Advertising,avoiding, disrupting,and tabooing: The discursive construction of diversity subjects in the Turkish context

This study investigates organizational diversity discourses in Turkey – a non-Western, politically relevant, yet underrepresented context. Using a Foucauldian perspective on power and discourse, we scrutinize how power relations in the Turkish context are (re)produced. Based on our analysis of company websites and semi-structured interviews with various actors (e.g., HR managers), we propose a conceptual framework of the discursive construction of diversity subjects at work along the dimensions of (1) visibility of organizational diversity discourses and (2) contestation of meaning within organizational diversity discourses. The combination of these dimensions yields four discursive dynamics as illustrated in our data (Advertising, Avoiding, Disrupting, Tabooing). This framework may inspire future context- and power-sensitive investigations on diversity discourses at the workplace.     

‘Totally Un‐Australian!’: Discursive and Institutional Interplay in the Melbourne Port Dispute of 1997–98*

ABSTRACT We examine how discourses are mobilized and deployed by actors in an inter‐organizational domain during a critical industrial relations event. We identify the ways that business interests and union interests in the Melbourne Port industrial dispute of 1997–98 related to each other. We weave concepts from domain theory and organizational discourse theory in deriving the concept of the discursively ordered domain. This suggests that the main processes that occur in a domain are actors’‘mapping’ texts onto discourses and discourses onto interpretive schemes which make certain courses of action rational and sensible. Methodologically, we join an institutional‐historical analysis and a text‐based discourse analysis to gain a well‐rounded understanding of the situation. We extract several discursive frameworks which the major actors mobilized to make sense of the situation, and draw linkages to the actions that those positions made possible. The main findings are that actors in the two networks performed complex mapping in different ways, the material and symbolic outcomes of the dispute are products of those mapping processes, and the material and discursive aspects of the domain interweave. We discuss the value of the concept of discursively ordered domain for mutually enriching domain theory and discourse analysis and for understanding critical events such as major industrial disputes in new ways.     

From National Service to Global Player: Transforming the Organizational Logic of a Public Broadcaster

We present organizational logics as a meso‐level construct that lies between institutional theory's field‐level logics and the sense‐making activities of individual agents in organizations. We argue that an institutional logic can be operationalized empirically using the concept of a discourse – that is, a coherent symbolic system articulating what constitutes legitimate, reasonable, and effective conduct in, around, and by organizations. An organization may, moreover, be simultaneously exposed to several institutional logics that make up its broader ideational environment. Taking these three observations together enables us to consider an organizational logic as a spatially and temporally localized configuration of diverse discourses. We go on to show how organizational logics were transformed in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation between 1953 and 1999 by examining the changing discourses that appeared in the Corporation's annual reports. We argue that these discourses were modified through three main forms of discursive agency: (1) undertaking acts of ironic accommodation between competing discourses; (2) building chains of equivalence between the potentially contradictory discourses; and (3) reconciling new and old discourses through pragmatic acts of ‘bricolage’. We found that, using these forms of discursive agency, a powerful coalition of actors was able to transform the dominant organizational logic of the ABC from one where the Corporation's initial mission was to serve national interests through public service to one that was ultimately focused on participating in a globalized media market. Finally, we note that discursive resources could be used as the basis for resistance by less powerful agents, although further research is necessary to determine exactly how more powerful and less powerful agents interact around the establishment of an organizational logic.     

Managing Discursive Tension: the Co–Existence of Individualist and Collaborative Discourses in Flight Centre

Our study of the travel agency Flight Centre began as a case study of a company that appears to be a 'success story' in what is a highly competitive industry. In the course of our study we found that inscribed in Flight Centre were two, differing discourses which appear to co–exist in creative tension throughout the organization. One discourse is competitive individualism and the other collaborative teamwork. Our paper focuses on how Flight Centre has made use of multiple discourses such as these in the process of achieving competitive advantage, and how people manage the differing discursive logics which confront them on a day–to–day basis. The paper proceeds by identifying the social and textual practices which constitute each discourse. It then establishes the discursive co–existence and tension which exists between the two discourses. Study is made of the conditions under which this discursive co–existence is disrupted. We then identify the interpretative routines and practices through which organizational actors maintain and reproduce discursive co–existence. Our paper concludes by considering a variety of implications of studying multiple discourses in organizations.     

