a manner that is in accordance with federal law and principles of good customer service. Due to the unusual command structure of the post office, using formal military authority to coerce negligent mail rooms was impossible. However, both sets of parties, the military post office and the unit mail rooms, had an inherent interest in supporting efficient mail room operations. It was through storytelling that my stakeholders and I were able to realize a future potential state where joint needs could be realized. To reach this desirable future state, we created an adhocracy – a temporary organization that operates on a kairological timeline different than the surrounding environment. Through this accelerated timeline, we were able to accomplish tasks in a few days that would otherwise have taken months to achieve under ordinary bureaucratic schedules. Furthermore, after the dissolution of the adhocracy, their primordial narratives lingered and were integrated into the larger bureaucratic setting, resulting in sustained gains. The contribution of this paper is to emphasize the importance of future potentiality in entrepreneurial storytelling and serve as an empirical illustration of entrepreneurial opportunity as a future alignment of the abstract, the entrepreneurial organization, and the context.

The fourth paper, How Temporality Saved Christmas at the Military Post Office, explores the antithesis of the situation proposed in the third paper, or the role of past potentiality. In this manuscript, I explore the impact of the holiday mail surge – an influx of mail that exceeded the operational capacity of the military post office and drove the probability of successfully processing all the mail in a timely fashion to zero. In order to accomplish the mission, I used a story to communicate a prosaic emergency – or an emergency that is not going to result in a loss of life, limb, or eyesight, but provides a sense of urgency through a narrative. I utilized this emergency to reveal a limited degree of future potentiality to our stakeholders, which paved the way for our joint reinterpretation of the past for the benefit of a present situation. As a result, our stakeholders agreed that it was desirable to recreate prior experiences, such as memorable and wonderful holiday experiences, at Camp Humphreys. We determined that presents and gift giving, as well as community service, were important parts of this experience; consequently, our stakeholders agreed to volunteer in the post office to assist in the delivery of all the holiday gifts. The outcome was one large holiday adhocracy where labels such as consumer and producer were blurred in favor of overcoming the prosaic emergency. Working together, we ensured that all of the gifts were delivered on time for the holidays. The contribution of this composition is to depict the power of emergencies in facilitating a reinterpretation of the past and represents a case of entrepreneurial opportunity articulation as a return to previous alignment of the abstract, context, and entrepreneurial organization and the accompanying behaviors.

Finally, the conclusion informally tells the story of the journey of writing this thesis. It thanks the people I have met along the way and provides a brief summary of the papers. It also discusses the contributions and limitations of this thesis. Finally, it imparts how I will use the research of this thesis in future endeavors before providing my final thoughts.

Capitalism in all its variants, and the market disconnect economic exchanges from social relations (Adler, 2001; Polanyi, 2001). As such, it has always been perceived as a potentially dangerous system, prone to systematically destroy affective links (Adler & Heckscher, 2006; Tönnies, 1988). The current phase of advanced capitalism dominated by financial logics can even result in the subjugation of life (Banerjee, 2008; Fleming, 2013a, 2013a). Emancipating from this subjugation not only requires putting capitalism in question (Adler, 2013; Parker, 2002), but also realizing collective processes of territorial (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006), economical (Gibson- Graham, 2006), and political re-appropriation at the local level.

In this sense, pre-capitalist and community-based forms of organizing, which re-socialize the economy and re-integrate it in a territory, benefit from a renewed interest (Adler, 2013; Gibson-Graham, 2006). In fact, establishing an intentional community involves a rejection of the norms established in the surrounding environment for trying out alternative social arrangements (Kanter, 1972; Pitzer, 2014). As such, it constitutes political attempts to appropriate civil society through the (re)creation of meaning, without confronting directly with the sources of power (Schehr, 1997).

However, alternative organizations drifting and challenging dominant institutions necessarily face the essential challenge of being embedded in (and dependent of) the larger system while resisting it (Cheney, Cruz, Peredo, & Nazareno, 2014; Meira, 2014). Hence they are always at risk of being co-opted (Flecha & Ngai, 2014; Vieta, 2014) or caught in a process of degeneration (Cornforth, 1995). If scholars have well documented the paradoxes and tensions existing in the everyday life of alternative organizations, we still know little about the conditions under which a sustainable process of re-appropriation of economic exchanges, life and work is possible. How do people interact within these autonomous geographies, and with the larger society, so as to construct a project of collective empowerment? The present dissertation builds on an ethnographic study of Longo Maï – a European network of intentional communities created in 1973 to experiment an alternative mode of living – to explore how a group of people construct, maintain and develop a community aimed at producing collective empowerment and social innovations.

