Why is resistance a pervasive feature of organizations? We seek to add to the established ways of understanding resistance by arguing that it may emerge owing to the rationality and irrationality, order and disorder that imbues organizations. We explore how such conditions create ambivalent situations that can generate resistance that is ambivalent itself as it can both facilitate and hinder the operation of organizations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a manufacturing organization, we introduce the concept of pragmatic resistance as a means to grasp the everyday resistance that emerges through and reflects cracks in the rational model of organizations. Rather than being anti-work, we demonstrate how pragmatic resistance is bound up with organizational disorder/irrationality, competing work demands and the prioritization of what is interpreted as ‘real work’. Overall, the concept of pragmatic resistance indicates that resistance may be far more pervasive and organizations more fragile and vulnerable to disruption than is often assumed to be the case.

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Drawing on a deep single case study of a Polish subsidiary of a US-headquartered pharmaceutical multinational company (MNC), the paper contributes to the study of power and politics in international business (IB) by advancing understanding of the interactional and processual dynamics of micropolitics in MNCs, which supplements the current dominant actor-centred approach. The paper advances understanding of translation in IB by demonstrating how interlingual translation can be deliberately used as a management tool to pre-empt resistance and promote managerially desired attitudes and behaviours at the subsidiary level. It highlights how hitherto largely ignored processes of interlingual translation provide an important internal forum for the exercise of power and micropolitics. The paper puts forward an emergent model of the micropolitical dynamics of interlingual translation and demonstrates how subsidiary managers can use interlingual translationto support and oppose the views of both corporate and local managerial colleagues, and thereby influence how HQ-level decisions will be received by subsidiary-level employees.

This article is a reflection on organizational oblivion, viewed as an archetypical antonym of learning. The consequences of this kind of forgetting for organizational identity construction are described as a narrative project. We refer to the image of Lethe, an archetype of forgetting, to depict how forgetting directly affects the process of identity narrative construction. In this perspective, drinking from the waters of Lethe implies not just the loss of knowledge or memories of how things are done, but the loss of identity so that the individuals do not know who they are anymore. In this context, forgetting disrupts organizational narrative which ceases to be a coherent story and results in organizational identity loss.

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