The language of social entrepreneurs

This paper questions the application of the entrepreneurship discourse to social entrepreneurship in the UK and looks at how people ‘doing’ social enterprise appropriate or re-write the discourse to articulate their own realities. Drawing on phenomenological enquiry and discourse analysis, the study analyses the micro discourses of social entrepreneurs, as opposed to the meta rhetorics of (social) entrepreneurship. Analysis using both corpus linguistics software and Critical Discourse Analysis showed a preoccupation among interviewees with local issues, collective action, geographical community and local power struggles. Echoes of the enterprise discourse are evident but couched in linguistic devices that suggest a modified social construction of entrepreneurship, in which interviewees draw their legitimacy from a local or social morality. These findings are at odds ideologically with the discursive shifts of UK social enterprise policy over the last decade, in which a managerially defined rhetoric of enterprise is used to promote efficiency, business discipline and financial independence. The paper raises critical awareness of the tension in meanings appropriated to the enterprise discourse by social enterprise policy and practice and illustrates the value of discourse analysis for entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship research.     

Telling and selling the value of diversity and inclusion—External consultants' discursive strategies and practices

On the basis of a qualitative study of a subgroup of diversity professionals, external diversity and inclusion (D&I) consultants, we explore D&I consultants' discursive strategies and practices situated within organisational structures, relations, and interactions of power and knowledge. Theoretically, the research reveals how D&I consultants' own discursive strategies interact with existing organisational and societal discourses of diversity, incrementally shaping their continual evolution. A classification is developed, which sets out four approaches taken by consultants with regard to their discursive strategies in relation to clients. The findings suggest that HR practitioners need to work in tandem with external consultants to develop strategies to improve the status and legitimacy of diversity work if the field is to progress the organisational D&I agenda.     

Struggling with Meaningfulness when Context Shifts: Volunteer Work in a German Refugee Shelter

This article draws on an ethnographic study of volunteer work in a German refugee shelter to explore how individual experiences of meaningfulness are intertwined with shifting discursive and organisational contexts. At the beginning of the so‐called refugee crisis, societal discourses portrayed this volunteer work as extraordinarily meaningful – a state we capture through the metaphor of ‘overflow’. This ‘overflow’ mobilised volunteers and was an important point of reference for framing their work experiences as meaningful. Later, shifting discursive and organisational contexts challenged their framings. Instead of letting go, however, the ‘overflow’ triggered volunteers to reframe their experience in dysfunctional ways in order to sustain their sense of meaningfulness. This paper reveals how shifting societal discourses feed into individual experiences of meaningfulness, shows how individuals may respond to such shifts in problematic ways and theorises the nature of such shifts in drawing on Swidler’s notion of settling contexts.     

A Tale of Three Discourses: The Dominant,the Strategic and the Marginalized*

abstract This study drew from a structurational view of discourse and employed a discourse analysis approach based on rhetoric and hermeneutics to analyse the organizational discourses operating in the UK operations of a global human resources consulting firm, People Associates. The aims were firstly to understand in what sense we can speak of ‘modes of discourse’ in organizational settings; secondly to explore the potential existence and nature of interrelations among different modes of discourse; and thirdly to explore the constructive potential of modes of discourse on their social and organizational contexts. The results suggest that modes of discourse can usefully be seen as rhetorical enthymemes constituted of relatively stable, normative structures and flexible, action‐oriented structures; that modes of discourse can interrelate through their deeper structural features, and can have mutually co‐optive or antagonistic relationships; and lastly that the constructive potential of discourse is based primarily on its deeper structures, and on the consonance of surface communicative actions with these structures. This research thus sheds light on fundamental definitional and substantive issues in organizational discourse; in particular offering a novel conceptualization of the nature of discourse, a further understanding of discursive interrelations, and finally one way to understand its constructive effects on social organizations.     

