Is “getting started” an effective way for people to overcome the depletion effect?

Whereas most research on depletion focuses on its effect on the overall performance of a subsequent task requiring self‐control, we examine the effect of depletion on self‐control after performance has begun. Across different manipulations of depletion and using different measures of self‐control (e.g., overriding an automatic behavioural tendency, enduring on a physically demanding task, and making healthy consumption choices), the results of three studies show that when self‐control has been initiated, the effect of depletion has little influence on subsequent behaviour also requiring self‐control: in other words, “getting started” on a self‐control task attenuates the depletion effect. The results also show that the way in which self‐control starts—that is, whether people choose to regulate, or whether this choice is forced—appears irrelevant. This research clarifies an effective way to facilitate self‐control after depletion, while providing a better understanding of the process underlying depletion. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What does diversity management mean for the gender equality project in the United Kingdom? Views and experiences of organizational “actors”

There has been a shift at the organizational level away from a traditional “equal opportunity” paradigm underpinned by notions of social justice, with a specific focus on tackling gender inequalities towards a business‐led “diversity management” paradigm, with a focus on the individual and their contribution to the organization. We argue that diversity management as a concept and model has the potential to undermine the gender equality project, but drawing on a UK‐based study we conclude that whether or not it presently does so in practice is less clear. Nevertheless, our study, presenting views and experiences of multiple organizational actors, demonstrates the seductiveness of the diversity discourse, which could herald danger for the future direction and substance of the gender equality project. Copyright © 2010 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Duelling Discourses at Work: Upsetting the Gender Order

Findings of an extensive archival study of Pan American Airways (PAA) strongly support Acker's (1990) notion of the presence and importance of a dominant discourse of organizing logic in structuring a gendered order. Findings also demonstrate that the presence of alternative, but not necessarily feminist, discourses can serve to upset the gender order of organizations. Thus, we conclude that changing the organization's gender substructure (Acker, 1992b) by changing the dominant discourse or introducing competing discourses may help to destabilize “truths” and interrupt the perpetuation and reification of policies, practices, and understandings that are often taken for granted despite their ability to silence voices and privilege some groups over others. Copyright © 2011 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the discursive contest of an international M&A relationship development process within financial services

The global liberalisation of national regulated financial services’ sectors has opened up a wave of international mergers and acquisitions processes. To succeed with such processes, a positive relationship needs to be developed between involved parties. But actors within and outside involved companies in international mergers and acquisitions may have conflicting interests, not least because of national resistance to changes in domestic financial sectors. In order to study the discourse among such actors, this paper presents a theoretical view based on business relationships, highlighting the concept of legitimacy. The aim is to analyse how different actors communicate in and through the media, in order to legitimise their own actions or to delegitimise the actions of their opponents in the relationship development process. The empirical investigation is a longitudinal study of an acquisition process between two insurance companies from Sweden and South Africa. A discourse analysis shows that the relationship development process is not only a matter of rational arguments. It is rather a struggle between actors drawing on discourses that change over time, as a means to affect perceptions of legitimate behaviours to reach the preferred outcome.     

会战疫情 议谋发展 解读危机下会议业的自我救赎

自2019年12月湖北省武汉市爆发“新冠肺炎”疫情以来,疫情在两个月的时间里迅速蔓延到全国各地,对我国国民健康带来重大伤害。疫情不仅严重威胁到民众的生命健康,更对我国现阶段经济社会的发展带来巨大冲击。受此影响,中国会议行业的发展也面临严峻的挑战。受疫情影响,赛事停办、会议取消、活动延期,旅游业发展遭受沉重打击。国外游客与商旅客人纷纷改变行程或取消来华的各项商务活动。同时也促使酒店业、消费业、娱乐业、餐饮业、旅游业等会议产业多个周边领域的生产、经营活动陷入困境。众所周知,会奖六要素是构成现代会议业发展的基本条件,是会议经济的驱动力与带动力,更是拉动地区经济发展的主要推手。面对突如其来的疫情,中国会议人虽然抛开自身利益,勇于奉献。但是面对严峻的市场发展态势,如何在狙击疫情的前提下,迅速展开生产自救,在危机下如何拉动行业发展前进,已经成为时下行业关注的焦点与值得探讨的话题。     