This question is addressed in three parts: we first look at how the group interacts with the larger society, then focus on how they relate with each other inside their territories, and finally, we explore how production is organized in a small world of equals. It is proposed first that the neutralization of symbolic threats coming from the environment helps the group in creating an alternative culture of exchanges; second, that the use of the territory allows the group to frame specific political actions and to craft an oppositional relational structure based on friendship and hospitality; and finally, that the existence of a functional hierarchy allow them to survive as an economic unit. These aspects have been identified as essential conditions in the shaping, maintenance, and development of Longo Maï, as an enduring collective project of empowerment and social transformation. More precisely, the analysis shows that Longo Maï is continuously shaping a productive community in which economic exchanges, work and life are re-embedded in social relationships and in a territory.

From this analysis, we conceptualize praxis-based form of collective empowerment facilitating the ongoing production of social innovations. Instead of relying on a strong and unified ideology, actors experiment various and fragmented practices which incorporate political beliefs. This praxis approach, associated with the crafting of a perpetual democratic dialogue, and with the nurturing of hospitable practices, facilitates the production of social innovations through the crafting of collective forms of empowerment based on a re-appropriation of life .

This study contributes to ongoing discussions around the possibility of constructing sustainable community-based and value-rational organizations (Adler, 2013; Cheney et al., 2014; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Stohl & Cheney, 2001) by analyzing collective processes of enduring and empowering social transformation at the small group level (Fine, 1979; Fine & Harrington, 2004; Harrington & Fine, 2000). It can also contribute to current discussions on processes of collective empowerment (Drury & Reicher, 2005; Rao & Dutta, 2012; Vallas, 2006) leading to social innovation. More largely, this is a story of an organization facing several contradictions and striving to survive, not only in spite of them, but also with them. As such, this study can contribute to organization theory by analyzing processes through which ambiguity and disorder are accepted in daily organizational life (Robertson & Swan, 2003; Stark, 2011; Thanem, 2006), and appropriated so that to facilitate the maintenance and development of the organization.

What is the most important problem facing employees in the modern economy once they come up with a new business idea? Maybe it is the decision whether or not to leap into self-employment. The dissertation is an inquiry into the economics of entrepreneurship, and the research question “Why do some employees leap into self-employment, and others do not?” I study the determinants of self-employment entry, using two sources of data: 7 years of employer–employee matched data from Statistics Sweden, and an economic experiment. The results suggest that employees are more likely to enter into self-employment when they invest effort in their own business idea, and are employed in occupations with high wage variance and low mean wages. They also suggest that unincorporated and incorporated entries are structurally different from each other, and should be studied as separate phenomena. The four essays are based on a randomized laboratory experiment, a multilevel survival model, a statistical learning procedure, and a theoretical model. The findings contribute to research on occupational choice, entrepreneurial decision making, and self-employment entry.

This dissertation presents a collection of three essays that investigate the relationship between capability portfolios and performance using the data from Formula One industry. The first essay identifies distinct types of capability portfolios and examines how different configurations of capability portfolios contribute to performance. Analyses show that four different types of configurations of capability portfolios exist and focused capability portfolios perform better than all other portfolios. The second essay analyzes the evolutionary trajectories of capability portfolios of Formula One teams over time and the performance implications of different evolutionary trajectories of capability portfolios. Analyses show that teams differ to the frequency and the timing of capability portfolio reconfiguration, and teams that follow atypical evolutionary trajectories perform better than other teams. Finally, the third essay investigates the impact of capability configuration on firm performance. Findings revealed that while capability portfolio upgrades are related to immediate performance increase, the impact of capability portfolio downgrade on performance is delayed. These findings enrich our current understanding of capabilities and how they contribute to firm heterogeneity.

The purpose of the study was to investigate how members' interpersonal processes observed at the individual level determine team outcomes at the cluster level. I focus on two dimensions of interpersonal processes from previous research and theory, the extent to which members discuss and disagree about their work. I labeled the first construct dimension task debate, which is based on the information sharing literature (Stasser & Titus, 1985, 1987), and the second construct dimension task conflict, which is based on the intragroup conflict literature (Jehn & Mannix, 2001; Jehn, 1995). From minority influence theory (Moscovici, 1980, 1985a), I hypothesized that task conflict moderates (generally positive) relations between task debate and team outcomes. However, I extended De Dreu and West's (2001) contingent model in two ways. Firstly, I propose that the moderated effects have alternate directions in early, middle, and late episodes of specific projects. Secondly, I generalize the moderated relations to several important outcome variables from the team effectiveness literature (Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008); performance measured at the cluster level, satisfaction measured at the individual level, and creativity measured at both levels. Specifically, in early episodes, task conflict is a positive moderator; in middle episodes, it is negative; and in late episodes, it is positive again. I explore my thesis using a sample of 60 student teams (360 individuals) working together for 5 months (21 weeks) to write a first business plan for a new venture. I used self-reported data collected from members on weeks 1, 9, and 17 about their interpersonal processes and used data from archival, observer-rated, and self-reported sources on outcomes in week 21. I used Bayesian estimation for my multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) approach (B. O. Muthén & Asparouhov, 2011); (a) to indicator measurement error, (b) to individual selection error, and (c) to missing data on the predictor variables. Finally, a Bayes factor analysis of my informative hypothesis revealed moderately convincing support from the data for my model, where no such support was forthcoming from traditional graphing and post hoc probing of the moderated relations.

