MANAGEMENT IN CONTEXT: AN ESSAY ON THE RELEVANCE OF CULTURE TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

The recent interest in cultural analysis of organizations is based on the belief that organizations have symbolic aspects that affect organizational behaviour. Underlying this research, however, are different assumptions about the nature of symbols and the role they play in organizations. The majority of writers have assumed that symbols perform an expressive function and are used in a type of action they call 'symbolic action’which they contrast with ‘substantive action’. This dichotomy between symbolic and substantive action has resulted in the development of models that assume culture is a causal factor in organizational change, and should be controlled by the management of symbols. In this article, this approach - the management as symbolic action approach - is examined and found to be inadequate. An alternative approach is developed - the culture-as-context approach - that assumes all actions have a symbolic aspect, all actions are value-laden, symbols are meaningful only in terms of their relations with other symbols, and symbols are dispositions to action, not causes of it. The study of culture is seen, then, as the explication of action in terms of the system of symbolic forms - goals, plans, ideas, roles and traditions - that people use to give meaning and order to their experience. This approach is applied to the interactions of the members of the‘Transition Team’in a Bell Telephone operating company preparing for the deregulation of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, its parent corporation, in 1981. It is demonstrated empirically and explained conceptually that culture leads to a certain class of possible actions which makes certain attempts at change, or reactions to change, probable in a given situation.     

Discourse and Audience: Organizational Change as Multi-Story Process

abstract    This article is critical of monological research accounts that fail to accommodate polyvocal narratives of organizational change, calling for more fully informed case studies that combine elements of a narrative approach with processual/contextual analysis. We illustrate how contrasting versions of the same change event by different stakeholders and by the same stakeholder for different audiences, raise theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis and presentation of data on organizational change. Our argument is that research narratives (that seek to develop understanding of change processes) are necessarily selective and sieved through particular discourses that represent different ways of engaging in research. They are authored in a particular genre and written to influence target audiences who become active co-creators of meaning. Organizational change viewed from this perspective is a multi-story process, in which theoretical accounts and guides to practice are authored consistent with pre-selected narrative styles. These, in turn, are purposefully chosen to influence target audiences, but this subjective crafting is often hidden behind a cloak of putative objectivity in the written and oral presentations of academic research findings.     

Inertia in the attributional content of annual accounting narratives

Narrative disclosures in annual reports reflect explanatory activities in which specific attribution patterns can be identified. Research on corporate attributional behaviour within the context of financial accounting narratives has documented this behaviour and evidenced significant preferences for certain kinds of explanations in particular circumstances. This kind of research typically relies on cross-sectional data. There exist few statistically validated conclusions regarding the character and consequences of such verbal behaviour over time. This paper reports on a study investigating the change in narrative explanation practices over time. In this longitudinal research special attention is given to the relative strength of consistency and inertial forces on the attributional behaviour in annual reports. It is argued that there are a variety of forces that make that the explanatory patterns in annual reports are likely to be very similar year after year. Reporting practices can be to a great extent unadaptive, in the sense that they become programmed through the development of habit, precedents, traditions and formalized procedures. This is not to say that reporting practices do not change, but that changes even in the way corporate outcomes and actions are explained, are expected to be modest. The purpose of the research was to determine the extent to which the attributional content and framing in annual narrative reports changed over a period of eight years, and whether these changes were related to certain organizational characteristics of the reporting companies conceptualized as potential sources of inertial forces. Overall the results confirm a significant degree of consistency in the attributional content of accounting narratives over time. Evidence of an inertial effect of company listing status and performance history was convincingly present as to the assertiveness aspects of attributional behaviour and as to the differential use of accounting language in the explanation of financial accounting outcomes.     

Placing Knowledge Management in Context

ABSTRACT We welcome the increased emphasis on practice‐based theories of knowing as an alternative to the more representational, knowledge‐as‐object approaches which have characterised many organizational attempts at ‘knowledge management’ to date. Building on the findings of a short empirical study into the ‘knowledge management’ initiatives of a global software organization, which highlighted the value of rich context in the generation of meaning, we seek to shed some light on a perceived confusion about the nature of organizational context. We show such context to be an inseparable part of knowing, which it creates and by which it is defined, and re‐use Blackler's (1995 ) taxonomy of ‘knowledge types’ to illustrate the relational interaction between shared and deeply personal components of context. Finally, we use these insights to suggest a way in which organizations may be able to derive more value from their investments in internal initiatives by increasing their ability to support knowing – and hence the generation of meaning – amongst their employees.     