The (Re)Making of Polycentricity in China's Planning Discourse: The Case of Tianjin

Polycentricity is promoted as an ideal urban form to achieve sustainable and balanced development, and it has been widely adopted by planners in China, especially in large cities. However, the rhetoric about polycentricity has rarely been interrogated in planning research in terms of scales, contextuality, power and rationality. To fill this gap, we carried out a Foucauldian discourse analysis in our research to interpret the nature of polycentric practice in City Master Plans, using Tianjin as a case study. Through an analysis of how the discourse of polycentricity is being deployed in planning documents, we develop two principal arguments in this article. First, the conceptual substance of polycentricity evolved alongside the urban transition process in China, and its discursive practice involved multiple scales and spatial elements. Secondly, rather than being mere technocratic practice, the production and legitimation of distinct discourses of polycentricity is an articulation of multi-scalar power involving various stakeholders, which is disguised and justified by the planning profession.     

A language perspective to environmental management and corporate responsibility

Few environmental management scholars have applied a research approach that focuses on analysing the language use through which managers and other societal actors come to describe, explain or otherwise account for environmental and social problems. This article discusses some of the important benefits that treating linguistic materials as ‘sites of language use’ offers for studying corporate responsibilities in various societal challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and poverty. Findings from a longitudinal discourse analysis of the debate between a leading global forest industry company (Stora Enso) and a global environmental organization (Greenpeace) demonstrate the utility of a research approach that focuses on the discussants' language use. The article shows how the application of a language perspective opens up new avenues for understanding how certain ways of talking about corporate responsibilities may hinder or facilitate our efforts to steer corporate actions into a more balanced relationship with nature and society. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Minority Employees Engaging with (Diversity) Management: An Analysis of Control,Agency, and Micro‐Emancipation*

abstract This study analyses how minority employees engage with control in organizations. Differently from most critical studies of diversity management, which focus on how minority employees are discursively controlled, we approach (diversity) management as a constellation of both identity‐regulating discourses and bureaucratic controls. We assume that minority employees are agents who actively resist and/or comply with the constellation of controls they are subject to. Based on qualitative data collected in a technical drawing company and a hospital, the specific constellation of controls in each organization is first reconstructed. Four interviews with minority employees are then analysed in depth, showing how their engagement with material and discursive controls creates both constraints and possibilities of micro‐emancipation.     

Barriers to Managing Diversity in a UK Constabulary: The Role of Discourse

The literature on diversity management has tended to obfuscate some of the theoretical and methodological shortcomings associated with research in this area. Specifically, the literature tends to make a number of rather naïve assumptions about the experiences and aspirations of disadvantaged groups. This paper seeks to problematize the universalist and partisan tendencies that typify much of the diversity literature by focusing on the issue of 'resistance'. Using a form of discourse analysis informed by Foucauldian principles, the paper explores how 'resistance' to diversity initiatives is expressed by both 'dominant' and 'subordinated' groups in a UK police force. It is argued that 'resistance' is better thought of as a discursive resource that can be drawn upon to justify or account for one's own organizational experiences and, in turn, the need to both justify and account for one's experiences is located in broader discursive fields that reproduce dominant ideologies of liberal democracies. The theoretical implications of this position are discussed and a case is presented for more critical and theoretical approaches in the diversity management literature.     

Discourse as the means of community creation

The concept of “discourse communities” has wide use in education and linguistics, but has not yet been incorporated into studies of organizing. We would like to propagate the term in the context of organizing, as it extends the commonly accepted Foucault's insight that discourses tend to create their objects. One could add that discourses also create the identities of their participants. The concept is used in this paper as an analytical tool for three cases. We begin with the case of an attempt to create a new discourse community to replace an existing one. Following the logic of grounded theory, the analysis moves to a similar case—the creation of a discourse community around a product development project. The third case, although portraying a different process—an international acquisition—reveals a pattern similar to the second one. These cases demonstrate that discourses can both create and dissolve boundaries around a discourse community, and that although discourse is often used to create inclusion, it may also recreate the traditional patterns of exclusion.     

