Over the past forty years, there has been a growing interest in how actors intentionally shape the key “objects” of organizational life including emotions, identities, relationships, boundaries, and institutions. For each object in question, a stream of literature has developed that focuses on a kind of “work” intended to shape that object – emotion work, identity work, relationship work, boundary work, institutional work, etc. This “turn to work” emphasizes the purposeful efforts of reflexive actors – the “conscious, intended try” as Hochschild (1979, p. 560) put it – to create, maintain, destroy, or transform the objects that constitute organizational life. These traditions have been vibrant and productive, but many are in danger of exhausting the energy provided by their initial focus, as evidenced by recent calls for rethinking their assumptions and boundaries (Brown, 2020; Grandey and Gabriel, 2015; Hampel et al., 2017; Vaara and Whittington, 2012).
As a response to both the broad interest in these forms of work and the calls for their reconsideration, a general theory of “social-symbolic work” has emerged that highlights the connections among forms of work, providing an overarching explanation of how actors carry out this activity, and theorizes its effects (Barberá-Tomás et al., 2019; Claus and Tracey, 2020; Langley, 2021; Lawrence and Phillips, 2019; Mantere and Whittington, 2021; Pradies et al., 2020). This special issue will build on the growing interest in social-symbolic work and focus on integrating, extending, and challenging its diverse streams.
Read the full issue here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14676486/2025/62/5 or browse the individual articles below.
Extending the Turn to Work: New Directions in the Study of Social-Symbolic Work in Organizational Life by Nelson Phillips, Thomas B. Lawrence, Brianna Barker Caza, Emily D. Heaphy, and Hannes Leroy
‘Vote the Assholes Out’: How Value Congruence Work Aligns Stakeholders for Corporate Activism by Sean Buchanan, Mojtaba Mohammadnejad Shourkaei, and Bruno Dyck
From Hopeful Heroes to Cynical Martyrs: Identity Work and the Path-Dependent Identification with Maladaptive Logics by Lindie Botha, and Ralph Hamann
With or without you: Family and Career-Work in a Demanding and Precarious Profession by Erin Reid, Farnaz Ghaedipour, and Otilia Obodaru
How Social-Symbolic Work Changes Places by April L. Wright, Richard Lang, and Ewald Kibler
Communities in Coworking Spaces: Boundary Work and Social Identity Work by Community Managers by Nam Kyoon (Nathan) Kim, Dominic S.K. Lim, and Lucas Monzani
Biocentric Work in the Anthropocene: How Actors Regenerate Degenerated Natural Commons by Laura Albareda, and Oana Branzei
ESSAY | Constructing ‘Problems’ and ‘Solutions’: Social Innovation as Social-Symbolic Work by Paul Tracey, and Neil Stott
Transforming How Ambivalence About DEI Work is Managed in Organizations by Stephanie J. Creary
List of People Who Reviewed for this Special Issue
