Research

My main research ethos and outputs.

My research develops a cumulative understanding of how organizational efforts toward sustainability and social change unfold and unravel over time. Across different empirical settings, I examine how individual and group engagement is shaped, sustained, and constrained as people navigate organizational structures, symbolic commitments, and broader institutional environments. By centering agency and lived organizational experiences, my work builds toward an explanation of the human limits of organizational change.

Recent work

Academy of Management Journal

Siloed Sustainability: How Paradox Management Unravels in Integrative Practice Implementation

Organizations often struggle to implement sustainability practices, even when such efforts are strategically prioritized. Through an ethnographic study of LatinCar, the Brazilian subsidiary of a multinational carmaker, we introduce the concept of “integrative practices,” patterns of activity marked by indivisibility, complexity, and non-codifiability, to explain why certain sustainability practices require extensive cross-functional coordination and generate persistent contradictions.

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JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT

Bridging institutional theory and social and environmental efforts in management

We synthesized and integrated 720 studies from 1997 to 2023. Our framework captures the structure–agency bidirectionality and serves as a tool to guide future research on social and environmental efforts in management.

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Other recent research outputs

Navigating academia’s stressful waters: Discussing the power of horizontal linkages for early-career researchers Gay employees on social media: Strategies to portray professionalism Losing control: The uncertain management of concealable stigmas when work and social media collide When aspirational talk backfires: The role of moral judgements in employees’ hypocrisy interpretation

Other peer-reviewed publications

Salazar-Morales D., Rodriguez P., Amaral L. (2024), Governing Schools in Times of Pandemic: A Set-Theoretical Analysis of the Role of Policy Capacities in School Closure, Governance, 37(4), pp. 1433–1463.
Lauriano L. (2020), Book Review: Labor Standards in International Supply Chains: Aligning Rights and Incentives, by Daniel Berliner, Anne Regan Greenleaf, Milli Lake, Margaret Levi, and Jennifer Noveck, ILR Review, 73(4), pp. 1024–1025.
Lauriano L., Spitzeck H., Bueno J. H. D. (2014), The State of Corporate Citizenship in Brazil, Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society, 14(5), pp. 598–606.

Book chapters

Amaral, L. (2025), Individual Agency in Addressing Grand Challenges, in Alice Erthal and Douglas Wegner (Eds.), Strategy and Leadership for Grand Societal Challenges, p. 18.
Lauriano L. (2023), The all-over-the-place academic: how to fit in an academic niche but also be free to pursue new and exciting research ideas, in Alexandra Bristow, Olivier Ratle, Sarah Robinson (Eds.), Doing Academic Careers Differently – Portraits of Academic Life, Routledge, pp. 23–28.
Salazar-Morales D., Lauriano L. (2020), A Typology of the Latin American Civil Servant: Patronage Appointee, Technocrat, Loyalist, or Careerist, in Helen Sullivan, Helen Dickinson, Hayley Henderson (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant, Palgrave Macmillan, chapter 1, pp. 41–62.

Research reports

Business Models and Labour Standards: Making the Connection — ETI Reflections on the current sustainability stage of Brazilian corporations — FDC Innovation, Industrialization and Sustainability: Precon Housing Solution — FDC Como anda o diálogo com stakeholders nas empresas brasileiras — FDC Sumário Executivo — Estado da Gestão para Sustentabilidade 2014 — FDC Estado da Gestão para Sustentabilidade nas Empresas Brasileiras, 2014 — FDC Estágio de sustentabilidade das empresas brasileiras, 2012 — FDC Rumo à integração da sustentabilidade no sistema de gestão empresarial — FDC Os desafios dos stakeholders para as organizações — DOM FDC Magazine Integrando a sustentabilidade à gestão corporativa — DOM FDC Magazine Panorama da gestão para a sustentabilidade nas empresas brasileiras — DOM FDC Magazine Estágio da sustentabilidade nas empresas brasileiras — DOM FDC Magazine

Conference presentations

Academy of Management (AOM)

Stigmatized Employees’ (Dis)Engagement with Organizational Destigmatization Initiatives (2024)
When the Institutional Theory Lens Meets Sustainability: Bridging the Gaps (2023)
I’m not racist, they’re just Facebook jokes: how organizations deal with viral racist incidents (2022)
The stakeholder capitalism: Organizations’ capabilities promoting individuals’ freedom (2022)
Sustainability, silos and means-ends decoupling (2021, AOM Latin America)
Organisational silos, decoupling and sustainability (2021)
Concealable Stigmas When the Online and Offline Worlds Collide (2020)

European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS)

Visual aesthetics and attentional engagement to environmental crises: A double juxtaposition of near/far and stunning/horrifying (2025)
Qualitative research on personally relevant grand challenges: A strategy to synergize scholarly impact and practical impact (2024)
Exploring the relational dynamics of destigmatization in the workplace: Evidence from LGBTQIA+ employees in Brazil (2023)
I’m not racist, they’re just Facebook jokes: how organizations deal with viral racist incidents (2022)
The stakeholder capitalism: Organizations’ capabilities promoting individuals’ freedom (2021)
Hypocrisy as Ideology: the performative (re)construction of a flagship trainee programme (2020)
Be Gay, But Not That Much: Identity Work; Organisational Expectations; Social Networks and Context Collapse (2019)
Uncoordinated and Uncontrolled: How Isolated and independent Units Impact CSR (2018)

Process Organization Studies (PROS)

Between targets and blockers: How backlash shapes destigmatization engagement in the workplace (2025)
Avada Kedavra: Death of the Author through social-symbolic work in the Harry Potter fandom (2023)
The trickle down and up effect of stigma: How stigmatization processes occur and change across levels (2023)
I’m not racist, they’re just Facebook jokes: how organizations deal with viral racist incidents (2022)

Other

When activism loses its ground: how external backlash reconfigures the conditions of insider activism — Special Conference Strategic Management Society (2026)
The micro-foundations of decoupling in corporate sustainability: the politics of organizational silos — Strategic Management Society Conference (2022)
The state of corporate citizenship in Brazil — Annual EABIS Colloquium (2013)