An Olympic‐sized Challenge: Effect of Organizational Pathology on Maintaining and Repairing Organizational Legitimacy in Sports Governing Bodies

Private organizations increasingly wield public authority, with substantial impact on the lives of individual persons. Such authority is often paired with enhanced public scrutiny and decreased trust in the relevant organization, leading to a loss of legitimacy. This paper uses sports governing bodies to contribute to the literature on governance by developing theory on the interaction between organizational legitimacy and pathological internal structures. It takes a nuanced view of legitimacy and extends a model of organizational pathology. While primarily conceptual, the paper uses the well‐documented cases of the International Olympic Committee and, to a lesser extent, FIFA to illustrate how organizational pathology can not only undermine an organization's legitimacy, but can also interfere with its ability to perceive a path to legitimacy repair, even when it recognizes the necessity of doing so. The paper concludes with recommendations for practice and suggestions for future research looking beyond sports governing bodies.     

Under the skin: Exploring 2-month-olds' thermal reactions in different social interactions with mother and stranger

Physiological adaptations to external stressors can reveal socio-cognitive health in infancy. With the use of thermal imaging and behavioural analyses, the current study examined the arousal markers accompanying infants’ interactions with a familiar and an unfamiliar person. To address the current research question, the mother and a complete stranger interacted with 2 to 3 month-old infants (N= 10, 2 boys)in three different conditions: Neutral, Play, and Compliment. Behavioral analyses showed that overall gaze was longer to the Stranger compared to the Mother independent of condition. Physiological findings showed that skin temperature was significantly higher with the stranger independent of condition. The regions of the face that passed the significance threshold included the maxillary area, the nose, and the forehead. Both behavioral and physiological findings emphasize the ability of the infant to distinguish between a familiar and an unfamiliar person. Most importantly, however thermal imaging has proven to be a promising tool in physiologically differentiating between variable social conditions in very young infants opening up a new experimental portal for identifying healthy physiological development.     

Nikos Kazantzakis’s phenomenology and its relevance to the study of organizations

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Morgan’s theorization of images of organizations from a phenomenological perspective using the works of Nikos Kazantzakis. The paper argues that Morgan’s representation of metaphors currently favours an entitative interpretation of influence and control, undermining novel processes deeply embedded within existential nuances situated in the realm of the human experience. By focusing on Kazantzakis’s phenomenology, the paper proposes that a theorization of transitionality demonstrates that a content–process struggle is rooted within a permanence–temporality struggle constantly conditioned against individuals’ transitoriness of existence. Relatedness, affirmation and temporality represent three interdependent process states and each exposes self-existential tensions that regulate the directionality of one’s transitions. Such transitions are thought to challenge the entitative form with which organizations are portrayed in the individual. The paper shows that a conceptualization of transitionality through Kazantzakis provides a new scope for understanding the structure of movements situated in the self and for customizing the forces of permanence and temporality.