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Theories of Work and Working Today

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DOI: 10.5465/amr.2013.0169

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姝 Academy of Management Review
2013, Vol. 38, No. 4, 491–502.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amr.2013.0169

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL TOPIC FORUM

THEORIES OF WORK AND WORKING TODAY

GERARDO A. OKHUYSEN
University of California, Irvine

DAVID LEPAK
Rutgers University

KAREN LEE ASHCRAFT

University of Colorado Boulder

GIUSEPPE (JOE) LABIANCA

University of Kentucky

VICKI SMITH
University of California, Davis

H. KEVIN STEENSMA
University of Washington–Seattle

The article discusses conceptions of work as a focus of research in the area of

organization and management. We consider obstacles in the study of work, including
different disciplinary lenses used in research. We discuss the contributions of the
articles in this special topic forum, as well as questions generated from them. We end
by examining how different disciplines may approach new questions about work, and
call for an engaged and rich consideration of work as a dynamic phenomenon

As organizational and management scholars,
we care about work. Work is at the core of the
phenomena we study and is the effortful accom-
plishment of collective tasks. These are, for the
most part, rather uncontroversial statements.
And, in fact, work permeates organization and
management studies. A quick search for “work”
on the Academy of Management publications
webpage, limited to the titles of articles, returns
over 3,200 results. Such results beg the question,
“Why do we need a special topic forum on
work?”
We contend that in spite of the obvious inter-
est in work from the field, as scholars we still
do not have a full grasp of this obviously central
phenomenon. We suggest the challenge lies not
with a lack of effort—as the search results
show— but, rather, with the phenomenon itself,
and with specific obstacles to the creation of
knowledge regarding work. These obstacles,
sometimes working in concert, keep us from
fully realizing a deep understanding of work.
491
Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright
holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.
Below we consider what a short list of obstacles
might include.
THE DOMAIN OF WORK IS VAST
A relatively straightforward definition of
work, focusing on effort toward an objective,
belies the range of activities and meanings the
term draws to itself. Work performance. Work
and family. Work teams. Work context. Work
motivation. Emotional work. Contingent work.
Work roles. Work practices. Workplace. Knowl-
edge work. Work norms. Work crafting. Work
outcomes. Institutional work. Dirty work. The
number and variety of uses of the term show
that the scope of work is vast, and, thus, it is
difficult to fully account for the phenomenon we
seek to study.
Naturally, using work as a reference point for
our scholarly work has other effects as well. In
particular, the focus on work excludes phenom-
ena from our attention that are classified as “not
work” in organizational and management stud-
492 Academy of Management Review
ies. Leisure activity. Volunteering. Unpaid work.
Homemaking. Raising family. Friendships. Each
of these is conceptualized—when it is treated at
all—as complementary or opposite to work.
Such treatment is always political, with ramifi-
cations for our attention to and value for differ-
ent elements. And each of these is part of the
domain of work in management and organiza-
tions.
WORK IS CONTENT AND CONTEXT
In much research the purpose is to understand
what people do in organizations, such as mak-
ing decisions, caring for patients, and accom-
plishing other tasks. But our field is also inter-
ested in broader effects and sites of work
activity. For instance, scholars interested in
work-family issues use the workplace context as
a critical social location to negotiate personal
preferences, roles, and conflicts. This context is
related to and separate from other spheres of
life, which are themselves sources of those pref-
erences, roles, and conflicts. The workplace also
serves as the context for individual psychologi-
cal processes, such as the construction and de-
velopment of identity. It is also a context for the
work itself, and as such we see it treated as an
enabler or disabler of creative activity and as
either more or less supportive of task comple-
tion. Work is also a site where individuals enact
agendas, goals, and missions. Responding to a
call for work on a given issue not only requires
attention to the task at hand but invokes consid-
erations of a broader agenda to pursue. In short,
work is the content but also the context in which
individuals live, act, and interact with others.
WORK IS DYNAMIC
Another challenge in studying work is that
both work and the workplace are ever-changing.
Although some occupations and organizations
have largely disappeared (e.g., telephone oper-
ators and buggy whip makers; video rental
stores and pet rock shops), many older forms of
work, professions, and organizations remain.
And as they remain, they are constantly reorga-
nized, reformed, and reconstituted such that the
people doing the work, the arrangements
around the work, the technology used in the
performance of the work, and even the purpose
of the work may change. For instance, early in
October
the twenty-first century we are seeing dramatic
changes in the field of health care in the United
States, with shifts that portend changes in the
work, from treating illness to enabling wellness;
in the people doing the work, from doctors and
nurses to a broader set of care providers; and in
the organizations, from doctors’ offices and hos-
pitals to integrated care organizations.
The changes we observe in work and work
arrangements are sometimes in response to
macroeconomic forces, such as the shift from a
predominantly agricultural economy to a period
in which manufacturing (seemingly) reigned su-
preme to a service economy today. But changes
are also due to social and political upheavals,
such as civil rights movements, which have en-
abled some women and men of color to enter
arenas of professional and managerial work
that were once forbidden. The entry of women
into skilled manual jobs previously reserved for
men has also dramatically changed the world of
work. Sharp gender and racial divisions of labor
persist, and many low-skill and low-pay jobs
continue to be occupied by those who are so-
cially marginalized. In addition, the increased
interconnectedness across national borders can
significantly reorganize work efforts through re-
defining boundaries of competence and through
changing the “make or buy” decision for organi-
zations by reducing or eliminating international
boundaries. These and other broad changes pro-
duce a moving target for our field’s interest
in work.
WORK CAN BE KNOWN IN DIFFERENT WAYS
Another obstacle stems from widely different
epistemological perspectives in our field. The
way in which we know work differs markedly
depending on the stance we take, as scholars,
regarding the subject of research. Recall that
Fredrick Taylor studied work through a very par-
