Maxim VoronovYork University · Schulich School of Business
Maxim Voronov
Ph.D.
About
67
Publications
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Introduction
I am Professor of Sustainability and Organization at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto.
I conduct research on social change. My work appears or is forthcoming in such leading management journals as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, and Human Relations.
Publications
Publications (67)
Voyeurism violates dominant moral codes in many societies. Yet, for a number of businesses, including erotic webcam, reality television, slum tourism, and mixed martial arts, voyeurism is an important part of value creation. The success of such businesses that violate dominant moral codes raises questions about value creation that existing theory i...
About
Abstract
Authenticity is increasingly seen as a source of competitive advantage in many industries. Accordingly, authenticity work, the organizational efforts to develop and sustain believable authenticity claims, has emerged as an important organizational practice. We examined the interplay of materiality and narratives underpinning producer...
We argue for the importance of including analyses of emotional and unconscious processes in the study of institutional work. We develop a framework that integrates emotions and their connection to domination, and we offer a typology of interactions between the emotional and cognitive antecedents of institutional maintenance, disruption, and creatio...
We develop the concept of emotional competence (EC), which refers to the ability to experience and display emotions that are deemed appropriate for an actor role in an institutional order. EC reveals a more expansive view of emotions in institutional theory, in which emotions constitute competent actors and lend reality and passionate identificatio...
This paper examines how organizations create evangelists, members of key audiences who build a critical mass of support for new ways of doing things. We conduct a longitudinal, inductive study of Ontario's cool climate wineries and members of six external audience groups who evangelized on behalf of their emerging winemaking practice. We found that...
Organisational scholars have treated emotions mostly as an individual-level phenomenon, with limited theorisation of emotions as an important component in social embeddedness. In this review essay, we argue for the need for a toolkit to study emotions as an inherently social phenomenon. To do so, we apply insights from sociology that have been unde...
Organisational scholars have treated emotions mostly as an individual-level phenomenon, with limited theorisation of emotions as an important component in social embeddedness. In this review essay, we argue for the need for a toolkit to study emotions as an inherently social phenomenon. To do so, we apply insights from sociology that have been unde...
Vaccine hesitancy is a growing social problem. In 2019, the WHO declared it a top-10 threat to global health, with clear economic implications. In response to this rising threat, what business leaders decide about Covid-19 vaccine mandates will go a long way toward fostering the social norms that can either mitigate or exacerbate this pandemic.
Although researchers have acknowledged that not all institutional change results from the intentional efforts of relatively reflexive actors, we lack an explanation of how mundane interactions between actors can result in non‐strategic institutional change. To address this, we advance the theory of institutional drift that reveals how the practice...
In much contemporary institutional scholarship, the term ‘actor’ is used as a shorthand for any entity imbued with agency. Talking about actors in institutions thus serves the necessity of allocating agency before returning to the analysis of institutional structures and processes. We find this approach to actorhood limiting, conceptually and norma...
Emotions are central to social life and thus they should be central to organization theory. However, emotions have been treated implicitly rather than theorized directly in much of organization theory, and in some literatures, have been ignored altogether. This Element focuses on emotions as intersubjective, collective and relational, and reviews s...
Drawing from research on strategic choice, this study investigates the relationship between market turbulence and firms’ sustainable behavior, in the context of sustainability-related institutional adversity. It argues that the relationship between market turbulence and sustainability is mediated by network embeddedness, and this mediating role in...
The historical development of organizational institutionalism has been marked by the so-called cognitive turn (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991), with a particular theoretical emphasis on people as cognitive ‘carriers’ of taken-for-granted institutional ‘schemas’ or ‘scripts’. This emphasis on cognition as the primary modality of institutional processes has...
Over the past decade, institutional research has relied extensively on the premise that institutional contradictions are key drivers of institutional instability and institutional change. In this article we argue that apprehending institutional contradictions, that is experiencing institutional arrangements as provisional and potentially changeable...
We utilize a specific emotion – nostalgia – as a lens for understanding how people experience institutions, and how their subjectivities are aligned on an ongoing basis with the fundamental ideals – or ethos – of an institutional order. We argue that nostalgia plays a unique role in disciplining social action by creating idealized and fictionalized...
In this paper we explore how emotions influence organizations in situations of institutional complexity. In particular we study members' and leaders' emotive responses and influence activities in response to a disruptive event that led to a violation of expectations. Our findings show that when people's expectations of an organization's actions are...
Extant institutional research and the primarily cognitive frameworks upon which it is based do not explicitly consider the role emotional expression plays in legitimation processes. In this study, we reveal how emotional expression that signals belongingness to emotion culture serves as an intangible resource used by wineries in Ontario. We find th...
As institutional theory increasingly looks to the micro-level for explana-tions of macro-level institutional processes, institutional scholars need to pay closer attention to the role of emotions in invigorating institutional processes. I argue that attending to emotions is most likely to enrich institutional analysis, if scholars take inspiration...
This article draws upon the attention-based view when investigating how local sourcing is influenced by the personal resources and values of key decision makers within small firms. We argue that such firms are more likely to engage in local sourcing when key decision makers have access to location-specific human and social capital and strongly iden...
The paper theorizes the factors that make people more or less likely to recognize the need for change. Organizational scholars in such diverse domains as organizational learning, strategy, organizational development, leadership, HRD and institutional theory recognize the importance of key people being able to recognize when change is needed, but a...
We utilize the notion of emotional capital (EC), which refers to the community valued ways of experiencing and displaying emotions in order to gain social advantage, to theorize the role of emotions in facilitating institutional reproduction. In doing so, we advance a more expansive view of the role of emotions in institutional theory – beyond the...
