Showing papers in "Organization in 2011"

Ways of constructing research questions: gap-spotting or problematization?

Abstract: This article examines ways of constructing research questions from existing literature, which are likely to promote the development of interesting and influential theories. We review 52 articles in organization studies and develop a typology of how researchers construct their research questions from existing literature. The most common way across paradigmatic camps is to spot various 'gaps' in the literature and, based on that, to formulate specific research questions. The dominance of gap-spotting is surprising, given it is increasingly recognized that theory is made interesting and influential when it challenges assumptions that underlie existing literature. The article discusses why assumption-challenging approaches are rare, and it identifies a range of social norms that favour gap-spotting. Finally, the article proposes some ways of constructing research questions that move beyond gap-spotting, and discusses how these ways are likely to promote more interesting and significant theories.

Organization outside organizations: The significance of partial organization

Abstract: It is common practice in organizational research to restrict the concept of organization to formal organizations, and to describe the world outside these entities by such other concepts as institut ...

Journal list fetishism and the perversion of scholarship: reactivity and the ABS list:

Abstract: The case for using academic journals lists is critically scrutinised. An effect of their use, it argued, is to stifle diversity and constrict scholarly innovation. A monoculture is fostered in which a preoccupation with shoehorning research into a form prized by elite, US-oriented journals overrides a concern to maintain and enrich the diversity of topics, the range of methods and the plurality of perspectives engaged in business and management research. Use of a particular journal list, such as the one prepared by the Association of Business Schools (ABS), can come to dominate the scholarly terrain of a particular discipline with consequences that can be damaging to funding as well as to research culture.

A postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies: tensions, contradictions and possibilities

Abstract: This article reports on a postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of representations of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies. The resulting analysis revealed tensions and cont...

Voices of the Governed: towards a theory of the translocal:

Abstract: In this article I want to interrogate the political, economic, and social conditions that enable the extraction of natural and mineral resources from Indigenous and rural communities in Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. The end of direct colonialism and the emergence of the development state did not necessarily translate into forms of local sovereignty for these communities who bore the brunt of development. I describe the emergence of resource wars in the postcolonial era and how organizational technologies of extraction, exclusion and expulsion lead to dispossession and death. I conclude by discussing possibilities of resistance and develop the notion of translocal resistance where local actors most affected by development are able to forge a series of temporary coalitions with international and national groups in an attempt to promote some form of participatory democracy. The article advance debates on postcolonialism by developing theoretical insights from translocal modes of resistance that open up new analytical spaces marked by particular configurations of market, state and civil society actors.

Doctor in the lead: balancing between two worlds:

Abstract: The article examines the leadership of department heads in a university hospital in day-to-day practice. These ‘doctors in the lead’ bridge the medical and the management world in the hospital organization.They are better able to influence their colleagues’ clinical activities than a non-medical manager. This is, however not a trouble-free task. The concepts of Pierre Bourdieu—habitus, field and capital—guide the analysis of empirical material. The medical habitus influences the questions and dilemmas department heads face, as well as the ways in which they can exert influence on their colleagues. ‘Janus-faced’ they look at the medical and the management world with their two different logics. Sometimes they display managerial behaviour, but the medical habitus remains their second nature. Based on these findings we argue that the formal hierarchy of the hospital organization should be brought more in line with the informal professional hierarchy.

Diversity in the lean automobile factory: doing class through gender, disability and age

Abstract: This study advances a critical re-conceptualization of ‘diversity’ through class. Drawing on the case of CarCo, the Belgian branch of a North American automobile company, I show how the discursive constructions of various socio-demographic identities reflect underlying class relations between labour and capital and are, in turn, implicated in their reproduction. Reflecting the instrumental conceptualization of labour as the source of economic value in the capitalist mode of production, female, older and disabled workers were discursively constructed as unable or unwilling to perform as expected within the factory lean production system. These negative identities in turn legitimized the elimination of ‘different’ workers in the company restructuring and the outsourcing of the phases of the production process that could be carried out by them, materially reproducing class relations. The analysis unveils the ‘dark’ business case against diversity at CarCo, a company which was renowned as a ‘best’ case for di...

