Research has long shown that organizations shape members’ identities. However, the possibility that these identities might also be desired and that members might benefit from this process has only recently been explored. In a qualitative study of a French aeronautic plant, I demonstrate how an...

Human cadavers are crucial to medical science. While the debate on how to secure sufficient cadavers has focused primarily on donors’ behaviors, procuring organizations’ roles in increasing donations remain less explored. The United States offers a unique setting in which to examine this...

Mina O'Reilly, an officer at Logan Airport's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in Boston, must discipline an employee responsible for a security breach that resulted in a 45-minute terminal closure during peak hours, a potential threat to traveler safety, and travel delays across the...

Anyone who has been trained as a physician – or is close to someone who has been – is aware that the dissection of a cadaver is an integral part of the physician’s learning and socialization. The first incision is something few physicians forget. That procedure is reproduced time after...

Corporate accountability is never far from the front page and Harvard Business School trains many future business leaders. But how does HBS formally and informally ensure its members embrace proper business standards? Relying on his first-hand faculty experience, Michel Anteby takes readers...

“homer” is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during work hours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds homers. Along with this evidence, interviews...

La « perruque » consiste en l’utilisation de matériaux et d’outils par un travailleur, sur le lieu de travail et pendant le temps de travail, dans le but de fabriquer un objet en dehors de la production normale de l’entreprise. Même si de nombreuses traces juridiques, artistiques et...

Poaching, usually understood as trespassing in pursuit of game, in the context of the French aerospace factory described in this article, amounts to manufacturing objects on company time and with company materials and tools for personal use. These objects are known as ‘homers’ in English and...

Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on an analysis of 309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost 50 years, we theorize a...