Jannick Friis Christensen’s research while affiliated with Novo Nordisk and other places

Based on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here, pinkwashing is understood as a looming risk, and purity as an unrealizable ideal. As such, corporate sponsorships of Pride are conceptualized as inherently impure—and productive because of their very impurity rather than despite it. Analytically, we identify and explore three productive tensions where the first involves emergent normativities for what constitutes good, right, or proper corporate engagement in Pride, the second revolves around queer(ed) practices and products that open normativities, and the third centres on the role of internal LGBTI+ employee-driven networks whose activism pushes organisations to become further involved in Pride, developing aspirational solidarity. Reading across literatures on corporate activism and queer organisation, we introduce Alexis Shotwell’s notion of constitutive impurity to suggest that the potential for ethical corporate Pride partnerships arises when accepting the risk of pinkwashing rather than seeking to overcome it.

Based on a 1‐year ethnographic case study of a Copenhagen‐based CrossFit gym we demonstrate how an organized training place is made physically, psychologically, and socially safe. This we show empirically by analyzing how the local multi‐sited CrossFit gym ‘CHALK’ maintains its safe space through three organizing mechanisms: (1) coach‐led learning progression and practice of the physical craft of CrossFit exercise, intended to prevent injury; (2) a dynamic relation between ‘Rx’ and ’scaling’, that is, setting universal standards for an exercise (Rx) and adjusting to individual levels of competence (scaling), actively preventing the high intensity workout from becoming high risk and from setting idealized norms that only few can live up to, but feel compelled to pursue nonetheless; (3) an egalitarian culture whose practice enables members to participate regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, socio‐economic class, sexual orientation, and prior exercise experience. Our ethnomethodological approach further allows us to discuss how certain signifiers of difference are recognized but either do not become salient or do not matter in respect to the functional training. Rather, we find and argue for the possibility to engage in ‘tomboy‐ish behavior’ that challenges gender and other identity performances in CHALK. In identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for establishing safe space, the article contributes to extant literature, showing how safe space can emerge as an effect of everyday practice, in contrast to being intentional and declared.

This paper applies ritual theory to study public LGBTQ+ gatherings, including Pride parades, silent vigils, and commemorative litanies. The analysis of public LGBTQ+ rituals has often focussed on Pride parades and their carnivalistic exuberance. We call instead for more attention to the whole nexus of public rituals that this movement consists of, and we argue that these rituals are central to LGBTQ+ community building and meaning-making in this social movement. Using participant and non-participant observation, as well as publicly available data, the paper studies assembly forms, ritual scripts, symbolic interactions, sites, and objects that link the various public rituals within the LGBTQ+ movement. We find that, over the last five decades, these ritual elements have coalesced to provide members of the LGBTQ+ community access to the sphere of transcendence. Our findings suggest that this community might be slowly changing its character from social (protest) movement to becoming a viable civil religion.

Purpose The paper discusses how the management of a sports and fashion company, which we refer to as NULMA, successfully applied the neo/normative control technology “karma organisation” and gained employee engagement. Whereas other studies have documented employee resistance to organisational cultures when used for managerial control, our case demonstrates resistance to management practices that employees find inconsistent with the dominant karma culture. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a six-year longitudinal organisational at-home ethnography conducted by one of the authors using methods of both participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collaborative production of secondary data in the case organisation. Findings While our research shows that management can successfully apply neo/normative control which employees accept and support, we further show that employees mobilise the same values to resist management when it fails to deliver on the commitments and promises of the organisational culture. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature on organisational culture and, in particular, neo/normative control by theorising employee resistance as being by “accident”, by which we mean an inherent negative potentiality co-invented and released by managers establishing a “karma organisation”. Our theorising culminates in a discussion of the study’s implications for research and practice.

Disconnective action, this article argues, is an important supplement to the logic of connective action, which enables social movements to organize informally online. Through the (threat of) disconnection, members may (re)assert their agency in relation to social movement organizations. In conducting a case study of LGBTI+ community members’ protests of a corporate sponsorship of WorldPride 2021, we establish disconnective action as a particular form of within-movement activism that relies both on social media affordances and the conditions of possibility of hybrid media ecologies. Thus, we explore how individual members of the LGBTI+ community were able to influence the formal organization of WorldPride 2021, as the threat of community members’ disconnection from the event led the organizers to terminate a corporate sponsorship. On this basis, we conceptualize disconnective action as a central means for individual activists to shape the movements of which they are part.

A must have collection for all those studying and teaching event management and event tourism.

It is generally accepted in organisation and management studies that individuals are implicitly biased, and that biased behaviour has organisational consequences for diversity, equality and inclusion. Existing bias interventions are found not to lead to significant changes in terms of eliminating individual bias, reducing discrimination or increasing the numbers of underrepresented minorities in organisations. This article links that absence of positive change to a lack of engagement with the structural-organisational contexts, processes and practices that reproduce bias. We identify three concrete shortcomings in the literature: that interventions are 1) largely ignorant of broader societal power structures, 2) detached from specific organisational contexts and 3) decoupled from concrete organisational action. By combining insights from unconscious bias research with norm critique and design thinking, we develop a proposition for a new intervention model that forgoes the individualisation of unconscious bias and extends to a structural understanding of bias as embedded in organisational norms. The article draws on data from an action research project which included a workshop series developed and organised in three Scandinavian countries over the course of one year. The data provides the basis for an empirically grounded conceptualisation of the organisational bias intervention advanced by the authors.

This article presents a systematic literature review of how norms are used in a sample of 436 articles in the human resource management (HRM) field. In exploring how norms are theorized, applied, and operationalized, the article identifies four main thematic fields in which norms are commonly used: culture, diversity, labor market, and work–life. The article makes three main contributions to the existing literature. First, it reveals a pervasive inconsistency in the use of norms across HRM research such that any assumption of a “norm of norms”—that is, consensus on the meaning of norms in HRM—is erroneous and in need of critical reflection. Second, the review offers a typology that outlines four similarities and differences in how HRM research employs norms. Finally, the authors propose a norm-critical research agenda as a relevant basis for future critical and reflexive enquiry into norms in both HRM theory and practice.