Contextual Influences on Thinking in Organizations: Learner and Tutor Orientations to Organizational Learning

This paper examines the orientations, or frames of reference, of participants in five bank training programmes run by three banks in the United Kingdom. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach and ethnographic methods of investigation, the paper attempts to elucidate the ways in which both learners and tutors thought about their roles in the learning events and the goals and strategies they adopted in order to cope with their situation. It is suggested that in order to understand the participants' behaviour it is necessary to take into account the contexts in which their actions were constructed. In particular it is proposed that the organizational context of the training programmes, which exposed the participants to the gaze of ‘hidden audiences’ of organizational superiors, inhibited the potential of the programmes as vehicles for learning. It is also argued that interactionist approaches using ethnographic methods, which enable organizational actors to be studied in situ, have an important contribution to make to the wider study of organizational cognition.     

‘If I was King of India I would Get All the Horns Out of Cars’: A Qualitative Study of Sound in Delhi

In this article we present an experimental sonic space—the mobile noise abatement pod (mNAP)—constructed and used over a two‐week period in Delhi, India, during December 2014. The interdisciplinary project, involving a composer, designer, carpenter, development scholar, filmmaker, graphic designer and sociologist, sought to investigate how noise, including honking (one of the most prevalent sounds in Indian cities), is perceived. The fieldwork reveals noise to be a complex contextual, spatial and personal experience that is as much about habit as it is about identity and class, intimately related to economic inequality and inherently connected to social justice. The article suggests that attempts to reduce levels of noise need to take into account its meaning and position—by whom and how narratives of noise reduction are constructed and reproduced.     

Strategic human resource management: a conceptual approach

In this paper conceptual issues associated with strategic human resource management are addressed. The rapidly expanding international interest in strategic human resource management is first highlighted. The article then explores some of the broader issues around the debate on SHRM that can inform thinking at a macro level. Firstly, the progress made towards understanding the meaning of SHRM is analysed, then a brief overview of the major models of SHRM to date is presented. This overview is used to highlight the key variables and interrelationships that need to be included in a model of SHRM, and a more detailed critical analysis of the contribution of the literature in each of these areas follows. A summary of the most important research questions arising out of the literature is followed by a model of the SHRM process, which attempts to remedy the major weaknesses in existing models of SHRM. The ways in which this model may be used as a basis for empirical research are then noted.

Strategic human resource management     

The Contraction of Meaning: The Combined Effect of Communication,Emotions, and Materiality on Sensemaking in the Stockwell Shooting

In this paper, we seek to understand how individuals, as part of a collective, commit themselves to a single, and possibly erroneous, frame, as a basis for sensemaking and coordinated actions. Using real‐time data from an anti‐terrorist police operation that led to the accidental shooting of an innocent civilian, we analyse how individual actors framed their circumstances in communication with one another and how this affected their subsequent interpretations and actions as events unfolded. Our analysis reveals, first, how the collective commitment to a framing of a civilian as a terrorist suicide bomber was built up and reinforced across episodes of collective sensemaking. Second, we elaborate on how the interaction between verbal communication, expressed and felt emotions, and material cues led to a contraction of meaning. This contraction stabilized and reinforced the overall framing at the exclusion of alternative interpretations. With our study we extend prior sensemaking research on environmental enactment and the escalation of commitment and elaborate on the role of emotions and materiality as part of sensemaking.     

Organizational Identity and Place: A Discursive Exploration of Hegemony and Resistance

abstract    This paper analyses how three distinct cohorts of workers in a recently merged UK-based College of Further Education understood their group and their organization's identities. We focus in particular, but not exclusively on how the groups' shared understandings of 'place' informed their identity accounts. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and place treated as a discursive resource on which individuals and groups may draw in their attempts to author versions of their selves. In our case, understandings of place were also a resource on which some people drew in nostalgic reminiscence, and others used to fantasize about their preferred futures for the college. Framed by our intention to identify plurivocal native interpretations of place and identity in ways that promote the reading of polysemy back into case research, the contribution this paper makes is threefold. First, it adds to efforts to theorize organizations and identities as unstable social constructions constituted through acts of languaging. Second, it illustrates how different groups of local actors with distinct histories and value preferences may draw on their place of work in order to author contrasting versions of their organization's identity. Finally, our paper analyses the attempts made by senior managers and groups of other staff to define their organization in particular ways, as hegemonic 'moves' in an ongoing struggle for control over the organization as a discursive space.     

