What is Organizational Identity

Microloans garnered from crowdfunding provide an important source of financial capital for nascent entrepreneurs. Drawing on cognitive evaluation theory, we assess how linguistic cues known to affect underlying motivation can frame entrepreneurial narratives either as a business opportunity or as an opportunity to help others. We examine how this framing affects fundraising outcomes in the context of prosocial lending and conduct our analysis on a sample of microloans made to over 36,000 entrepreneurs in 51 countries via an online crowdfunding platform. We find that lenders respond positively to narratives highlighting the venture as an opportunity to help others, and less positively when the narrative is framed as a business opportunity.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/ETAP_ETAP12108.pdf?abstractid=2545628&mirid=3

Crowdfunding in a Prosocial Microlending Environment: Examining the Role of Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Cues:

In response to critiques of strategy tools as unhelpful or potentially dangerous for organizations, we suggest casting a sociological eye on how tools are actually mobilized by strategy makers. In conceptualizing strategy tools as tools-in-use, we offer a framework for examining the ways that the affordances of strategy tools and the agency of strategy makers interact to shape how and when tools are selected and applied. Further, rather than evaluating the ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ use of tools, we highlight the variety of outcomes that result, not just for organizations but also for the tools and the individuals who use them. We illustrate this framework with a vignette and propose an agenda and methodological approaches for further scholarship on the use of strategy tools.

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Strategy tools-in-use: A framework for understanding “technologies of rationality” in practice

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Su...

The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues

Handbook of Visual Analysis. Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt, eds. London, England: Sage Publications, 2001. 210 pp. $27.95 pbk. Martin Lister and Liz Wells make a compelling case for the importance of visual research: "With the late twentieth century's explosion of imaging and visualizing techniques (digitization, satellite imaging, new forms of medical imaging, virtual reality, etc.) . . . everyday life has become 'visual culture.' This can be seen as an acceleration of a longer history involving photography, film, television and video. [Some also argue] that the study of visual culture can not be confined to the study of images, but should also take account of the centrality of vision in everyday experience and the production of meaning." It is frustrating and challenging that such an important dimension of human communication is so ubiquitous yet so poorly understood. Part of the reason for our skimpy knowledge of visual communication is a proliferation of theorizing about visual communication at the same time that a mismatched welter of methods are being employed-empirical and critical, objective and subjective, focused and hit-miss, controlled and uncontrolled-to assess content, communicator motivations, viewer perceptions and effects, and societal embeddedness. This handbook seeks to provide an overview of available approaches and an explication of how they may be used to advance knowledge and understanding in the selected area. This book, written by leading internationally recognized scholars and practitioners of their perspectives, makes a good stab at those ambitious goals. In addition to Lister and Wells' chapter on cultural studies, the book also features overviews by Philip Bell on content analysis, Malcolm Collier on visual anthropology, van Leeuwen on semiotics and iconography, Gertraud Diem-Wille on therapeutic psychoanalytic use of drawings, Carey Jewitt and Rumiko Oyama on social semiotics, Charles Goodwin on ethnomethodology, and Rick Iedema's social semiotic analysis of a documentary film. The content analysis chapter is an excellent overview of a dominant method employed in visual analysis. A comparison of the first twenty with the last twenty covers of Cleo magazine walks the reader through the basic steps. Visual anthropology, which combines art and science in its analysis approach, is explicated in a very readable chapter, drawing on longitudinal photographic studies dating back to the 1930s of Navajo, Pueblo, and Hispanic populations in the American Southwest, as well as a San Franciscan Chinatown photo map. Lister and Wells' chapter on cultural studies provides a lot of dense verbiage as underbrush to be hacked through, but the towering treetops above are worth the trail through the terminology. I disagreed with their characterization of several photographs, but cultural differences may be at work here, since the British authors interpret photographs made by several nationalities. The chapter on semiotics and iconography contains clear, straightforward prose that nicely illustrates the complicated writings of others, particularly Roland Barthes (visual semiotics) and Erwin Panofsky (iconography). …

Handbook of Visual Analysis

Business schools, like many organizations, exist in increasingly turbulent environments, making them vulnerable to unexpected events. Making mistakes in such environments is less likely when organi...

Organizational Mindfulness in Business Schools

Despite calls for more visual methodologies in organizational research, the use of photographs remains sparse. Organizational research could benefit from the inclusion of photographs to track contemporary change processes in an organization and change processes over time, as well as to incorporate diverse voices within organizations, to name a few advantages. To further understanding, the authors identify researcher choices related to the use of photographs in organizational research, clarify the advantages and disadvantages of these choices, and discuss ethical and other special considerations of the use of photographs. They highlight several organizational areas of research, primarily related to the management discipline, that could benefit from the inclusion of photographs. Finally, the authors describe how they used photographs in a study of one organization and specifically how their intended research design with photographs changed over the course of the study as well as how photographs helped to de...

Using Photographs to Research Organizations: Evidence, Considerations, and Application in a Field Study

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to review and categorize how photographs have been used in management research and to provide strategic management researchers with suggestions about how to use photographs to enhance their qualitative research methodologies.

Methodology/approach – We develop a typology of photographic uses in management research by reviewing several scholarly journals.

Findings – We identify two dimensions that differentiate how photographs have been used in management journals. First, photographs can be used to illustrate scenes from a field setting or they can be interpreted as data. Second, the role of field participants can be one of active collaboration or no involvement in the photographic aspect of the qualitative research project. For instance, field subjects can collaborate in research by aiding in the photo-documentation process and/or aiding in the photo-elicitation process. Choosing which of our four identified photographic approaches represents a critical decision for qualitative researchers interested in incorporating photographs in their research.

Practical implications – We suggest ideas for strategic management researchers related to use of photographs in their research. Also, we describe how specific strategic management research projects can be approached with photography, which we argue can lead to enhanced theoretical contributions.

Originality/value of paper – To date, little has been written in the strategic management field about the use of photography. This chapter provides a succinct review of photographic methods in management research. Moreover, this chapter provides suggestions for how strategy researchers, study participants, and interested readers of management research could benefit from incorporating photographs into research accounts.

Worth a thousand words: photographs as a novel methodological tool in strategic management

In a study of 72 hospitals, we examined the participation of multiple stakeholder groups in each of five stages of hospital decision making and its effect on two measures of hospital financial perf...

Participation in decision making one more time: A look at hospital decision making and performance

To facilitate conveying to students the difficulties of implementing strategic decisions we offer an in-class exercise developed around a well-known case (i.e. Asahi Beer). Suitable for both capstone-undergraduate and graduate courses in strategy, this exercise allows students to experience the strategic implementation processes on a micro scale. We offer suggestions on time allocation, exercise set-up, facilitating break-out groups, group presentations, and debriefing. Furthermore, we provide suggestions for incorporating various streams of literature (e.g., complex adaptive systems) and offer insights based on our experiences implementing this exercise in classes over time.

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Creating and Executing In-Class Exercises to Complement Published Cases: “Ice Beer to Japan” Implementation Exercise to Accompany Craig’s Asahi Bee Case

Joshua L. Ray

Papers

Organizational Mindfulness in Business Schools

Using Photographs to Research Organizations: Evidence, Considerations, and Application in a Field Study

Worth a thousand words: photographs as a novel methodological tool in strategic management

Participation in decision making one more time: A look at hospital decision making and performance

Creating and Executing In-Class Exercises to Complement Published Cases: “Ice Beer to Japan” Implementation Exercise to Accompany Craig’s Asahi Bee Case