ticular lens significantly influenced by his be-
lief in the quest for a “hard science” of work.
Moreover, the positivist perspective that has
been elemental in our field is a very strong
foundation on which our knowledge rests. The
standards of that tradition, with hypothetic-
deductive logic, are quite evident in many lead-
ing journals.
But as work has changed, so have our tools to
understand it. Those with alternative perspec-
tives on contemporary work ask more interpre-
2013 Okhuysen, Lepak, Ashcraft, Labianca, Smith, and Steensma
tive and critical questions regarding how social,
cultural, and political relations converge to or-
ganize the meaning and practice of work. Such
approaches try to account for everyday work
interactions as (1) shaped by histories of mean-
ing both shared and contested (e.g., interpreta-
tions, values, rationalities, feelings), (2) embed-
ded in material trajectories both synthetic and
natural (e.g., of the body, space, time, institution,
economy, artifact), and (3) actively negotiating
and producing the very systems of symbol-
meets-stuff that inevitably constrain them.
These lenses cultivate an eye for occupational
and organizational formations that we create
from an array of possibilities that, in turn, create
us as particular kinds of humans with associ-
ated identities and influence capacities: manag-
ers, employees, leaders and followers, knowl-
edge workers, semiskilled laborers, men and
women, old and young, gay and straight, Chris-
tian and Muslim, disabled members, immi-
grants, people of color, and so forth. Critical
perspectives attempt to shift our attention from
“functionalist” and “managerialist” approaches
to deeper concerns about meaning and power at
work, recognizing not only different epistemolo-
gies but different politics as well. The alterna-
tive ways in which we know work reflect the
advances in our science but also pose obstacles
as they establish boundaries—in vocabularies,
professional associations, and/or topics—
behind which knowledge is accumulated.
WE KNOW WORK THROUGH THE LENS OF
OUR OWN CONTEXT
The treatment of work as an object of research
is also influenced by disciplinary differences
within our scholarly communities. Within the
Academy of Management alone, our divisions
reflect this variety, with researchers who use a
macro, meso, or micro orientation; a human re-
sources or strategy perspective; a sociological or
economic point of view; a positivist or critical
view; and many more. Each of these has the
effect of imposing additional obstacles, as our
communities discipline the questions we ask,
the methods we use, and other ways in which
we conduct our research.
A related challenge is the recognition of our
own role in the process of research and the man-
ner in which we ourselves are part of an often-
unnoticed historical, social, and professional
493
context. As knowledge workers and profession-
als of the mind, we participate in institutions—
such as business schools—and processes—such
as tenure—that shape our capacity to theorize
and know work. Although we often do not ques-
tion our position in our context, it has deep im-
plications for the production of knowledge,
which tends to reflect the concerns of industri-
alized, high-income countries, privileging white
collar work over blue collar labor. The challenge
that our cultural and historical embeddedness
represents only becomes evident over time.
These contexts reflect strong power dynamics,
ones that we often support when we adopt man-
agerial, efficiency, or pragmatic arguments or
when we advocate for relevance or the practical
application of our knowledge. But at other times
we may also subvert this power structure, when
we challenge established truths and assump-
tions, bringing to light otherwise unnoticed di-
mensions of work and the workplace.
So, then, returning to the initial question, why
do we need a special topic forum on work? As an
editorial team, we hoped that our collective call
would draw interesting and varied research.
Our team is made up of scholars with strong
commitments to both empirical and theoretical
understanding, and although we embody multi-
ple and sometimes conflicting approaches, we
share an investment in advancing knowledge of
work from multiple perspectives. As such, our
aim here has been to pause, to take a deep
breath and explicitly note the centrality of work
as a phenomenon in our scholarly endeavors. As
we pause, we also recognize the challenges fac-
ing us, in addition to the ways in which progress
is being made in understanding work.
Below we highlight some of the work that it is
our privilege to present. While feeling gratified
with the contents of the special issue, we are
also left with unanswered questions, the an-
swers to which we’ll learn only once the volume
is issued and the articles are read, cited, and—
hopefully— used as a basis for future research.
These questions we present have different ori-
gins, with some inspired by the manuscripts in
this issue. Others arise from our own curiosity,
embodied in our original call for papers. Last,
some questions come from the puzzling absence
of manuscripts in some areas that also deserve
attention.
Perhaps the best metaphor of this special
topic forum is that of a photograph. It captures a
494 Academy of Management Review
partial but attractive and compelling view of our
scholarly community’s research realities. It re-
flects, imperfectly, the aspirations of authors
who submitted manuscripts, as well as the help
we received from reviewers in the process. It
also reflects, more strongly, the choices made by
our editorial team, and, as such, the final picture
is subject to critique. As with any picture, it is
necessarily incomplete, with deserving and ex-
ceptional parts of the landscape remaining out-
side the frame. And, as always, the final product
is affected as much by what is emphasized as by
that which remains out of focus. In essence, we
believe the special topic forum provides a tell-
ing snapshot—albeit a mere snapshot— of the
activity that our scholarly community is en-
gaged in as it explores the world of work.
THE SPECIAL TOPIC FORUM
Fitzsimmons (2013) effectively lays out how
individuals exhibit multicultural identities in
terms of their plurality and integration. Impor-
tantly, Fitzsimmons argues that, for these orga-
nizational members, identity construction can
lead to different personal, social, and task out-
comes. Thus, the role of the employee in the
organization becomes clearer. However, Fitz-
simmons also raises a challenge, suggesting
that corporate managers should deepen their
understanding of the complex phenomena of
multicultural employees, since it will be in their
interest to fit them with an organization’s strat-
egy. It could be the case that having employees
who exhibit greater multicultural plurality and
integration is particularly conducive to an
effective global strategy where the global mar-
ket is viewed as an amalgamation of regional
markets and where goods and services are
standardized across regions. In contrast, a
multidomestic strategy may require cultural
specialists—that is, employees with a dominant
monoculture aligned with specific markets.
Issues of categorization and typologies in the
research process are relevant in several manu-