Free-Riding on Power Laws: questioning the validity of the Impact Factor as a measure of research quality in organization studies:

Abstract: The simplicity and apparent objectivity of the Institute for Scientific Information’s Impact Factor has resulted in its widespread use to assess the quality of organization studies journals and by extension the impact of the articles they publish and the achievements of their authors. After describing how such uses of the Impact Factor can distort both researcher and editorial behavior to the detriment of the field, I show how extreme variability in article citedness permits the vast majority of articles—and journals themselves—to free-ride on a small number of highly-cited articles. I conclude that the Impact Factor has little credibility as a proxy for the quality of either organization studies journals or the articles they publish, resulting in attributions of journal or article quality that are incorrect as much or more than half the time. The clear implication is that we need to cease our reliance on such a non-scientific, quantitative characterization to evaluate the quality of our work.

What is a critical journal

Abstract: Most competent editors should be able to make a clear statement about the scope, purposes and values of their journal. The boundary that they then draw provides a ground for justifications of acceptance and rejection, as well as a description of some sort of community, or a group that broadly recognizes itself as such. Sometimes, the community might be primarily articulated as oppositional, in the sense that it relies on not being something else. Organization, as a ‘critical’ journal with a strong statement about its distinctiveness, often seems to fall into this category. Implicitly or explicitly, ‘they’ are conservative whilst ‘we’ are radical. One term is defined by its other, and so a description of the conservatives is the antonym of the radicals. There is something comforting, even pious, about such a logic, suggesting, perhaps, that ‘they’ are stupid, narrow minded or deluded whilst ‘we’ are clear sighted and pure of heart. The logic is reversible of course, since the other side usually claims those virtues too. Such is the way that community and identity are often built, but it’s an unstable set-up.

Theorizing the client—consultant relationship from the perspective of social-systems theory

Abstract: Over the last few years research on management consulting has established itself as an important area in management studies. While, traditionally, consulting research has been predominantly a-theoretical, lately researchers have been calling for an exploration of different theoretical approaches. This article has been written in response to these calls. It explores a new perspective for theorizing the client—consultant relationship based on the theory of social systems by Niklas Luhmann. According to this approach, clients and consultants can be conceptualized as two autopoietic communication systems that operate according to idiosyncratic logics. They are structurally coupled through a third system, the so-called ‘contact system’. Due to the different logics of these systems, the transfer of meaning between them is not possible. This theoretical position has interesting implications for the way we conceptualize consulting, challenging many traditional assumptions. Instead of supporting the client in find...

How come the critters came to be teaching in business schools? Contradictions in the institutionalization of critical management studies

Abstract: How is it that a collection of working class drifters, sociology graduates, and ex-leftist politicos have ended up teaching in UK business schools? Understanding the predicament of these ‘critters’ helps to explain the ironic contingencies that provide the conditions of possibility for institutionalizing critical management studies (CMS), in particular the historic ‘defeat of the Left’ and the lack of more practical activities for radical management academics. Unlike labour process theory (LPT), CMS has come to terms with its institutional location within business schools and has taken the opportunity provided by the continued expansion of research oriented UK business schools to institutionalize itself as a recognized business school constituency. This has even led to the creation of one or two critically oriented business schools in the UK, where the contradictions of CMS are played out. One such contradiction is that having provided an opening for a wider academic and leftist intellectual community to ...

Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: A case of health care tendering

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between ethics and politics in organizations with a specific focus on ethical subjectivity—that is, how people at work constitute themselves as subjects in relation to both their conduct and their sense of ethical responsibility to others. To investigate this we consider those ethics that were politically mobilized when five clinical partners tendered to buy out the medical practice in which they worked. We provide a detailed reading of a letter of complaint written by one of the partners and sent to their employer—a letter we consider to be a deliberate, political, ethically motivated and overt act of resistance. Drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas we argue that the practice of ethics is characterized by a tension where ethical commitments and realpolitik come crashing together. The implication we draw from this is that in organizations the ethical subject is always a political subject; the one who takes action in response to the call of the ethical ...

Corporate accountability and the politics of visibility in ‘late modernity’:

Abstract: It is generally held that because of developments associated with late modernity large corporations are now much more visible and therefore more accountable. In this article, we challenge this idea and propose contrary and position: that precisely because of late modernity global corporations have become less accountable to their stakeholders. In particular, we argue that because of globalization, the explosion of scientific knowledge and the nature of risk in late modernity, it has in some respects become easier for corporations to conceal their unethical practices (making them less accountable). Drawing on sociological theory concerning late modernity, we seek is to demonstrate how the fashionable ‘ideology of visibility’ habors an insidious anti-democratic tendency apropos wider accountability. In light of this position, the article concludes by discussing the political implications and possibilities for rendering business corporations more democratically accountable.