Erratum to: Determinants of Consumer Attributions of Corporate Social Responsibility

Philanthropic giving among leaders is often assumed to be an expression of ethical leadership in both academic and media discourses; however, this assumption can overlook the ways in which philanthropy produces and is underpinned by inequality. In order to extend current understandings of ethical leadership, this study employs a critical discourse analytic approach to examine how the link between philanthropy and ethical forms of leadership is verbally and visually constructed in the media. Based on the analysis, the article demonstrates how the construction of Australian philanthropists as ethical leaders is achieved through their representation via three paradoxical identities: Aristocratic Battlers; Caring Controllers; and Publicity-Shy Celebrities. These discourses are mediated by Australian cultural norms and serve to conceal yet ultimately reinforce social and economic inequality. The article proposes that a critical discursive approach to understanding leadership ethics can help to explore the hidden or adverse effects of ostensibly ethical practices.     

Corporate Narratives of Information Society: Making Up the Mobile Consumer Subject

The purpose of the article is to study how corporate actors participate in the cultural construction of the Information Society. By means of a case study, the article explores how a multinational corporation is involved in forming consumer identities—making up the subjects of consumption—by shaping the interpretive repertoires and cultural practices that are available for consumers as members of the emerging information society. The article elaborates on the ways in which the corporation invokes a discourse of shareholder value in its visionary strategic narrative entitled Mobile Information Society, and how this discourse operates to mobilize consumer conduct in particular ways, by making up, framing and formatting the consumer as a mobile subject of the global economy. The article’s aim is to contribute to the empirical bases of policy debates about the roles and responsibilities of different market actors in the production of the information society.     

Partly primitive: discursive constructions of the domestic surfer

Various studies highlight the importance of discourses in consumer culture, yet fewer explore the historical development of these phenomena. This paper examines a long-view of the meanings and uses of primitive discourse in consumer culture. An investigation of the changing representation of indigenous Hawaiian surfing within Euro-American culture between the late-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century illustrates the ambiguous and malleable articulations of marketplace discourses. We find that over the course of this period, primitive discourses are expressed differently by changing figurations of social actors in manners that serve colonial, celebratory, contemplative and countercultural intentions. Finally, we find that the construction of surfing as a partly primitive marketplace culture combines these discourses to offer consumers a distinct and domesticated theatre of liberatory othering. Illustrating the changing possibilities and potentials for otherness in consumer culture, this paper reaffirms that contemporary marketplace cultures have complex historical roots. These legacies justify extended contextual investigations. Implications concerning representation and the politics of marketplace primitivism are discussed.     

Disentangling CEO compensation: A simultaneous examination of time,industry, and firm‐level effects

Despite decades of research, how CEO compensation is determined remains an enigma. Drawing on agency, managerial hegemony, and institutional theoretical perspectives, we use hierarchical linear modelling—a multilevel analytic technique—to examine how firm‐, industry‐, and time‐level effects drive CEO compensation in US corporations. Results show that while cash salary is mostly driven by firm‐specific factors, equity‐based compensation responds to time‐level effects with firm‐ and industry‐level effects playing a marginal role. We argue that such evidence is consistent with the institutionalization of the CEO compensation determination process through the widespread adoption of benchmark peer‐group comparisons. Such practices underlie economy‐wide changes in CEO compensation that are increasingly disconnected from other fundamental firm‐ or industry‐specific factors. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Discursive Construction of Gender in Contemporary Management Literature

This article analyses how the new type of worker is constructed in respect to gender in current management literature. It contributes to the increasing body of work in organisational theory and business ethics which interrogates management texts by analysing textual representations of gender. A discourse analysis of six texts reveals three inter-connected yet distinct ways in which gender is talked about. First, the awareness discourse attempts to be inclusive of gender yet reiterates stereotypes in its portrayal of women. Second, within the individualisation discourse, formerly discriminatory elements of gender lose their importance but a gender dimension reappears within the idea of ‹Brand You’. Third, in the new ideal discourse, women are constructed as ideal workers of the future. The article argues that there is little space within this web of discourses for an awareness of the continued inequalities experienced by women in relation to men to be voiced and that this rhetorical aporia contributes to a ‹post-feminist’ climate.     