scripts. For instance, Martin, Lopez, Roscigno,
and Hodson (2013) suggest the development of a
new typology for bureaucratic organization that
is more attuned to the shifting realities of the
global economy. This article provides a synthe-
sized theoretical framework for understanding
rule-breaking in complex organizations and ex-
amines two dimensions of this phenomenon: (1)
October
the degree to which rule-breaking is contested
and (2) the degree of coordination required for
rule-breaking. Cappelli and Keller (2013) de-
velop a new classification of economic work ar-
rangements based on differences in control over
the work process and contracts, and they point
to the need for reimagining classifications we
use to conduct research on work in the new
economy. From the perspective of management,
there remains a control-flexibility trade-off in
terms of the relationship between the individual
doing the work and the organization trying to
capture the value from these efforts (Matusik &
Hill, 1998). McIver, Lengnick-Hall, Lengnick-Hall,
and Ramachandran (2013) explore how an in-
creased focus on knowledge in the workplace
places renewed importance on what work in-
volves as organizations migrate from relying
primarily on manual work to knowledge-based
sources of competitive advantage. This shift
raises questions for how work that is fundamen-
tally knowledge based is managed by organiza-
tions. It also raises questions about our assump-
tions that knowledge is simply something to be
managed relative to something that is created,
emerges, and evolves over time.
Bartel and Wiesenfeld (2013) also argue that
the contemporary workplace is a setting that
elicits feelings of ambiguity, particularly
around what it means to be a typical member of
a given group. They suggest situations that pro-
voke feelings of ambiguity, the manner in which
this ambiguity motivates corrective action, and
the social negotiation processes that members
use to resolve the ambiguity. They further argue
that worker behavior, identity, and commitment
are likely to vary across these situations. A the-
oretical question arises regarding whether the
characteristics that demand these new classifi-
cations and behaviors will result in new work
arrangements. And a logical next step is to es-
tablish which work arrangements are more or
less consistent with various strategic pursuits
and how these might align to optimize
performance.
As highlighted by two articles in this special
issue, work and nonwork identities continue on
a path where they blur together. Work identity
can creep into nonwork space (Ramarajan &
Reid, 2013), and nonwork identity can creep into
work space (Ollier-Malaterre, Rothbard, & Berg,
2013). The authors provide a way to reframe and
expand current conversations about work and
2013 Okhuysen, Lepak, Ashcraft, Labianca, Smith, and Steensma
family, chiefly by growing the arena of “non-
work” to include multiple facets of activity and
identity and by rendering increasingly fluid and
permeable the symbolic and material separa-
tion of public and private as well as profes-
sional and personal. Although there can be
alignment and misalignment within individuals
in terms of inclusion of nonwork identity with
work identity, might there be variance across
industries in terms of integrating work and non-
work identities? Can organizations derive a
competitive advantage by facilitating different
patterns of inclusion and exclusion? Ollier-
Malaterre and colleagues (2013) hint at possible
differences across industries in terms of how
employees manage the integration (or segmen-
tation) of their online social networks and pro-
fessional selves. What are the implications of
organizational norms in this regard for their per-
formance? In what ways is organizational per-
formance influenced by employees’ online
boundary management strategies?
Finally, the presence of society within the or-
ganization is front and center for Gray and Kish-
Gephart (2013). Here, inseparably entwined with
“normal” organizational activities, is the con-
stant effort required to support social class dis-
tinctions. These distinctions—and their atten-
dant privileges and costs—sit side by side with
organizational work, precariously. Because the
“normal” interactions within organizations are
guided by managerial rationality, the support of
class distinctions is not a given and, conse-
quently, effort (in the form of class work) must be
expended to sustain the class structure. And
sustaining the structure is required because it
continues to be relevant for all involved upon
leaving the organization at the end of the work-
day. This article extends our understanding of
how the realities of the external context not only
impinge on organizational life but are an essen-
tial part of it.
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS
The articles included in the special topic fo-
rum cover a wide array of issues from a variety
of perspectives. At the same time, they only
scratch the surface of the types of issues and
questions that researchers need to explore to
better understand work and working in today’s
environment. Below we highlight a number of
issues and questions that we believe are partic-
495
ularly important for moving the field forward.
These are not meant to be exhaustive, naturally,
since new issues will continue to emerge as
organizations continue to explore organizing op-
tions. Rather, we raise questions from a variety
of disciplinary perspectives that, to us, remain
unanswered. Again, these certainly do not re-
flect all relevant disciplines; instead, they are
intended to highlight the pervasiveness of the
work issue in organizations and the extent of its
impact on organizational scholarship. We orga-
nize these issues from macro to micro levels of
analysis as traditionally understood, conclud-
ing with a perspective intended to challenge
and traverse these conventions.
Sociology
Sociologists are fundamentally concerned
with the linkages between social structure and
agency, between institutions and lived experi-
ence, and between culture and action. The arti-
cles in this special issue all expand on our un-
derstanding of these linkages, particularly
those between large-scale social change that
we’ve observed—such as those in the economy
and economic institutions—and those in dis-
crete workplace issues—such as identity, per-
ceptions of ambiguity, shifting conceptions of
multiculturalism, control systems, and bound-
ary work inside organizations. Among other
things, they focus on how outsourcing employ-
ment may be transforming the way work is done
and where, how this affects work identity (as
well as the very conceptual categories we use to
study work), and how globalization may require
new forms of multicultural competency.
Sociologists might have wished to see more
emphasis on concepts that are core to their dis-
cipline, not to mention core to the study of work:
power, inequality, and stratification. Many soci-
ologists investigate how structural changes,
such as those mentioned above, are recalibrat-
ing power dynamics between workers and man-
agers, both at the institutional level (changing
industrial relations and creating arguably in-
creasingly asymmetrical employment relation-
ships, for example) and the micro level (work-
