Stewart Clegg
Biographic Data
| ID | 80094 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stewart Clegg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stewart |
| FAMILY NAME | Clegg |
| SIGNATURE | CLEGG S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Technology Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6083-4283 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 176 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 534 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 173 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Englishization Beyond the Global North
This paper advances understanding of Englishization in management research by addressing a key limitation in the existing literature: its predominant focus on the Global North, especially Europe. Drawing on dependency theory and postcolonial theory, we examine how management academics experience and navigate Englishization in Brazil. Based on qualitative research, we found that Brazilian academics, like their European counterparts, faced growing …
Multiplicity, discretion, and power
School report cards are key audit devices through which New Public Management is enacted in public schools. We examine how educational professionals enact school report cards. We draw on Mol's concepts of coordination, distribution, and inclusion as abductive sensitizing devices. Based on ethnographic research in a Brazilian state school, we show how school report cards are enacted as audit instruments and sites of professional agency and organiz…
Professional credibility cycles in education
Experts must adapt to immediate circumstances when managing impressions and be able to reassert credibility and exercise authority when performing professionalism. A credible professional is constructed, applied, and recognized locally as well as relationally, particularly within the context of careers in bureaucratic structures. Few studies investigate professional credibility through processual approaches assessing experts’ testimony and practi…
Modalities of power
Globally, the care sector faces precarious working conditions and workforce shortages, prompting the emergence of numerous empowerment projects. To explore the power-related tensions and politics of empowerment, this study draws on ethnographic research investigating a nurse empowerment movement in the Netherlands. We build on a framework distinguishing ‘power-over, to and with’, and extend this debate by incorporating views of power that see it …
Saudade
Emotions and paradoxes permeate organizational life. The former shape how individuals interpret, respond to, and cope with the tensions that arise from the latter. While paradox theory has extensively explored the handling of these tensions through cognitive and structural mechanisms, the emotional dimensions remain largely underexplored. We discuss saudade, a paradoxical, culturally grounded emotion in Portuguese, an evocative state of being cha…
Tensions in implementing the tenure track system (TTS) in Pakistan’s higher education
Paradoxes of Authenticity in Liminal Consumption
What makes a “ fake ” seemingly “ authentic ”? The case of Rick’s Café, known worldwide for the movie Casablanca , situates that question. Rick’s was a set constructed on a Hollywood sound stage. Another Rick’s was created materially in Casablanca decades later. Consumers are aware of this liminal condition. It is the reflexivity inherent in this awareness of performative inauthenticity that makes the case both appropriate and nuanced as an oppor…
Paradox(a)
Exploring Organisational Controversies as Actor-Networks
We adopt an ethnographic approach grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to examine the controversies surrounding student performance in a Brazilian State School recovering from a post-disaster scenario. By tracing the networks of actors – school staff, students, educational regulations, and community concerns – we illustrate how translation processes shape and stabilise organisational actions. The analysis reveals that controversies over project…
Organising through time
This special issue represents the first effort to bridge paradox theory and historical analysis further. Its goal is to create a fertile environment for advancing the historical study of organisations by contributing to discussions on various research topics where organisations, paradoxes, and temporality intersect. Defining organisational paradoxes as interdependent contradictions that persist over time contains an immediate plea for applying hi…
Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship
Understanding the historical processes of privatization policies in North Africa
This paper provides a concise historical analysis of the political economy of privatization in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from the 1980s to 2007, a period that witnessed the emergence of privatization as a primary policy tool to reform the public sector. The paper examines the influence of political history, macroeconomic considerations, and International Development Agencies (IDAs) on the early privatization processes in these North African c…
Public-private partnerships for school infrastructure development
As Saudi Arabia embarks upon a transformative economic journey under the umbrella of its Vision 2030 and National Transformation Plan, the Saudi government plans to implement various initiatives to engage the private sector in meeting new national development goals, including the provision of 1600 schools through the public-private partnership (PPP) route. This article provides an international outlook and review of the use of PPPs to deliver sch…
Constructing smart cities through the use of public-private partnerships
