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In this editorial for our Special Issue, we focus on ways to better understand the role of organizations, organizing, and the organized during social and institutional change in response to disruption, division, and displacement. The papers in this Special Issue provide important insights into the hardships and heartache arising from social disruption, division, and displacement; in addition, they provide glimpses into potential ways of moving forward. To set the stage, we develop a framework building on extant literature that highlights several analytic approaches to understanding the consequences of eroding, or inadequate, institutions, the challenges of building anew when the status quo is destroyed, and what such novel and complex realities entail for organizational analysis. We offer a temporal view of responses to disruption, division, and displacement that draws on the papers in this Special Issue to identify and explain potential risks and challenges that arise at different points in time. To conclude, we provide a short summary of each paper, and call for a reinvigorated research agenda that goes beyond the excellent work featured here by broadening and deepening our focus on approaches to organizing that expressly address disruption, division, and displacement.

Wicked problems are complex and dispersed challenges that go beyond the capacity of individual organizations and require a response by multiple actors, often in the form of transnational regimes. While research on regimes has provided insights into such collective responses, less is known about how such regimes may form barriers that hinder and block appropriate responses to addressing wicked problems. Exploring the problematic role of regime-level responses is timely given that many of today’s wicked problems are far from being alleviated and in many instances appear instead to be intensifying. We draw from complementary insights of regime theory and research on institutional barriers to explore our research question: How do regimes form barriers to addressing wicked problems, and which mechanisms sustain such barriers? We explore this question with a longitudinal case study of the transnational regime for refugee protection and its response to displacement in Rwanda. From our findings, we develop a model of dissociation that explains how actors move further away from addressing a wicked problem. We identify four dissociative mechanisms (discounting, delimiting, separating, and displaying) that each create a distinct regime-level barrier. These barriers are distributed and mutually reinforcing, which makes it increasingly hard for actors to find alternative ways of responding to an escalating problem. Our study provides insights for research on regimes and wicked problems as well as studies on institutional barriers. We conclude with policy implications for overcoming those barriers, in line with the wider concerns and motivations of this special issue.

Collective identity is important for the cohesion of social movements, yet there is an inherent tension between group unity and heterogeneity when multiple groups are motivated to come together to work for change. Through a three-year investigation of the early stages of a women’s rights movement following the Libyan revolution, we explore the dynamics of collective identity development. Our findings capture how two heterogeneous groups, Libyan locals and Libyan diaspora, interact to negotiate and re-negotiate the boundaries of collective identity. We find that this process unfolds through an ongoing struggle where the point of difference between the groups—their uncommon past—is the mechanism first used to ensure inclusion of insiders, and then to exclude outsiders from the collective identity. Our paper contributes to our understanding of the relational process through which collective identity co-evolves, and the challenges faced by heterogeneous groups engaging in collective action.

In this paper we examine how a socially innovative solution to a complex social problem is able to overcome entrenched disadvantage and division and sustain itself within an existing institution. We explore how a rugby team in a high-security prison in Argentina has become an organizational response that substantially transformed prisoners’ lives in and out of jail, allowing inmates to reclaim many critical aspects of their humanity and dramatically reducing recidivism. We examine rugby as an analogy for new models of behaviours and identities in the context of extreme disadvantage, and surface the specific emotional work required to make the analogy generative. The findings from our in-depth case study reveal three reinforcing mechanisms in the workings of an analogy – resonating, resignifying and collective generativity – and in doing so provide a novel crescive model of how analogies may sustain change emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally over time, and ultimately achieve positive transformational effects in extreme social contexts.

Organization research on stigma has mostly focused on the stigmatized, limiting the scope for exploring what is possible and lacking recognition of the structural conditions and unequal power relations that create and sustain stigma. Consequently, it overlooks how actors can organize to resist and potentially overcome stigmatization altogether. Addressing this question empirically, we studied the long-term unemployed in Spain using a longitudinal qualitative research design. We develop a typology of responses to stigmatization – getting stuck, getting by, getting out, getting back atand getting organized– that advances our understanding of stigma in several ways. First, our typology captures stigma as a multilevel phenomenon. Second, it makes explicit that stigma can only be understood in relation to its socio-historical contexts and unequal relations of power. Third, it captures how resisting stigma needs to be a collective enterprise and advances the importance of organizing to both challenge stigmatization and explore alternatives.