place control, resistance, and cooperation, for
example). They explore the changing character
of power, from the more overt, hierarchical
power characteristic of industrial production
systems (manufacturing) and occupations that
496 Academy of Management Review
are organized along the principles of the assem-
bly line (clerical and fast food work) to the in-
sidious, covert power found in workplaces
where workers are required to self-manage or to
work under the surveillance of computer sys-
tems that incorporate invisible mechanisms of
observation and measurement.
Similarly, sociologists study how changing in-
stitutions and arrangements reproduce inequal-
ity and create new forms of inequality. Of par-
ticular concern, but only alluded to in this
special issue, has been the ways in which work-
place and industrial changes have eroded
“good” jobs that pay living wages, provide ben-
efits and pension plans, and offer a modicum of
job security. The expansion of minimum and
low-wage jobs and the demise of middle class
salaries that were accessible to workers without
college degrees, along with the expansion of
well-paying jobs in the professional, financial,
and information sectors, lead many sociologists
and economists to argue that we are witnessing
a declining middle class, a growing population
of working poor, and a concentration of wealth
among the elite. They analyze how these
changes affect wage patterns and changes in
the provision of benefits, as well as the “risk
shift” (Hacker, 2006) that has been precipitated
by all these changes. They explore the precise
explanatory factors underpinning this multifac-
eted inequality, as well as the troubling impli-
cations of these patterns.
Finally, these trends intersect to create axes of
stratification along lines of class, gender, race,
ethnicity, and citizenship. The trends mentioned
above systematically affect different demo-
graphic populations in unequal ways. Articles
in this issue that analyze knowledge workers,
look at multiculturalism in transnational corpo-
rations, or study employees’ presentation of self
in online social networks are implicitly biased
toward professional, often white, and highly ed-
ucated workers, and their theoretical framework
may not explain workplace dynamics for people
of color, the poor, immigrants, and many women
workers, even as they make valuable contribu-
tions to the theory of work. Future theorizing
about work should attempt to incorporate such a
broad understanding of how workplace prac-
tices and procedures (how people are hired,
compensated, and motivated; their job tasks, job
security, interactions, and training, among other
phenomena) operate differently for different
October
groups. Workplaces are not monolithic, unitary
sites. They are composed of multiple occupa-
tions along a hierarchy of positions, they entail
a multiplicity of skills and authority relations,
and they proffer dramatically asymmetrical de-
grees of authority, dignity, creativity, and em-
powerment. We have yet to develop a theoreti-
cal framework that might capture the breadth
and nuance of complex inequality (McCall,
2001), but the articles in this special topic forum
may suggest new ways in which that might
be done.
Human Resource Management
Researchers in human resource management
(HRM) have a long history of focusing on work
and workers. In fact, the field is, in large part, an
artifact of the emergence of the job and of work
relationships. Some of the most fundamental as-
pects of the field of HRM are tied to what work is
and how it is done. The field of job design, for
example, examines how alternative ways of set-
ting up the workplace impact productivity, mo-
rale, teamwork, and the like. As an example,
researchers may contrast insights from research
on the job characteristics model (Hackman &
Oldham, 1975) and its focus on designing work
to enhance individual psychological states of
meaningfulness, feedback, and autonomy as a
motivating force with research in scientific man-
agement, grounded in Taylorism that examines
how to design the optimally efficient workplace.
The fields of recruitment, selection, and train-
ing are also fundamentally based on a set no-
tion of what work is. When we discuss research
on person-job fit, the notion of the job is inter-
changeable with a particular conceptualization
of work—the key task for individuals is to iden-
tify which knowledge, skills, and abilities are
best for a particular unit of work. Related re-
search in compensation and performance man-
agement is fundamentally tied to the notion of
work. Individual wages in the form of base pay,
but also rewards and incentives, are designed to
achieve some level of performance in the deliv-
ery of specific tasks—to pay for work.
Strategic HRM builds on this research and
seeks to understand how the management of
work and workers may contribute to the compet-
itiveness of organizations. Clearly, HRM re-
searchers focus a significant amount of time
and energy on work and workers in the work-
2013 Okhuysen, Lepak, Ashcraft, Labianca, Smith, and Steensma
place. Not surprising, researchers in this field
are focusing on some emerging issues regard-
ing changes in the nature of work and workers.
How researchers view work is evolving. The
basic notion of a job involves a certain degree of
common understanding about what work is. But
this common understanding is not set in stone,
and companies are exploring alternative ways to
do work. Companies are also exploring variations
in the notion of employment and, related, who is a
worker. In large part this issue is a natural out-
come of the increased focus on outsourcing, off-
shoring, and reliance on consultants and contin-
gent workers within organizations.
One implication of this trend is that it raises
fundamental questions about who and where
workers are, as well as what we mean by em-
ployment. The notion of work being performed in
a single location does not reflect the history of
work, and as companies send work out of their
organizations in order to be more competitive,
the notion of employment requires renewed ex-
amination. Employment is typically viewed as
an exchange agreement between an individual
and an employee, in which the employee re-
ceives inducements (pay) for making a contribu-
tion to the employer (work; March & Simon, 1958).
But with information technologies and a better
grasp of the strengths and location of different
workforce talents around the globe, organiza-
tions are increasingly able to rely on individual
contributions from people all over the world.
Moreover, this reliance may vary from open-
ended—as in a more traditional employment re-
lationship—to very closed. With these trends,
what does it mean to be a worker or an em-
ployee? From a legal point of view, organiza-
tions are struggling with ensuring they are in
compliance with employment laws for workers
who are short timers, as well as for workers who
work for many organizations simultaneously.
But there are many additional research ques-
tions that are critical to examine with the chang-
ing nature of work.
When employees make contributions to mul-
tiple discrete organizations at the same time,
where do their loyalties lie? What does it mean
to manage an “affiliated” worker as opposed to