This article analyses the case of Dubai’s smart city from a public policy perspective and demonstrates how critical it is to rely on the use of the public-private partnership (PPP) model. Effective use of this model can guarantee the building of a smart city that could potentially fulfill the vision of the political leadership in Dubai and serve as a catalyst and blueprint for other Gulf states that wish to follow Dubai’s example. This article ar…
Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship
From Access Challenges (as Data) to Methodological Insights
Little attention has been given to questions of blocked access in public administration research. We draw on past scholarship on access: qualitative research accounts in public administration that address access processes, problems, and possibilities; and our own experience with access challenges in a public school setting involving public sector employees. This allowed us to detail three methodological principles to facilitate the initiation of …
Overcoming Strong–Weak Dualisms in Process Organization Studies via Three Theory-Methodology Hybrids
In processual approaches to the sociology of organizations, there are prevalent assumptions differentiating ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ process research. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and suggest a novel, non-dualistic hybrid approach that is methodologically strong-weak. This approach integrates both flux (becoming) and its temporary material instantiations (being), addressing tensions between slow-moving and mid-range elements of process.…
"We don't experiment with our patients!" An ethnographic account of the epistemic politics of (re)designing nursing work
This article draws on ethnographic research investigating experimental reform projects in local nursing practices. These are aimed at strengthening nursing work and fostering nurses' position within healthcare through bottom-up nurse-driven innovations. Based on literature on epistemic politics and critical nursing studies, the study examines and conceptualizes how these nurses promote professional and organizational change. The research draws on…
Organization for Liquid-Modern Times? An Introduction
National digital strategy development
Adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) to create a digital ecosystem gives rise to substantial economic and social benefits . Therefore, many countries develop National digital strategies (NDSs) to establish objectives, policy priorities and outline necessary actions for implementation of digital transformation. However, given the digital divide between different economies, it is difficult to compare consistently the prioritie…
Romancing leadership
Leadership studies focus on processes of leader romanticization to explain the attribution of charisma and account for leaders' personal power. Such research focuses on antecedents to leadership, stressing factors such as personal projections of dispositions, the specificity of context and situation or the leaders' capacity for image management. These processes, important as they are, do not fully identify and articulate the inner workings of the…
Public-Private Partnerships in the Gulf Cooperation Council Region
This policy insights paper explores the development of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region over the past three decades and argues that although GCC states did not embark on a full-fledged experience with PPPs, unstable oil and gas prices are changing this approach. PPPs are increasingly gaining strong political support, and GCC states have made numerous reforms to the existing regulatory and institution…
In a Kafkaesque catacomb
Bureaucracies, especially state bureaucracies, are typified as rational-legal organizations. We study how one such bureaucracy acted as neither rational nor legal but proved to be a space of exclusion. Ihor Homenuyk, a Ukrainian citizen, was ‘retained’ and then killed by the Portuguese foreigners and borders service. Police abuse has been much in the news in recent times, as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. The issues are wider than t…
Organizing the identity of the whistleblower
Whistleblowing: towards a new theory, by Kate Kenny, is an admirable book on many levels. Let me recount them. First, it deals with a topic of considerable importance in an industry of supreme impo
Public Administration in the Middle East and North Africa
Bringing Space Back in
In this article, we re.ect on architecture and management and organization theory, in terms of their mutual implications. We focus especially on a tacit implication in mainstream organization theory, which has an architectural genesis. In the past, management has been largely undergirded by a Cartesian rationality, one seen most clearly in the argument that structure follows strategy. Architecturally, this Cartesianism is present in the injunctio…
Reflexivity in Organization and Management Theory
In this article, we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) to reflexively investigate the role of the researcher and the research community in the production of a research subject. We review our earlier work, which explores how the dynamics of refugee systems help to produce the research subject - in this case, the refugee. We then use ideas from ANT to move beyond the more conventional institutional and discursive analyses that are used in these art…
Management paradoxes
Paradox is gaining more and more pervasiveness in and around organizations, thus increasing the need for an approach to management that allows both researchers and practitioners to address these paradoxes. We attempt to contribute to this project by suggesting a relational approach to paradoxes. To this aim, we first present the state of the art of research on management paradoxes and then explain four regularities surfaced in the literature on t…
Organization Theory in Business and Management History
