Although field-configuring events have been highlighted as catalysts of institutional change, scholars still know little about the specific conditions that allow such change to occur. Using data from a longitudinal study of United Nations climate conferences, we analyze how regular and high-stakes events in an event series interacted in producing and preventing institutional change in the transnational climate policy field. We uncover variations in event structures, processes, and outcomes that explain why climate conferences have not led to effective solutions to combat human-induced global warming. Results in particular highlight that growing field complexity and issue multiplication compromise the change potential of a field-configuring event series in favor of field maintenance. Over time, diverse actors find event participation useful for their own purposes, but their activity is not connected to the institutions at the center of the issue-based field. In discussing how events configuring a field are purposefully staged and enacted but also influenced by developments in the field, our study contributes to a more complete understanding of field-configuring events, particularly in contested transnational policy arenas. The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second World Trade Organization. Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet. And I'm afraid that if we don't, then the process will begin to slip. And like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic. (Y. de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary, 2008 interview) Less than two years after he made the above statement, the United Nation's (UN's) climate chief Yvo de Boer resigned, taking the blame for the chaos and breakdown for which the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit will go down in history. After almost two decades of transnational policy efforts, the summit ended without the promised new binding agreement to fight global warming. It was one of a series of meetings of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty aiming at transnational solutions to stabilize "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (article 2, UNFCCC [United Nations, 1992]). A decisive early-1997-UNFCCC

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Digital work platforms are often said to view crowdworkers as replaceable cogs in the machine, favouring exit rather than voice as a means of resolving concerns. Based on a qualitative study of six German medium-sized platforms offering a range of standardized and creative tasks, we show that platforms provide voice mechanisms, albeit in varying degrees and levels. We find that all platforms in our sample enabled crowdworkers to communicate task-related issues to ensure crowdworker availability and quality output. Five platforms proactively consulted crowdworkers on task-related issues, and two on platform-wide organisation. Differences in the ways in which voice was implemented were driven by considerations about costs, control and a crowd’s social structure, as well as by platforms’ varying interest in fair work standards. We conclude that the platforms in our sample equip crowdworkers with ‘microphones’ by letting them have a say on workflow improvements in a highly controlled and easily mutable setting, but do not provide ‘megaphones’ for co-determining or even controlling platform decisions. By connecting the literature on employee voice with platform research, our study provides a nuanced picture of how voice is technologically and organisationally enabled and constrained in non-standard, digital work contexts.

This paper contributes to process studies on organizational creativity by developing two competing research agendas. The first perspective, the ‘becoming’ view, depicts creativity as a constant flow of activity that crystallizes every once in a while in unpredictable moments of creativity. The second perspective, the ‘practice’ view, understands creativity as a practised social process, in which structures play the important role of both enabling and constraining individual agents in pursuing creativity as a collective phenomenon. We compare and contrast these two theoretical perspectives, which are based on different process ontologies, and discuss their methodological implications. We argue that the practice perspective offers particular promise, because it allows us to address the important yet paradoxical question of how creativity may be organized and managed.

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