an employee? What is the optimal form of this
relationship? Are some workers, or worker traits,
more effective to operate in a fragmented work
setting? Related, what is the optimal portfolio of
work relationships for organizations to realize
497
their competitive goals? Are the returns from a
more traditional employment relationship
greater or less than an increased reliance on
contingent work, contractors, or affiliated work-
ers? Or does it depend on the type of work that is
being performance by the organization?
What do we expect from workers? McIver and
colleagues’ article (2013) provides an insightful
theoretical approach to how companies may ap-
proach leveraging knowledge contributions
from workers to realize competitive advantage.
In contrast, other organizations may expect
more tangible or lower skills contributions from
employees, consultants, or contractors. What is
the optimal HR system for these individual
contributors?
The field of HRM is explicitly based on the
performance of work—and on a particular view
of what work means that is a function of the era
in which the field evolved, during the Industrial
Revolution and the 1900s. But with more recent
changes blending transient and market-based
relationships with more traditional full-time em-
ployment relationships, all blurring the nature
of how work is performed as well as where work
is done, there are many critical questions to be
examined. The articles published in this special
issue offer some insights into some of these is-
sues, but there is a need for much more research
to address these important questions regarding
the changing nature of work and workers in
organizations.
Organizational Behavior
The field of organizational behavior offers
several lenses to explore changes in work that
are becoming increasingly evident. For in-
stance, the recent global financial crisis has
made clear that ethical behavior cannot be
taken for granted within or by organizations.
The result has been considerable attention on
unethical behavior by individuals, its causes,
and its consequences. However, a lens that in-
corporates ethical concerns more centrally as
part of work activities or work roles might shed
additional light on the challenges that people
and organizations face in ethically fraught situ-
ations. One immediate opportunity is to explore
ethical and moral decisions made in the context
of groups, among multiple participants, to un-
derstand those processes more clearly. Another
potential route is to develop conceptual tools to
498 Academy of Management Review
examine “ethical labor” in a manner similar to
emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983), which is con-
cerned with how emotions are part of work per-
formance and how organizations direct the ex-
pression of appropriate emotions. If we fully
integrate the expectations of organizations re-
garding ethical expression by individuals, and
how organizations may see ethical behavior as
an indispensable part of work roles, we may
gain analytic leverage to understand how ethi-
cal systems are sustained but also how they
break down when failures occur. Such a lens
can give us insight as well into how organiza-
tions may attempt to train for ethical expression
in a manner akin to training for emotional
expression.
Naturally, such developments should also
give us pause. Training people to embody the
ethics of their work organizations may be, on its
own, an ethically questionable activity. In West-
ern society such indoctrination usually has been
reserved for religious or spiritual organizations,
where people’s participation is seen as voli-
tional. But the decline in those same religious or
spiritual institutions in an increasingly secular
society may open the door for additional influ-
ence by work organizations. And to the extent
that the ethical work of an employee represents
narrow industry norms, such as particular inter-
pretations of the legitimacy of law enforcement,
such training can instill values that are prob-
lematic in broader society. The notion of man-
aging through the ethical values of employees
should raise questions, in our minds, about the
appropriate limits of managerial and organiza-
tional reach into the minds and lives of people.
A second area that is evidently changing is
the nature of work collaboration. Traditionally,
we have treated collaboration through the lens
of groups and teams—social entities with rela-
tively well-defined membership, task, and tem-
poral boundaries. However, the emergence of
more complex forms of organizing enabled by
globalization, technology, complexity in knowl-
edge, and specialization have made such ap-
proaches less helpful, clouding over that lens
and our ability to understand collaboration.
Thus, it may be useful to move away from a
reification of groups as a unit of analysis by
loosening the constraints on dimensions that
have defined them. One way to modify these
conceptual dimensions is to focus on more cur-
rent work practices in collaboration such that
October
characteristics like stable membership, full-
time participation, boundedness, and so on can
be relaxed.
One potential direction would involve explor-
ing collaboration as a more general phenome-
non by putting the product at the center of our
studies. Treating the product of work as the unit
of analysis can help us see how collaboration, in
all its forms, is organized around that product.
Consider a patient at a hospital and the manner
in which the patient’s diagnosis “calls on” or
“attracts” resources in the form of people, mate-
rials, and processes. The diagnosis itself be-
comes the engine of the collaboration, and fol-
lowing the interactions around the diagnosis
then becomes the focus of our research. In other
organizations the purpose of the work, whether
a product or project, can be conceptualized sim-
ilarly, as the engine of collaboration, to advance
our understanding. In this case a well-bounded
and clearly defined group becomes a special
case of collaboration, where the social entity
and the product or project neatly coincide.
Expanding from a consideration of products
and projects to sites where particular forms of
work take place, such as boundaries, may also
be fruitful avenues to explore changes in orga-
nizations. By moving away from reification of
boundaries as walls or moats, we can examine
their nature as temporary products of people
and groups interacting. For instance, customers
may be considered outsiders by a grocery store
company, since they are not employees and
do not appear on the payroll. However, to the
extent that customers are responsible for select-
ing their own articles from shelves, picking their
own produce, and paying for these goods at the
register on their own, they are performing work
that was formerly done by paid employees. In
such situations rigid categorizations like “insid-
ers” and “outsiders” lose meaning, as they do in
service interactions where the service is copro-
duced by customers and providers, denying
boundaries as fixed entities.
As current literature considers boundary
work, it tends to focus on people acting as
“boundary spanners”—individuals who jump
over the boundary to go and find resources on
behalf of a group or organization and then jump
back into the group or organization to deliver