Commentary on “The meaning of ‘talent’ in the world of work”

This paper provides a commentary on the article in this Special Issue on “The meaning of ‘talent’ in the world of work”, welcoming its analysis of the definition, meaning and conceptualisation of talent and seeking to develop further its research recommendations. In particular, it argues that the relationships between talent and gifts should be further explored, proposes that exploring its use in other languages than English would be useful, and suggests comparing its identification and development in management and other fields, especially sport and the arts. It also proposes multidisciplinary research and research into talent and talent management in various contexts, including sectorial, cultural, institutional and structural contexts. Finally, it proposes that factors which influence how talent is identified need further analysis, and perspectives from resource-based theories, ethical theories, development economics, and social capital theories should be utilised.     

The communicative constitution of IT innovation

This paper contributes to studies of IT innovation, by approaching discourse and technology not as alternating causalities of change, but rather as constitutive to processes of change. Drawing on a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective, the paper provides an analysis of oral and written evidence on innovations in the English National Programme for IT (NPfIT) from 1998 to 2011. The paper makes two key contributions to the literature. First, it offers a longitudinal empirical understanding of how IT innovation is constituted in the triadic relationship between human and nonhuman actors, and the narrative texts in which the delegation between the first two occurs. The paper explores the implications of this renewed understanding of IT innovation for IS research in sociomateriality. Second, the paper contributes to CCO-informed research by adopting a methodological approach that draws on both a historical analysis of the constitution of material objects in specific narrative texts and a rhetorical analysis of communicative actions. The paper explores the methodological implications of this approach for addressing the challenge of understanding the scaling-up of micro communicative actions to macro actions towards the constitution of IT innovation.     

Loving Diversity/Controlling Diversity: Exploring the Ambivalent Mobilization of Upper‐Middle‐Class Gentrifiers,South End,Boston

This article centers on a group of upper‐middle‐class gentrifiers living in a neighborhood in the South End of Boston, and their complex attitude towards diversity. I use data from my fieldwork in the South End, based on ethnographic observation and 77 interviews with residents active in local organizations, such as neighborhood associations. These residents explicitly stress their endorsement of diversity, in terms of class, race, but also sexual orientation, and their commitment to maintaining it. I examine the meaning they give to this principle, the actions they take in its name and the kind of relations they establish with those ‘others’ who embody such diversity. I argue that the gentrifiers' love of diversity, which cannot be reduced to sheer hypocrisy, is intrinsically linked to their capacity to control it, thus shedding light on the changing definition of social distinction in upper‐middle‐class culture.     

CROSSING MOTHER: IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS ON ORGANIZATIONAL IMPROVEMENTS

This paper uses a case study to explore a basic dilemma: can the people who control organizations develop ideologies which simultaneously facilitate stability and change? This dilemma is likely to become most apparent when people set out to improve an organization within its current ideological context but the consequences implicit in the improvements are poorly understood. The meaning and value of the improvements are then likely to be assessed differently by superiors and subordinates, and by loyal members and heretics. The case study illustrates how resources are mobilized to constrain improvement attempts in such a way that the consequences reconfirm the preexisting organizational ideologies and halt the improvement attempts [I].     

Network structure,games, and agent dynamics

Consider a group of agents embedded in a network, repeatedly playing a game with their neighbors. Each agent acts locally but through the links of the network local decisions percolate to the entire population. Past research shows that such a system converges either to an absorbing state (a fixed distribution of actions that once attained does not change) or to an absorbing set (a set of action distributions that may cycle in finite populations or behave chaotically in unbounded populations). In many network games, however, it is uncertain which situation emerges. In this paper I identify two fundamental network characteristics, boundary consistency and neighborhood overlap, that determine the outcome of all symmetric, binary-choice, network games. In quasi-consistent networks these games converge to an absorbing state regardless of the initial distribution of actions, and the degree to which neighborhoods overlap impacts the number and composition of those absorbing states.     

Stories from the Front‐line: How they Construct the Organization*

abstract Drawing on social constructionist theory this paper applies discourse analysis to ten narratives told by service delivery staff in one distribution network. The analysis looks at how the narratives construct the organization through their constructions of self (the narrator), customer and manufacturer and their constructions of the relationships linking these three sets of actors. The paper argues that the narrators construct the self either as an organizational customer or an organizational partner. The two constructions locate conflict either within the organization or at the customer–organizational boundary respectively. The implications of this are suggested. Contrasts between the manner in which organizational members construct the self as customer or partner and the construction of the organizational member in the internal customer literature are highlighted and briefly discussed.     

