The article highlights the importance of silence in the change process of organizations, making the claim that silence distributes authority and decision-making processes. It thus adds to existing organization literature that applies a performative approach to silence as neither static nor neutral. It creates new realities. Silence as an act, rather than a noun, is conceptualized as central to organizational change. Through an ethnographic study in a mental healthcare organization, it is shown how different performances of silence make new decision-making processes available and influence new work practices that are central to understanding the particular characteristics of psychiatric organizations. Although the performance of silence can have somewhat immaterial and mundane connotations, when one uses an actor-network theory approach to organization studies, the performance of silence becomes helpful in conceptualizing how new and old practices are often imbedded into each other.

There is a scarcity of knowledge regarding the potential benefits of human–nature contact within the context of working life. Even more limited is the research that focuses on working outdoors and the setting in which it takes place. This study aimed to obtain insight into key aspects of the physical environment relevant for the experienced benefits and challenges of workers exploring office work outdoors. We conducted interviews with key informants as well as photo registration and mapping of the different green spaces in the environments of six small or medium-sized workplaces. The information gathered was used as background knowledge for exploratory qualitative interviews, which were conducted while walking in natural settings chosen by the interviewees. With a landscape architectural perspective and an inductive approach, we explored employees’ experiences of bringing office work outdoors. The following themes emerged: ‘Simplicity,’ ‘Safeness’, ‘Comfort’, and ‘Contact with Nature’ were experienced as key aspects in relation to the physical environment, whereas ‘Sociality’, ‘Well-being’, and ‘Functioning’ stood out as the main benefits and, ‘Digital dependency’ and ‘Illegitimacy’ as challenges to overcome. Based on the identification of potential benefits and their prerequisites, we propose implications for practice and research that can be useful when focusing on bringing office work outdoors.

Purpose: The paper seeks to illuminate the intersection between doing greater good in the world and the self-disciplining that comes along with it. The paper raises a discussion on how purpose-driven organizations with a sustainability focus should be concerned about internal social sustainability in order to maintain consistency between external purpose and internal well-being of employees.Design/methodology/approach: This article investigates the interrelations between purpose-driven organizations' quest for social sustainability and internal work conditions exemplified through experiences with work intensification. A governmentality studies approach is applied to investigate how employees' perceptions of doing greater good in the world also become a productive self-disciplining strategy that potentially increases work intensification and simultaneously result in an instrumentalization of working for greater sustainability.Findings: Working with an organizational sustainability purpose can, in some situations, create dilemmas that may decrease employee well-being as it demands continuous negotiation of boundaries between paid work and free time, meaningfulness and work devotion, self-management and work intensification.Originality/value: The paper raises a discussion on how purpose-driven organizations with a sustainability focus should be concerned about internal (social) sustainability in order to maintain consistency between external purpose and internal well-being of employees.

In this article, we examine how employees experience different types of work commitment at an IT consultancy company using agility to give staff greater autonomy and decision-making latitude. We analyze its agile practices through an in-depth case study comprising interviews and non-participative observation of managers and employees, concluding that the company aims to increase autonomy and decision-making latitude by introducing agile approaches to project management, but thereby risks eroding its employees’ commitment. Indeed, the new social dynamics engender new professional insecurities and decision-making passivity and appear to lack a clear organizational purpose, thus challenging certain aspects of employee commitment.