Articulating circumstance, identity and practice : toward a discursive framework of organizational changing

Abstract: The literature on organizational change abounds with models that map the trajectory of change with ordered stages or episodes. However, limited progress has been made in understanding the dynamic process of changing or becoming from one stage or episode to another. To enhance our knowledge of changing, this study intends to offer a discursive framework grounded in a process-oriented perspective of organization. The framework highlights key discursive dynamics of changing by integrating recent developments in several streams of research. It conceptualizes changing as discursive struggles over articulating multiple layers of meaning. These layers comprise the articulation of organizational circumstance, organizational and individual identities and organizational practice.To illustrate the utility of this framework, the author undertook a discourse analysis of real-time communication among members in a large US insurance corporation. The interpretation was grounded in data from a four-month ethnographic stud...

Institutional work amidst the financial crisis: emerging positions of elite actors

Abstract: We draw on the institutional work literature to analyse the rhetoric in mainstream media spawned by the global financial crisis. We identify the emerging positions (status quo, neutral and change) ...

The skewed few: people and papers of quality in management studies

Abstract: Publication in the top journals of management studies is highly skewed. Very few authors publish in these top journals. They are said to be the best few, on the assumption that skew indicates quality. Yet, skew is natural in any distribution and would occur in the absence of all quality. Peer review is supposed to ensure that this cannot happen, but pressure to publish in top journals puts demands on the peer review system it was never intended to bear. One result is that the skewed few tend to be the same few. We look at how this is arranged. We investigate the citation of the skewed few. We find much self citation, mutual citation and group citation. This behaviour is encouraged by the paramount importance of the journal impact factor. The article looks at how this indicator has been contrived for commercial rather than academic reasons, and considers some of the consequences.

World visions in dispute in contemporary Latin America: development x harmonic life

Abstract: The aim of this article paper is to offer a Latin-American perspective on the field of post-colonial studies. Following the modernity/coloniality/de-coloniality approach it is possible to recognize how the complicity between modernity and rationality has worked to homogenize knowledge throughout this part of the world. Such an approach makes it possible to reflect on how this process towards homogeneity has been resisted, as seen in the current indigenous struggles against extractive development policies. These struggles show that the various critiques of development need to be articulated and renewed in order to account for processes such as these, incorporating multiple scales perspectives and knowledge produced from the epistemic colonial difference. The critique of managerialism also needs further developments to account for the new roles of management in contexts of open conflict. It is defended that the re-consideration of Marxist Theory of Dependency could enrich the way we understand global capita...

A culture of mania: a psychoanalytic view of the incubation of the 2008 credit crisis

Abstract: The full text of this article is not currently available on the LRA. The published version is available from the publisher's website at: http://org.sagepub.com/ ; doi: 10.1177/1350508410390071

A Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thinking: constructing a project of the self within an ontology of becoming:

Abstract: As influential as Michel Foucault may be in organization theory, several critics have seriously questioned the epistemological foundations of the Foucauldian philosophical project (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1995, 1999; Caldwell, 2007; Habermas, 1990; Newton, 1994, 1998; Reed, 2000; Thompson, 1993). If these remain unanswered, the Foucauldian approach could be relegated to a self-contradictory, ultra-relativist and partial reading grid of ‘reality’. In this article, we develop a Nietzschean reading of Foucault’s thinking that offers answers to these criticisms, and reinstates it as an independent philosophical project grounded in epistemological assumptions that are coherent with its ontology and methodology. Finally, we suggest that, following Nietzsche, the whole Foucauldian project can be approached as a genealogy of morals. Subsequently, we call on scholars to further explore the ‘third generation’ of Foucauldian studies which would study management practices as morals understood as an ‘art de vivre’.

Egg dates sperm: a tale of a practice change and its stabilization:

Abstract: The aim of this article is to enlarge practice-based studies to the consideration of institutional environment and institutional work, opening a dialogue with neo-institutionalism and, in so doing, advance the growing field of sociology of practice. This study attempts to do this by answering the question: how does a change in a practice become stabilized and what does the new practice do, once stabilized? Within practice-based studies, most studies have considered mainly endogenous changes, emergent from the community of practitioners under study. By contrast, this study discusses an exogenous change (a recent Italian law limits medically assisted reproduction practices) and the emergent relations that stabilize a provisional new practice through negotiation within the institutional context. Stabilization of a new practice is achieved by limitation, by rhetorical closure and by anchoring in technology. The aim of the article is to show the unintended power effects that a new practice generates once stabi...