A common lament is that business history has been marginalized within mainstream business and management research. We propose that the remedy lies in part with more extensive engagement with organization theory. We illustrate our argument by exploring the potentialities for business history of three cognitive frameworks: institutional entrepreneurship, evolutionary theory, and Bourdieusian social theory. Exhibiting a higher level of theoretical f…
Organization, Class and Control
Governmentality Matters
The concept of governmentality was developed by Michel Foucault to address the specificity of contemporary neo-liberal forms of governance - premised on the active consent and subjugation of subjects, rather than their oppression, domination or external control. These neo-liberal forms of governance are evident in new forms of alliance contracting in the construction industry. We review the major innovations in organization form in the sector, be…
Invisible walls’ and ‘silent hierarchies’
In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and outcomes. We report on an in-depth case study of an award-winning creative architecture firm. Our data show how talk about creativity and the creative identities of architects can be analysed as effects of power. Theoretically, our study represents an investigation into the disciplining of professional architects’ discourse about their selves, their orga…
Politicization and political contests in and around contemporary multinational corporations
This article looks at core arguments in international business, organization studies and surrounding academic fields that focus on the study of politicization and political contests in and around multinational corporations (MNCs). Two evident streams of debate are identified. Equally evident is that these streams hardly connect. One stream is mainly interested in studying politicization from the outside, whereas the other is mainly interested in …
International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies
Emotions and identity work
For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, although extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this…
Manna from heaven
Organizations have, in the past, often been discussed as if they were Cartesian mentalities, planning agendas, learning from doing, processing information, reducing equivocality, mimicking and copying, floating disembodiedly apart from the actors who work in these organizations. We are offered representations of organizations as organically grounded metaphors that minimize the biological facticity of employees: namely, their need for food. While …
Radical reformism
According to a specialized research area within environmental sociology - ecological modernization theory - the shift towards seeking to protect the environment constitutes a broadly emergent sociological phenomenon: the radicalization of modernity. The understanding of the fundamentals of such phenomenon is, therefore, crucial for both the practice and theorization of organization and environment . This is the main reason why this paper seeks to…
Power, Rationality and Legitimacy in Public Organizations
In this paper we propose answers to the research question: how does power shape the construction of legitimacy in the context of public organizations? We suggest that while organizational structures of dominancy will be embedded, not all structures of dominancy align with those that are normatively presented as legitimate and authoritative. Such situations make the creation and sustenance of legitimacy problematic for organizational action. This …
Social organization, classificatory analogies and institutional logics
As a social theory of organization, it is unsurprising that institutional theory draws upon the profound and ambitious work of the late anthropologist Mary Douglas. One of the foundational concepts of organizational institutionalism, institutional logics, directly draws upon her work. Yet, in recent times this foundational role has faded from view. This is unfortunate for there is much continuity in current work with that of Douglas, it now being…
Kafkaesque power and bureaucracy
The metaphor of Kafkaesque bureaucracy has attracted the imagination of organization theorists for decades. While the critical and metaphorical approach offers vibrant insights about organizing, it has not been complemented by systematic empirical analysis. We take a step in that direction and conduct an inductive study of how people experience and deal with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy. We focus on the Kafkaesque organization as constructed in pro…
The Architecture of Complexity
In this paper we reflect on organizational space and its implications for organization and management. In contrast to dominant discourse in management and organization theory we address the ways in which corporate buildings, as social objects, provide a materiality to organization. Developing the concept of the architecture of complexity, we focus on space as the precondition of processes of organizing. The productive power of space lies in its p…
Professional closure
The politics of gossip and denial in interorganizational relations
Organizational gossip has largely been discussed in terms of effects at the individual level. In this article we turn our attention to the organization level. The article makes a research contribution that addresses gossip that spreads fact-based rumours about organizations in terms of their shifting role in circuits of power. The research question asks what happens when organizations officially formulate themselves as doing one thing while other…
Puritans, Visionaries and Survivors
All readings take place in the here-and-now, even of texts written back there and then. Nowhere in management and organization theory has this been truer of anyone than Max Weber. Unread in English during his lifetime, it was nearly 30 years after his death before his ideas had much impact. When they did, they were read in a context and tradition years away from those in which they were conceived. And, ever since, they have been subject to system…