Ethical Discourse and Canadian CA's, 1912–1997

The current study examines informal, practitioner-directed ethical discourses within the Canadian CA profession for the 1912–1997 period. Starting from the premise that ethical discourse within practitioner journals are less constrained, more flexible and timely than formal ethical codes in communicating "important" ethical information to the lay membership, we examine: (1) is the CA profession's current interest in ethics a recent phenomena?, (2) what was meant by the term ethics in earlier periods?, and (3) are current-day ethical discourses a continuation of – or break with – prior discourses? We expect that the analysis provides a necessary historical context for understanding the state of current-day ethical discussions with public accountancy.     

Sustaining critically reflective practitioners: competing with the dominant discourse

This article argues that discourse analysis can be utilized in conjunction with other forms of analysis to develop a more critical teaching and research agenda for Human Resource Development (HRD); in particular this article suggests that the introduction of a discourse analysis perspective can support and facilitate the development of critically reflective practitioners. The article highlights the tensions inherent within competing definitions of HRD and calls attention to the power of dominant discourse and argues that HRD needs to become more critical, opening up alternative discourses in order to support learning and critically reflective practice.     

Sustainable Development and Well-Being: A Philosophical Challenge

This paper aims at gaining a better understanding of the inherent paradoxes within sustainability discourses by investigating its basic assumptions. Drawing on a study of the metaphoric references operative in moral language, we reveal the predominance of the ‘well-being = wealth’ construct, which may explain the dominance of the ‘business case’ cognitive frame in sustainability discourses (Hahn et al. in Acad Manag Rev 4015:18–42, 2015a). We incorporate economic well-being variables within a philosophical model of becoming well (Küpers in Cult Organ 11(3):221–231, 2005), highlighting the way in which these variables consistently articulate a combination of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ concerns. We then compare this broad understanding of well-being with the metaphors operative in the sustainable development discourse and argue that the sustainability discourse has fallen prey to an overemphasis on the ‘business case’. We proceed to draw on Georges Bataille to challenge the predominance of these value priorities and to explore which mindshifts are required to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what is needed to enable ‘sustainable development’.     

Road bowling in Ireland: social space and the context of context

ABSTRACT

Consumer research has offered a multitude of understandings of space. While these insights have contributed both to absolute and relativistic appreciations, the discourse has tended more often towards absolute representations. Through an examination of Irish road bowling, built from a four-year ethnography, we position Henri Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space as a heuristic device that may be used to further relativistic representations of space. In doing so we expose how Irish road bowlers produce space on public roads. We find that such space and the actions of road bowlers within it are deeply influenced by both historic and contemporary socio-cultural discourses. In this way, we highlight how Lefebvre can be used to get at the context of context and offer an alternative understanding of normative and existential communitas.     

(Re)Presentations of Gender and Ethnicity in Diversity Statements on European Company Websites

This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders (investors, government, community, press etc.). Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. Val Singh received her PhD from Cranfield School of Management, where she is Senior Research Fellow in Organisational Behaviour. Her research areas include corporate governance and diversity; women directors’ careers, gender and ethnic diversity management, work/life balance, mentoring; role models, networking and impression management. She is Gender Section Editor of the Journal of Business Ethics, Associate Editor of Gender Work & Organization, and has published widely in both academic and practitioner journals. She has been a judge of the UK National Business Awards since 2003. Sébastien Point received his PhD in management from Institut d’ Administration des Entreprises, Lyon, France. He is currently Lecturer in Human Resource Management and International Management at the Université de Franche-Comté(France). He is also Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management (UK). His research interests include diversity managment, organisational discourse and impression managemnt. Current research centers on analysing organisational discourse, through both corporate annual reports and websites, often with cross-national comparisons.     