those resources. But this presumes a static and
atomized view of boundary spanning, where a
single exchange occurs at one point in time.
2013 Okhuysen, Lepak, Ashcraft, Labianca, Smith, and Steensma
Instead, we might recognize increased dyna-
mism, as when an initial boundary spanner
hands off the ongoing relationship to someone
else. In such situations the boundary spanner
acts as a relational entrepreneur, bringing to-
gether individuals on either side of the bound-
ary. At other times the boundary spanner might
recognize that his or her organization’s needs
are not being adequately addressed in the ex-
ternal environment and so will leave the orga-
nization to found a new venture to serve those
needs. Here the boundary spanner becomes an
entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word,
while maintaining a relationship with the old
organization through an external contract,
rather than through internal salary-based con-
tracts. Indeed, the nature of the external contract
in such a situation might involve a different type
of agreement that sits between a market con-
tract and an internal contract, owing to the in-
dividual’s prior employment and perhaps to the
wealth of internal contacts the person generated
before leaving to become an entrepreneur.
A richer conceptual perspective can also
move from the treatment of isolated boundary
spanners, shifting focus instead to the interac-
tions they have with others. It is in those inter-
actions that focal individuals attempt to recon-
cile differences, the differences (in many
manifestations) that are the generative condi-
tion for boundary work. Moreover, focusing on
interactions can also account for features of the
partner that are reflected in the creation of a
boundary. Thus, the same focal person may in
different situations deal with partners who are
more or less powerful, more or less in demand,
and more or less interested in participating in a
relationship or exchange. A perspective that fo-
cuses on interaction can also help us generalize
our understanding of boundary activity, since
differences can be present between groups that
nominally belong to the same organization, as
well as between those that do not. Focusing on
interactions moves us away, as before, from
simpler conceptions of insiders and outsiders to
an understanding of the differences that gener-
ate boundary activity. In each of these cases, a
simple description of a boundary as a wall
does not fully explain the work that individuals
do on behalf of groups or organizations, and a
richer conceptualization would advance our un-
derstanding of boundaries as sites of work.
499
Communication
Communication scholars conceive of interac-
tion in and around organizations and occupa-
tions in a diverse range of ways. Here we em-
phasize those that treat communication as a
constitutive activity— one that generates, rather
than merely expresses or transmits, work reali-
ties (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). Specifi-
cally, we highlight communication perspectives
that interrogate how discourse, communication,
and identity intertwine to organize the meaning
and practice of work.
In using the term discourse, we are staking a
claim for the importance of the social construc-
tion process in defining the historical legacies
of work we now take as natural, inescapable
momentum. We refer to the ongoing discursive
struggle over work, which occurs within and be-
yond particular organizations, and to the result-
ing discourses, or discursive formations, that
emerge as victors from such struggle. Here “a
discourse” refers to a relatively coherent, dura-
ble, and roving narrative, embodied in lived
practices and enshrined in institutional ar-
rangements and artifacts, which constitutes the
very things (e.g., imperatives, objects, actors,
and agencies) of which it speaks. The question
about contemporary work thus becomes “What
discourses enable(d) certain work economies,
technologies, configurations, and practices to
develop and take hold? How do (did) these dis-
courses come to the fore amid specific cultural,
historical, and political economies?” Jacques’
(1996) close examination of how the notion of “an
employee” arose, as well as the tangible rela-
tional and material potentials it actualized, of-
fers one of many examples. Such research un-
locks the history of work identity—a revealing
approach largely absent from management
studies of both identity and the changing char-
acter of contemporary work.
As we designed this special topic forum, we
envisioned studies of how categories of work
identity arise, endure, and change over time;
intermingle with one another; and, especially,
how they shape the way we come to know, do,
value, administer, and experience work itself.
We need more of these discursive histories to
illuminate how work today is shaped by endur-
ing habits of text and talk about the identity not
only of workers but of work itself. It is worth
500 Academy of Management Review
noting how this conception of discourse signals
a distinctive approach to the history of work.
Although management research is largely ahis-
torical in character, several scholars contend
that the study of contemporary work and orga-
nizational forms necessitates accounting for the
significant economic, technological, and social
shifts that have defined the past century. Barley
and Kunda (2001), for example, started with this
premise in their call for management scholars to
return to close investigations of today’s work
practices. Similarly, observers of contemporary
professions insist that market fragmentation
has strained traditional professionalization
projects and the maintenance of exclusive au-
thority and boundaries. On our own editorial
team, for instance, Smith (1997) has traced his-
torical shifts in the American workforce, such as
the rise of a new class of “flexible” periphery
workers. These are just a few of many voices
affirming that the history of work is consequen-
tial to management studies. Typically, however,
such claims are received as evidence of real,
self-evident change over time— of material tra-
jectories that must be accommodated—rather
than as discourse creating the appearance of
inevitability and imperative. To acknowledge
the latter, as we call for here, is to begin to see
how ostensibly real shifts are also malleable
objects of social construction and how manage-
ment scholars participate in the construction
process.
When we refer to communication, we mean
those everyday interactive exchanges—typi-
cally the object of at least some human design
yet invariably unruly in practice—in which dis-
course, matter, and cognition intertwine to con-
struct work as it is and is becoming. It is in this
sense that communication research stands to
challenge and transcend traditional demarca-
tions among micro, meso, and macro levels of
analysis: for many communication scholars, in-
teraction is the site at which these distinctions
collide and disintegrate, as so-called macro and
meso formations get invoked, reproduced,
tweaked, and sometimes transformed by mun-
dane human and even nonhuman actors. An
example from the arena of knowledge work can
help to illustrate such an effort to span analytic
levels.
If there is one thing management theorists of