Playing with the Pieces: Deconstruction and the Loss of Moral Culture

This paper investigates the assumptions and implications of the notion of deconstruction as they are found in writers concerned with organization theory and organization ethnography. Deconstruction, and postmodernism generally, is shown to be a continuation of modernity's attack on cultural authority and its celebration of the ideology of individualism with its concomitant of endless criticism. Deconstruction posits the oppositional nature of language and symbolism as a 'violent hierarchy' and seeks to overturn this hierarchy to achieve human freedom. This reading of the repressive aspects of culture is shown to undermine the essential dynamic of culture, which is a recurrent splitting of what is from what is not in the process of forming meaning.
By opening up structures of meaning to expose their repressed contents, deconstruction aspires to question all authority. This is particularly threatening to the ethical aspects of organizational culture, because it suggests a continuous attempt to question the boundary between right and wrong. Indeed, orders of right and wrong are seen by deconstruction as mere political attempts at controlling an organization. Ethics is reduced to politics; authority is confused with power.
I argue here, instead, that stable structures of meaning are needed over time to found a traditional and thus legitimate base for business ethics. Contrary to deconstruction's goal of opening meaning to its repressed opposite, I assert that memory should be seen as a moral decision based on past experience. Business ethics requires stable moral standards and, no less, the capacity to believe in them.     

Linking quality & quantity

Interpretations are theoretical structures that explain empirical facts. The joint use of data from qualitative and quantitative studies can provide empirical facts for interpretation that are both valid and reliable. The examples reviewed in this article show how articulated qualitative and quantitative research can ameliorate three interrelated methodological problems that have hindered the gaining of an interpretive understanding of social actions. These are: (1) verstehen and the implementation of empirical studies to assess the subjective meaning of social actions; (2) the linking of understanding and explanation; and (3) the linking of macro and micro analysis.     

Entrepreneurship and mutuality: social capital in processes and practices

Social capital, which offers the broader theoretical construct to which networks and networking relate, is now recognized as an important influence in entrepreneurship. Broadly understood as resources embedded in networks and accessed through social connections, research has mainly focused on measuring structural, relational and cognitive dimensions of the concept. While useful, these measurements tell us little about how social capital, as a relational artefact and connecting mechanism, actually works in practice. As a social phenomenon which exists between individuals and contextualized through social networks and groups, we draw upon established social theory to offer an enhanced practical understanding of social capital – what it does and how it operates. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Putnam, we contribute to understanding entrepreneurship as a socially situated and influenced practice. From this perspective, our unit of analysis is the context within which entrepreneurs are embedded. We explored the situated narratives and practices of a group of 15 entrepreneurs from ‘Inisgrianan’, a small town in the northwest of Ireland. We adopted a qualitative approach, utilizing an interpretive naturalistic philosophy. Findings show how social capital can enable, and how the mutuality of shared interests allows, encourages and engages entrepreneurs in sharing entrepreneurial expertise.     

The Sociomaterial Negotiation of Social Entrepreneurs’ Meaningful Work

This research examines the role of digital technology in the constitution of meaningful work. Adopting a sociomaterial perspective, we argue that meaningful work emerges as an outcome of a complex negotiation between individuals and their digital devices. This process was explored through video diaries and interviews with social entrepreneurs, capturing moments of their everyday meaning‐making and encouraging reflexivity. Accounting for their sociomaterial practice led participants to reaffirm their work as uniquely meaningful, produce more nuanced accounts of meaningfulness and/or make pragmatic adjustments to their meaning making. Whilst authenticity was a key meta‐narrative in these accounts, it also produced tensional knots which, in their unravelling, required the adoption of more practicable meanings of work. The paper concludes by urging scholars to de‐centre the human from their analysis to provide a more complete account of meaningful work.     

Dress and Identity: A Turkish Case Study

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–narratives are likely to be fractured, contested and multi–layered. It is in this context that attire is an important object symbol that conveys information about the individual and collective self. Here we focus on aspects of dress, especially the Islamic headscarf, and its role in the dynamics of collective identity maintenance and challenge in one all–female Turkish university department. Our ethnographic approach yielded multiple, related and sometimes overlapping story lines centred on dress. These we have chosen to represent as a single though multi–voiced faculty narrative in order to facilitate analysis of what was a particularly rich symbolic milieu. The principal research contribution of this paper is as a discussion of participants' clothing in the constitution of individual and organizational narrative identities, and its importance for understanding the dynamics of identity conflicts.