Constructing a legitimate history: crisis,legitimacy, and the atlantic schools of Business Conferences

The Atlantic Schools of Business (ASB) conference is one of the longest running academic business conferences in Canada. It continued without the structure of an organizing committee for 34 years. In its 35^th year, however, a formal structure was adopted. The adoption of formal structure provides an opportunity to look critically at the change process from various perspectives. This paper takes three interrelated approaches: reviews of archival material to provide context; surveys of ASB membership to ascertain individual perceptions of the organization's purpose; and interviews with key individuals involved in the change process to examine the decision to formalize. Our analysis shows that perceived organizational crisis and a search for enhanced legitimacy can precipitate isomorphism and exclude alternative avenues for change. Copyright © 2008 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

不负好春光复工正当时

步入三月,春暖花开。国内新冠肺炎疫情防控已经接近尾声,复工、复产则成为我国社会发展的主要工作方向。左手稳防控,右手抓经济,两者皆不误。面对危机,我国不仅在短时间内取得了显著的效果,战胜疫情。同时也给世界上了一堂具有现实意义的教研课。现在,面对国际严峻的疫情态势。我国已开始通过科学、有序的方式,陆续恢复生产生活秩序。疫情之后百业待兴,对于会议业的发展,则显得更加重要。会议业的复工、复产不仅是对全国各行业的稳定运行负责,更是对国家经济建设的重要保障。     

Dominant Articulations in Academic Business and Society Discourse on NGO–Business Relations: A Critical Assessment

Relations between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and companies have been the subject of a sharply increasing amount of publications in recent years within academic business journals. In this article, we critically assess this fast-developing body of literature, which we treat as forming a ‘business and society discourse’ on NGO–business relations. Drawing on discourse theory, we examine 199 academic articles in 11 business and society, international business, and management journals. Focusing on the dominant articulations on the NGO–business relationship and key signifiers they rely on, we analyze the problem-settings of articles in order to reveal the statements that are acceptable and appropriate within this field. Our threefold aim is to (1) identify dominant articulations of NGO–business relations in business and society discourse, (2) expose those articulations that are silenced or suppressed by these dominant articulations, and (3) critically assess possible power effects of these discursive dynamics in the field of discursivity. While business and society discourse on NGO–business relations overall remains open to many different articulations, we also find that those articulations that focus on NGO–business partnerships and governance initiatives tend to privilege collaborative and deliberative ways of engaging and marginalize more adversarial subject positions. We call for more recognition of the potentially constructive role that can be played by conflict.     

The Restructuring of Market Socialism in China: The Contribution of an “Agency” Theoretical Perspective

Most discussions of the development of market socialism in China adopt an “institutional approach” in which socioeconomic and political organizations are described as a complex set of arrangements determined by the policies and role of the Communist Party. Such institutions are often seen to be little more than passive forces responding to the imperatives and stipulations of the party. However, the character and continuing development of market socialism is far more complex than this. It is made up of interacting forces that are the outcome of the purposive actions of economic agents that, although created and nurtured by the party, create tensions within the socioeconomic structure and thereby shape the direction of societal change. It is these that constitute many of the defining characteristics of market socialism. There are, the tensions between the imperatives of an emerging market economy and the political imperatives of the party. But there are others that are determined by the goals and values of a diversity of agents within both the state‐owned and privately owned sectors of the economy. For an understanding of these, we argue in this article for the need to adopt an “agency approach,” that is, one that focuses on the key roles of actors and agencies in shaping institutional arrangements of the sort that constitute present‐day market socialism. This, we argue, does not displace an “institutional” theoretical perspective but complements it, thereby offering a more complete insight into the generic character of a socioeconomic structureÑin this case, Chinese market socialism. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.