"We don't experiment with our patients!" An ethnographic account of the epistemic politics of (re)designing nursing work.

This article draws on ethnographic research investigating experimental reform projects in local nursing practices. These are aimed at strengthening nursing work and fostering nurses' position within healthcare through bottom-up nurse-driven innovations. Based on literature on epistemic politics and critical nursing studies, the study examines and conceptualizes how these nurses promote professional and organizational change. The research draws on data from two pilot projects to show how epistemic politics frame the production and use of knowledge within reform efforts. The study finds that knowledge produced through such experimenting is often not considered valid within the contexts of broader organizational transitions. The nurse-driven innovations fail to meet established legitimate criteria for informing change, both among stakeholders in the nurses' socio-political environment, as well as within the nursing community. The research reveals that the processes inadvertently reinforce normative knowledge hierarchies, perpetuating forms of epistemic injustice, limiting both nurses' ability to function as change agents and healthcare organizations' capacity to learn.

Pandemic, power and paradox: Improvising as the New Normal during the COVID-19 crisis.

The global COVID-19 pandemic made salient various paradoxical tensions, such as the trade-offs between individual freedom and collective safety, between short term and long-term consequences of adaptation to the new conditions, the power implications of sameness (COVID-19 was non-discriminatory in that all were affected in one way or another) and difference (yet not all were affected equally due to social differences), whereas most businesses became poorer under lockdown, others flourished; while significant numbers of workers were confined to home, some could not return home; some thrived while working from home as others were challenged by the erosion of barriers between their private and working lives. Rapid improvisational responding and learning at all levels of society presented itself as a naturally occurring research opportunity for improvisation scholars. This improvisation saw the arrival of a 'New Normal', eventually defined as 'learning to live with COVID-19'. The five articles in this special issue capture critical aspects of improvisation, paradoxes and power made salient by the COVID-19 pandemic in contexts ranging from higher-education, to leadership, to medical care and virtue ethics. In their own ways, each breaks new ground by contributing novel insights into improvisation scholarship.

Stewardship as process: A paradox perspective.

Long-term stewardship is usually represented as a stable structural condition and portrayed as a source of competitive advantage to firms (including family businesses) that use it as a mode of governance. Less is known about how organizations engage with stewardship as a process. We embrace a process approach to report a case study about the unfolding of stewardship in a multi-business family group. We conclude that stewardship is a process marked by critical tensions and paradoxes; by exploring the nature of these we uncover further dimensions and responses to the paradoxes of stewardship.

Liderança Global Virtuosa / Global Leadership Learned

Mostramos como as forças do carácter e as virtudes ajudam os líderes globais a ser mais eficazes e a contribuir para o desempenho positivo das organizações e das pessoas com as quais interagem. Usamos o quadro de análise de Peterson e Seligman (2004), abarcando vinte e quatro forças do carácter, que se agrupam em seis virtudes nucleares (sabedoria/discernimento, coragem, humanidade, justiça, temperança e transcendência). O texto inspira-se na tese de Ghoshal e Moran (2005), segundo a qual as teorias da gestão devem ser correctas e boas ­ ou seja, assentes em fundamentos teóricos e empíricos apropriados e obedecendo a critérios éticos e justos. É nosso objectivo sugerir que líderes globais virtuosos podem contribuir para fomentar o desempenho organizacional e criar um mundo mais justo e sustentável para os humanos.

We show how virtues and character strengths help global leaders to be more effective and promote the positive performance of organizations and people with whom they interact. We use de framework proposed by Peterson and Seligman (2004), which embraces twenty four character strengths grouped in six core virtues (wisdom and knowledge, courage, justice, humanity, temperance, and transcendence). The article is inspired by the idea Ghoshal and Moran (2005), who argued that management theories must be both right and good. We suggest that virtuous global leaders may promote positive organizational performance and contribute to build a more fair and sustainable world.