work seem to agree on, it is that we have seen a
significant shift over the past several decades
October
toward service- and knowledge-based econo-
mies. Two related trends seem especially note-
worthy for our initial vision for this special topic
forum. First, scholars of knowledgeable work
increasingly demonstrate that knowledge is a
communicative phenomenon, best understood
as an unfolding, situated sociomaterial practice
(or verb) rather than an abstract, codified pos-
session (or noun) to be transferred among hu-
man parties. We hoped to see more submissions
developing the work-knowledge relation as a
communicative phenomenon, as well as sub-
missions theorizing the rise of distinctively com-
municative modes of knowing. Indeed, the sec-
ond trend stems from several theorists who
argue that communicative knowledge (i.e., em-
bodied, context-sensitive knowledge about in-
teraction that is also created and used in inter-
action) is a specific form of knowing vital to
knowledge- and service-based economies. Thus
far, however, mainstream management scholars
have shown more interest in modern manifesta-
tions of so-called embrained knowledge, associ-
ated with the work of technicians and manage-
ment consultants, for example. One possible
way to explain this asymmetrical emphasis is to
consider how knowing practices associated
with certain kinds of practitioners (e.g., engi-
neers) become prioritized over others (e.g., inter-
active service workers).
As this suggests, we suspect that theorizing
work today requires better accounting for the
ways in which social identities (such as gender,
race, nation, sexuality, age, religion, ability, and
so on) fuse not only with one another but, cru-
cially, with core meanings, practices, configura-
tions, and theories of work. It may be tempting to
say that the relationship between work and so-
cial identity especially commands attention un-
der conditions of globalization, yet we resist
such a claim here. We note instead the prepon-
derance of evidence confirming, for example,
that domestic gender and race relations have
long served as organizing principles of Ameri-
can work, even if management scholars
have not often theorized how this occurs. In
other words, the discourse of globalization may
intensify the imperative for certain kinds of so-
cial identity analysis (e.g., postcolonial theory);
social identities have always been central to the
constitution of work, even as the contours of that
relevance may change over time.
2013 Okhuysen, Lepak, Ashcraft, Labianca, Smith, and Steensma
Bringing Different Lenses Together
Given that the domain of work is explored
from many perspectives, it is also useful to con-
sider ways in which future research might be
multidisciplinary. The primary means of achiev-
ing this, we believe, is to recognize the manner
in which our sites of interest can change and the
way multiple perspectives can enrich our under-
standing. We can begin by recognizing that the
historical shifts we have observed over the past
two decades are discursive as well as material
productions. They can be named, known,
achieved, and felt in myriad ways— celebrated,
challenged, resisted, even reversed. “Steady
progress” toward a new future is neither inevi-
table nor unproblematic. For instance, we typi-
cally agree that developed countries, where
most theorizing in our field has its origins, have
shifted toward a service- and knowledge-based
economy. Yet we rarely consider how our own
theoretical rhetoric, which tends to promote a
narrative of monolithic change, helps to produce
this shift as a sweeping force or taken-for-
granted fact that must be accommodated. Ac-
knowledging this can push us to consider alter-
native accounts and to examine the vagaries,
detours, and contradictions that have accompa-
nied and contested this shift.
As an example, the combination of new free
trade agreements and the collapse of the Soviet
Union brought the integration of billions of new
workers from emerging markets and from for-
merly separate communist labor markets into a
global labor pool. This has meant, among other
things, a severe loss of jobs and a drop in earn-
ing power for manufacturing workers in North
America. For academics, the same changes
have added new scholars and new sites around
the world to explorations of organizations and
management. Many of these scholars now re-
side in the locations where manufacturing is
taking place, and they are taking on the task of
continuing the exploration of those forms of
work. In other locations the disappearance of
manufacturing has driven a shift toward theo-
rizing service- and knowledge-based work more
heavily. This trend, however, is not inevitable or
irreversible, nor is its nature and meaning self-
evident or homogeneous. Because such shifts
can be otherwise and known in multiple ways
within and across space and time, part of our
task as theorists is to chart and critique the
501
plurality of possibility. Indeed, if global energy
prices continue to fall because of increasing en-
ergy supplies, and if the wage gap between
developed and developing nations continues to
narrow, we may see a reversal to a new era of
manufacturing in developed nations. Moreover,
if work in financial markets and other white
collar industries is subject to increased regula-
tion, we may see shrinking employment in those
sectors. This would then shift our focus back,
perhaps returning to and renewing older theo-
ries of work and working that might suit the
industrial setting better than a knowledge-
based setting (e.g., the job characteristics
model), with an eye toward challenging them
based on our increased understanding of the
phenomena of work that have taken place,
across disciplines, in the meantime.
CONCLUSION
What do we do with the theoretical interven-
tions represented in this special issue? How can
we successfully maneuver between the articles’
abstract, high-level theoretical frameworks and
the practice and coordination of work and work
relationships “on the ground?” Will these arti-
cles jumpstart new scholarly conversations and
guide scholars in research that can unpack and
illuminate the featured topics? And, always rel-
evant in a field like management, how might
organizational leaders and managers use the
insights and arguments considered herein? Ul-
timately, will the articles have a discernible im-
pact? In some ways, the development of this
special topic forum now strikes us as quite a
naive undertaking. Our naivete is especially ev-
ident when we think through the many ques-
tions we still have about work.
The authors of this special volume do an ex-
ceptional job of conceptualizing different angles
on work, but the challenge will be to operation-
alize these theoretical agendas—to extend the
conceptual models to the specification of re-
search procedures, the measurement of organi-
zational variables, and the creation of enduring
generalizations. This will be the proof in the
pudding, the signal to organizational research-
ers of the power of these theoretical excava-
tions. We hope that the collection of articles
included here will revitalize thinking in work,
although we don’t know what the ultimate im-
pact of this special topic forum will be. The
 502 Academy of Management Review October

