I’m pleased to report that my paper with Linda Treviño and Raghu Garud on Values Work: A Process Study of the Emergence and Performance of Organizational Values Practices has been formally accepted for publication at the Academy of Management Journal. The paper has been a long time in the making and I couldn’t be more pleased with the final outcome.

In the paper we argue that existing cognitive and cultural perspectives on values have under-theorized the processes whereby values come to be practiced in organizations. We then address this gap by studying the emergence and performance of what we call values practices, defined as sayings and doings in organizations to articulate and accomplish what is normatively right or wrong, good or bad, for its own sake.

In other words, we conceive of values practices as ends in themselves, and thus, analytically distinct from organizational practices driven by technical or efficiency considerations. Examples of values practices include efforts to address normative concerns in areas such as ethics, diversity and sustainability, among others.

To understand values practices, we draw inspiration from scholars who have combined a practice perspective with insights from actor-network theory as a way of generating new theoretical insights. This approach enables us to move from cognitive understandings of values as abstract principles and cultural understandings of values as symbolic artifacts to a performative understanding of values as situated in networks of practices.

We apply this perspective to study the development of an honor code within a large business school over a 10-year period. Based on our analysis, we offer the concept of values work comprising four key interrelated processes – dealing with pockets of concern, knotting local concerns into action networks, performing values practices, and circulating values discourse. These processes are depicted in the figure below.

Taken together, these insights contribute to an understanding of the work involved in the emergence and performance of organizational values practices as well as the work that values practices perform and provoke in organizations. We conclude the paper by discussing some of the opportunities and challenges that values work implies for future organizational scholarship.