Contextualist Inquiry into Organizational Citizenship: Promoting Recycling Across Heterogeneous Organizational Actors

Although there is a significant amount of research on organizational citizenship behavior and its importance to individual and organizational outcomes (Podsakoff et al. 2000), relatively little research has explored the process by which such behavior emerges and is established within an organization. Against this backdrop, we combine the perspectives offered by contextualist inquiry (Pettigrew 1990) and actor–network theory (Latour 2005) to propose an integrative framework for investigating how organizational citizenship behavior develops in a large, heterogeneous organization. In order to illustrate the framework, we present a detailed case study of recycling at a large university. Like many other organizations, the university does not have a formal organizational structure to address sustainability concerns and the initiatives are therefore mainly voluntary and emerging in nature, and outcomes are, as a consequence, highly uncertain, and fragile. We argue that contextualist inquiry in combination with actor–network theory provides new and important insights into the emergence and establishment of organizational citizenship behaviors, and that outcomes are contingent upon interactions between the context, process, and content of the behaviors in question and the related networks of human and non-human actors.