process of editing and preparing this special
topic forum has been generative for us. We hope
it will be so for our readers as well.
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Gerardo A. Okhuysen (gerardo.okhuysen@uci.edu) is a professor of organizations and

management at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine.
He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research centers on groups in
different decision situations, focusing on the management of task and environmental
uncertainty.
David Lepak (lepak@smlr.rutgers.edu) is professor of HRM and associate dean of the
School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. He received his
Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests focus on the
strategic management of human capital and international HRM.
Karen Lee Ashcraft (karen.ashcraft@colorado.edu) is professor of organizational com-
munication at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Ph.D. from the
University of Colorado Boulder. Her research examines organizational forms, occupa-
tional and professional identities, and relations of difference such as gender and race.
Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca (joelabianca@gmail.com) is the Gatton Endowed Professor of
Management at the Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Ken-
tucky. He received his Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University. His research
focuses on taking a social network perspective on organizational behavior topics,
such as conflict, control, gossip, teamwork, and organizational change.
Vicki Smith (vasmith@ucdavis.edu) is professor of sociology at University of Califor-
nia, Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She
studies transformations in work and employment (including innovations adopted to
attain corporate flexibility, the introduction of employee involvement programs, and
the rise of temporary employment), with particular emphasis on how workers perceive
and navigate these transformations.
H. Kevin Steensma (steensma@u.washington.edu) is a professor of organizations and
management at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington–Seattle. He
received his Ph.D. from Indiana University. His research focuses on interfirm relation-
ships and technology alliances.

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