Whereas corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is viewed to influence firm competences, their relationship, along with organizational knowledge creation, remains largely unexplored. Towards that end, this research examines what and how different forms of CE actions (e.g. innovation, strategic renewal and corporate venturing), influence various firm second-order competences such as second- order marketing and R&D competences. It is further argued that firm second-order competences are also influenced by firm knowledge creation modes. By proposing a linkage between CE and firm competences- herein referred to as second- order competences, along with organizational knowledge creation effects, this research develops, and then, tests a model of firm-level entrepreneurship in context of competence development. Informed by literatures of Austrian school of economics, entrepreneurship, resource based view of the firm and organization knowledge creation perspective, it is proposed that firm second- order competences are variously influenced, in part, by different firm-level entrepreneurship activities, and, in part, by different organizational knowledge creation modes. Analysis of data collected from 37 firms, from various knowledge-intensive sectors, using regression modeling, confirms the proposed model.

This dissertation presents a collection of three essays which focus on the relationships between alliance portfolios, firm factors, and performance. Because these relations remain understudied, I tackle them through three empirical studies in the semiconductor industry. The first essay explores how diversity in alliance portfolios and firm factors influence firm performance in the context of the U.S. semiconductor industry (1995–2009). Findings suggest that three types of diversity – alliance functions, technological resources, and positional resources – have varying effects on focal firm's market performance, while those links are contingent upon the firm's market experience. These findings contribute to the debate on portfolio diversity in alliance portfolios literature. The second essay investigates the relationship between partners' bargaining positions, a focal firm's resources, and its performance. Findings in the global semiconductor industry (1997–2007) suggest that the effect of relative bargaining power on performance depends upon a firm's relative resource commitment and portfolio cohesion between partners. These findings contribute to alliance portfolio literature, by highlighting a focal firm's aspect in the context of partners' endowments. The third essay examines the effect of resources fit between a firm and its partners on firm performance. Analyses using data of the global semiconductor firms (1997– 2007) show that increasing complementarity of technological resources and compatibility of organizational resources influences firm's profitability. These findings contribute to alliance portfolios literature, by extending the current debate on partner endowment to resource fit between firm and partners.

This thesis presents a collection of four articles which focus on programme design and learning outcomes in entrepreneurship education and training. I adopt a multi-theoretic, socio-cognitive lens to study three different target populations in entrepreneurship education: women, engineering students and middle managers. A conceptual model of entrepreneurship education teaching (Fayolle and Gailly, 2008) encapsulates the research questions and acts as a unifying framework for these four articles. Theories and concepts from the disparate fields of feminism, educational science, team processes, management development and training evaluation are drawn on to provide useful insights into the development of entrepreneurs. I conclude by drawing convergent lessons from these four articles for future research in entrepreneurship education research.

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop an empirical instrument able to capture the variety of ethical principles used by managers in organizations. The philosophical literature offers dozen of principles based ethical frameworks, and the business ethics literature recognizes this plurality. Yet, most business ethics papers are normative, and few discuss more than three frameworks. In addition, a systematic search has produced only a handful of empirical papers attempting to measure this plurality, among which few are in accordance with received methodological conventions. Our process followed three steps. We first identified the ten most cited ethical frameworks in the business ethics literature, and summed up each of them with five assertions deemed accessible to practicing managers. In the second step, we analyzed extensively readings describing each ethical framework in order to synthesize the essence of the philosophy in five basic assumptions. In the third step, we empirically assessed the quality and significance of the questionnaire and its results. By and large, our results confirm the coexistence of a plurality of ethical frameworks in the representations of managers. They also show that managers tend to use frameworks based on a recombination of principles sometimes pertaining to more than one of the canonical moral theories discussed in the literature.

The objective of this thesis is to provide new theoretical and empirical insights on how small firms in a high-tech industry (biotechnology) leverage key strategic factors in order to balance rent generation and rent appropriation in a short-term and over a longer period. Specifically, the following research issues are studied: 1) Questioning the direct relationship between rent generation and rent appropriation; 2) Investigating differing effects of particular value drivers – diversity of technology application, exploitation alliances, and strategic orientation – on rent generation vs. Rent appropriation; 3) Investigating alliance portfolio diversity effects on firm exits. The key contributions of this thesis are primarily within strategy research field in that it advances our knowledge about the role that particular value drivers play in conditioning high-tech firms' competitive advantage. The research topics examined in this thesis also intersect with entrepreneurship research field, particularly the conditions of small entrepreneurial firms' development and survival.