The study investigates how local actors pursue two paradoxical aspects of legitimacy in a global institutional framework: the need for global conformity and the need for local distinctiveness. Drawing on the notion of globalization, it explicates how this pursuit is accomplished by actors' selective fidelity to global norms and adaptation of these...
In this paper, we seek to highlight how adherence to a dominant logic is an
effortful activity. Using rhetorical analysis, we show that the use of
rhetorical history provides a key mechanism by which organizations may
convince audiences of adherence to a dominant logic, while also subverting
or obscuring past adherence to a (currently) subordinate...
We argue for the importance of including analyses of emotional and unconscious processes in the study of institutional work. We develop a framework that integrates emotions and their connection to domination, and we offer a typology of interactions between the emotional and cognitive antecedents of institutional maintenance, disruption and creation...
Given the uncertainty surrounding the role and meaning of sustainability in business practice, it is important to explore the legitimacy drivers that newcomers (entrepreneurs) to a field derive from balancing sustainability and profitability. Drawing on the institutional logics literature and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, this article theorizes how...
This paper examines the influence of globalization upon the micro-processes through which actors in a dominated local field theorize the local version of a global institution which they attempt to import into their field. We attend to the dialectical relationship between grobalization and glocalization in the context of theorization work by local a...
The article discusses a conceptual framework developed to analyze the interconnection between emotion and systems of domination that form the parameters of institutional work. Concepts from the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu were combined with ideas from the psychoanalytic study of organizations in order to construct the framework. The syst...
Drawing on Bourdieu’s social theory, we theorize two facets of legitimacy bestowed upon newcomers entering a field: institutional legitimacy, which represents the extent to which newcomers conform with the field’s current power arrangements (‘fit in’) and innovative legitimacy, which pertains to the extent to which newcomers challenge these arrange...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical management studies' (CMS) awkward relationship with the world of practice may have allowed it to become a dominated field in academia, which features a nearly exclusive focus on research for theory's sake, a lack of interest or discomfort with practical applications, and a devaluing of no...
The article discusses the role of so-called critical management studies (CMS) in management science and organizations sociology research. CMS is seen as a field of study which can bridge the gap which exists between academic management science and organizational studies and their use in actual practice in businesses and organizations. A shift in ac...
We argue that entrepreneurship research would benefit from a practice perspective, and drawing from Bourdieu's work, we envision entrepreneurship as a profoundly socially embedded process connected to entrepreneurs' positions in structures of power relations. In taking an initial step in the development of a practice perspective of entrepreneurship...
We conceptualize entrepreneurs' success in acquiring resources as the outcome of a socially embedded process of pursuing legitimacy, which in turn encompasses their ability to meet field incumbents' expectations about conformity and innovation. Drawing from Bourdieu's theory of practice, we specifically discuss entrepreneurs' ability, when entering...
'This is an excellent text. It covers an impressive range of salient topics. Moreover, it provides a nuanced, considered and balanced treatment of both conceptual and practical aspects of critical management studies.' - Cliff Oswick, Queen Mary, University of London, UK. © Julie Wolfram Cox, Tony G. LeTrent-Jones, Maxim Voronov and David Weir 2009....
This is a chapter about power in groups and organizations. In the following pages, we suggest that the analysis and exploration of the complexities of organizational power by managers and workers is both necessary and useful. We begin by discussing three of the prominent theoretical perspectives on power from the literatures of social and organizat...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging literatures on organizational learning and strategic management by developing a practice perspective on strategic organizational learning (SOL). While the literature on SOL has been growing, much of it has targeted exclusively practitioners and has not yet elaborated the mechanics and th...
Despite widespread acknowledgment that entrepreneurship takes place in a broader societal context (Low and Abrahamson 1997), extant research does not fully acknowledge the power-laden nature of the taken-for-granted notions of what constitutes desirable entrepreneurial practices (Bruni et al., 2004). We recognize entrepreneurship as a set of practi...
We contribute to research on institutional complexity by acknowledging that institutional logics are not reified cognitive structures, but rather are open to interpretation. In doing so, we highlight the need to understand how actors engage with institutional logics and the creativity that such engagement implies. Using an inductive case study of t...
In this article, the author argues that despite important differences between Critical Management Studies (CMS) and Organization Development (OD), there is enough common ground to make a dialogue worth-while for both fields and for management practice. The author outlines some major “objectives” of each field, noting some important but frequently o...
Purpose
– This paper argues that failing to grasp thoroughly the influence of power on the strategy‐making process can severely inhibit the potential of strategy making as a vehicle of organizational learning.
Design/methodology/approach
– First the organizational learning perspective on strategic management is sketched and an attempt is made to s...
The aim of this article is to consider how the important insights offered by critical management studies (CMS) can be made more accessible to wider audiences and used to inform organizational practice. The authors start by briefly discussing the main ideals and aims of CMS, touching on the heterogeneity of the field and focusing on the issues that...
The authors critically assess the dimension of individualism-collectivism (I-C) and its various uses in cross-cultural psychology. They argue that I-C research is characterized largely by insufficient conceptual clarity and a lack of systematic data. As a result, they call into question the utility of I-C as an explanatory tool for cultural variati...
Given the uncertainty surrounding the role and meaning of sustainability in business practice, it is important to explore the legitimacy drivers that newcomers (entrepreneurs) to a field derive from balancing sustainability and profitability. Drawing on the institutional logics literature and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, this article theorizes how...