Organizational creativity as idea work
How do we understand the nature of organizational creativity when dealing with complex, composite ideas rather than singular ones? In response to this question, we problematize assumptions of the linearity of creative processes and the singularity of ideas in mainstream creativity theory. We draw on the work of Bakhtin and longitudinal research in two contrasting cases: developing hydrocarbon prospects and concepts for films and TV series. From t…
Lessons for leaders
Machiavelli should be a central and canonical text for management education, even in the age of positive organizational literatures. We give it this role by considering the case of the virtuous leader. Our proposition is simple: virtuous leaders live and act, like anybody else, in the power circuits that are constitutive of reality. Therefore, they participate in power dynamics that sometimes make them face the need to decide in ways that do not …
The organization ( Ângkar ) as a state of exception
Organization theory, Clegg pointed out, has failed to address the role of organizations in some of the crimes of/against humanity, suggesting that more attention should be given to the case of total institutions. With this paper we respond to Clegg’s invitation and study the S-21 extermination camp, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We do so by engaging with the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, with the aim of investigating the organizatio…
Improvisation as “real time foresight”
Violence and Workplace Bullying
Understood as an act of violence intentionally perpetuated by one person over another, bullying is a direct affront to ethics, especially when ethics is seen to be grounded in a primary relationship with and responsibility for other people. Existing research has attended largely to providing individualized rather than organizational explanations of bullying and has not adequately interrogated bullying in relation to ethics. With this paper, we ad…
Media Management and Digital Transformation
With theoretical chapters, methodological insights and qualitative case studies of contemporary practices, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners involved with media management globally
Power, theorizing, and nihilism
Organizations as Bargaining and Influence Systems
Power, Rule, and Domination
The Theory of Power and Organization
The Theory of Power and Organization
Organization, Class and Control
The Theory of Power and Organization
Organizations, Class and Control
Enjeux, stratégies et structures
Organization, Class and Control
From the Politics of Production to the Production of Politics
Apros Conference, 3-9 April, 1988, Hong Kong
Socialism
Struggletown
1900--1914 Birthplace The place The people The economy The politics Childhood The family home The Edwardian baby Mothers and fathers Play School 1914--1926 War and peace I Richmond goes to war: 1914--1918 Peace and problems: 1919--1926 Youth Work Morals Fun 1927--1939 Depression and decay Crisis: 1927--1930 Sepsis: 1931--1934 Convalescence: 1935--1939 Young marrieds The Depression and private life Marriage and childbirth 1939--1955 War and peace …
Against Antinomies
Class, Politics and the Economy
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Frameworks of Power
Frameworks of Power is a coherent and comprehensive account of the different frameworks for understanding power that have been advanced by influential thinkers across the social sciences. A true classic in the field, the original edition proved hugely influential and a major point of reference for scholars at all levels concerned with power.Looking back to the classical literature on power, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Hobbes, the boo…
The End of Organized Capitalism
End of Organized Capitalism argues that despite Marx s and Weber s insistence that capitalist societies become increasingly more ordered we now live in an era of disorganized capitalism. The book is devoted to a systematic examination of the shift to disorganized capitalism in five Western nations (Britain, the United States, France, West Germany, and Sweden). Through the analysis of space, class, and culture, Lash and Urry portray the restructur…
Semi-Peripheries or Particular Pathways
The paper deals comparatively with the class structures of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Four hypotheses, which could account for the similarities and differences in class structure, are identified. The first is based on their semi-peripheral status in the world economy; the second, pertaining particularly to Canada, argues for an 'Americanisation effect'; the third is based on their similar heritage in the context of dominion capitalism; wh…
‘Post-Confucianism’, Social Democracy and Economic Culture
Capitalism in Contrasting Cultures
Power, Technology and Flexibility in Organizations
This paper critically reviews arguments about technology and their relationship to some positions which have recently been established in the sociological analysis of power. These positions reformulate the relationship between concepts of power and concepts of the organization. Each is seen as integral to the other rather than power being a merely contingent feature of some organizations. Emphasis is placed upon notions of practices and disciplin…
Professional closure
Capitalism in Contrasting Cultures
Sociology (113 works) · Political science (112 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (76 works) · Law (73 works) · Epistemology (64 works) · Computer Science (50 works) · Law (48 works) · Philosophy (48 works) · Politics (46 works) · Economics (40 works)