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In this chapter, we argue that realism has become an influential philosophical foundation that has increasingly informed research in management studies. Realism, which assumes that the world external to the subject is mind-independent, offers a particularly attractive way out of the anthropocentrism and idealism in much contemporary research in management studies that detaches theorizing from its material conditions. This becomes especially problematic when understanding and handling the "Grand Challenges" closely connected with our material existence in the world. We outline three different versions of realism-empirical, critical, and scientific realism-and discuss how the latter two have informed management studies in terms of ontology, epistemology, and praxeology. Finally, we draw some recommendations for future research.
New technologies can become an identity-challenging threat for organizations. While there is a growing literature on how new technologies challenge fundamental questions of organizational existence such as "who are we?", "what do we do?", and "what do we want to be?", this literature has largely overlooked how new technologies can become drivers of organizational identity change. In this paper, we investigate the impact of digitalization, especially Robotic Process Automation, on organizational identity. Drawing on the analysis of shared service centers in Asia and Eastern Europe, we explored how these organizations respond to identity challenging technologies. While traditionally, work in shared services has been characterized by a combination of standardization, controlling the labor process, and deskilling, we found in this study that shared service organizations are responding to the digital challenges by moving up the value chain to more complex, knowledge-intensive work. As a result, shared service organizations in our study began to redefine their organizational identity by, among others, professionalizing their workforce.
Legitimacy is crucial for the survival and growth of strategic ventures inside larger corporations. Yet, despite much progress, research on the strategic venturing‐legitimacy nexus, that is, how internal strategic initiatives gain legitimacy and become part of the corporate strategy, remains underexplored. Drawing on the analysis of a longitudinal case study of the development of a sustainability initiative within a major diversified firm, we identified three core mechanisms of legitimation – seeding, energizing and prospering – that turned the concept of sustainability from an internally widely shared moral obligation into a business case. Our study contributes three distinct mechanisms that facilitate the legitimation and the integration of a strategic initiative within the corporate strategy. Moreover, we show how the sequence of legitimation mechanisms matters and highlight the inherently sequenced nature of strategic venture legitimation.