A critical analysis of North American business leaders’ neocolonial discourse: global fears and local consequences:

Abstract: Using a postcolonial analytic frame and critique this article investigates the nature of the discourse used by 24 North American business leaders to describe, understand and make sense of the economic development of China and India and contemporary international encounters. In particular the article investigates how business leaders discursively characterize this ‘threat’, how they (re)present China and India and, how they discursively construct the requirements of a response to this ‘threat’. An analysis of the interviews indicates the persistence of the discourse of (neo)colonialism (Orientalism) in the construction of the Other within the context of a view of China and India as developing and progressing towards a North American ideal. Despite this, North American business leaders also show ambivalence and uncertainty towards China and India. On the one hand they laud their success while damning them for their apparently exploitative social, economic and workplace systems and practices. Moreover, while...

Capitalism in Crisis: Organizational Perspectives

Abstract: She quotes the head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow operation as stating that ‘Our world is broken— and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it’. What a difference a few years make! The crisis of finance capitalism has turned into the fiscal crisis of the state. Having rescued the banks through the provision of millions of dollars worth of state funding, governments have found themselves facing a crisis in their budgets that comes directly from the crisis, the rescues and their impact on revenues and expenditures. The result, Organization 18(2) 147–152 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1350508410392397 org.sagepub.com

When events interact with business ethics

Abstract: The article analyses the dynamics of the interaction between events and business ethics within organizations. Events comprise those unpredictable things that happen. When they do, organizationally ...

From long-term savings to instant mortgages: financial demonstration and the role of interaction in markets

Abstract: Accounts of the crisis have privileged ‘high finance’ innovations whereas retail banks constantly experimented with how they sell (new) products to consumers. I examine the case of product innovati...

Lines of flight: Everyday resistance along England's backbone

Abstract: A line of flight is essentially a movement of creativity, a practical act or a way of living that wards off or inhibits the formation of ‘centres’ and stable powers in favour of continuous variation and free action. This article supports the arts-based practice of a documentary film, Lines of Flight, which uses free solo rock climbing in the Pennine region of northern England, to give access to a range of ‘intensely lived experiences’ that can offer a route out of the social, economic and cultural conditions that often subjugate modern society and back to life in its free and wild state. The documentary becomes a presentational line of flight in itself, as it looks to find the conditions for a novel experience in the making, under which a new filmic affect is produced in the here and the now.

The use and abuse of journal quality lists

Abstract: The ABS list is one of the most widely used journal quality lists available. It is pluralistic and comprehensive, and is widely seen as capturing the consensus in relation to journal ratings. As editors of the ABS list we are concerned at recent calls for a moratorium, or even the abolition of journal quality lists. These calls reinforce the elitist view that the tacit knowledge of where to publish should not be made explicit in lists.

Anomie and culture management: reappraising Durkheim

Abstract: This research investigates how recent approaches to culture management have tacitly assimilated Merton’s and Mayo’s reformulations of Durkheim’s theory of anomie.This reformulation legitimates an instrumental focus upon the need for ‘experts’ to regulate the means by which naturalized utilitarian ends are pursued by developing culture management practices that aim to (re)integrate the mal-socialized. In contrast to this technocratic approach, we explore how Durkheim’s original formulation of anomie, far from accepting utilitarian ends as givens, articulated concerns about the unfettering of egoism he saw to be engendered by the classical liberal free market assumptions at the heart of utilitarianism. How this free market ethos, articulated by recent neoliberal discourses, guides the content and processes of post-bureaucratic culture management manoeuvres is then investigated. This article concludes by showing how, from Durkheim’s stance, such managerial processes paradoxically serve to express and propaga...

In Deep Waters: process theory between Scylla and Charybdis:

Abstract: In this article, I propose a middle way between current process and substance theorizing as I argue that both ‘pure’ views are fraught with theoretical problems. I base my proposal on the ontologies of Aristotle and A.N. Whitehead, who both maintain that being and becoming are equally important for a comprehensive analysis of change processes. Drawing on their insights, I develop a conceptual frame that distinguishes between change and becoming, and proposes to use the pairs of potentiality-actuality and activity-relationality as notions that are less fraught with conceptual baggage and more relevant empirically than the distinction between substance and process.