The governmentality of marketing discourse

This paper provides a reading of mainstream academic marketing discourse based upon Foucault's concept of governmentality. Three periods of marketing thought are identified, described and analyzed—‘early marketing thought’ (c. 1900–1960), ‘marketing management’ (c. 1950–1985) and ‘service management’ (c. 1975–present). For these three periods, respectively, our focus is on analyzing what marketing seeks to govern, how marketing governs, and who we become when governed by marketing. It is argued that customer orientation has become the dominant governmental discursive practice in marketing—it has embedded marketing discourse more and more deeply over time. By exposing the governmental rationality of marketing, this paper provides a basis for resisting and deconstructing marketing discourse.     

The Recontextualization of Management: A Discourse‐based Approach to Analysing the Development of Management Thinking*

ABSTRACT Many analysts have sought to explain the development and growth of management ideas and discourse in recent years, using notions such as the diffusion and consumption of ideas, and analogies with the fashion industry. These frameworks have a number of weaknesses that inhibit their value. Conceptualizing management knowledge or ideas or thinking as a form of discourse leads us to alternative frameworks for examining developments in this field. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be used to explore the social processes and structures from which discourse emanates and which discourse in turn underpins. Bernstein's concept of recontextualization can be employed to analyse the discursive relations between different social spheres or conjunctures within which human action takes place and how discourse is changed as it moves between conjunctures to meet the needs of different social agents. In this respect it can be used to analyse how management discourse unfolds as it is produced, distributed and acquired by agents within the academic, consultant and practitioner conjunctures. By doing so we can explore: the intertextual relations between the discourses; how the management discourse becomes technologized; and how hybrid forms of discourse, which mix genres and styles, emerge.     

Knowing What You Don’t Know? Discourses and Contradictions in Knowledge Management Research

ABSTRACT Even though knowledge management scholars generally advocate explicit management of knowledge, there is research that cautions against the unintended consequences of such efforts. Some researchers go as far as arguing that knowledge and management are contradictory concepts ( Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001 ). This paper explores the apparent double‐edged nature of knowledge management by developing a theory‐based framework that highlights different fundamental assumptions about knowledge and its management. This framework, which is an adaptation of Burrell and Morgan's four paradigms of social and organizational inquiry, distinguishes among a neo‐functionalist, a constructivist, a critical and a dialogic discourse. We use the contradiction of managing tacit knowledge, which has been highlighted in the knowledge management literature, as an analytical device to explore the four discourses in more detail. We show how notions of knowledge, and what it means to manage knowledge, vary across the four discourses. We conclude that all four discourses need to be appreciated, understood and represented in knowledge management research for this area of inquiry to deal with the rich and problematic nature of managing knowledge in practice.     

Unpacking linguistic devices and discursive strategies in online social movement organizations: Evidence from anti-vaccine online communities

This study investigates linguistic devices and discursive strategies employed by online social movement organizations (SMOs) in attempts to deinstitutionalize long-standing, institutionalized behaviors. The research draws from an in-depth analysis of public discourse within anti-vaccine online communities in Italy and contributes to the social movement literature on framing and the theory of discursive institutionalization. It employs semi-automated text-analysis methods and interpretive analysis of textual data from seven anti-vaccine social media communities, before and subsequent to the 2017 regulatory intervention of the Italian government to increase vaccination rates. This intervention followed a phase of intense debate centered on the decrease in vaccination coverage and the spread of anti-vaccine ideas in social media as well as in the broader public discourse. The study analyzes the discursive strategies and linguistic devices of community leaders (moderators) and followers (members), and investigates shifts in micro-level online anti-vaccine discursive strategies that developed after the government regulation. The findings suggest that anti-vaccine online SMOs employ specific sets of linguistic devices, namely rhetorical fallacies, that support well-defined discursive strategies such as those aiming to delegitimize actors that endorse vaccines. Furthermore, the evidence shows that these linguistic devices and discursive strategies, after the government regulation, shift from an evidence-based stance towards values and emotions-based argumentations.     

I Don't Need Leadership: An Exploration of the Societal Discourse of Leadership

Even with a myriad of definitions of leadership, we still know little about the discourse of leadership in which those of us without formal leadership education and development are embedded. Through a discourse analysis of interviews with a broad cross‐section of 12 “followers,” the current study begins exploring the idea of a societal discourse of leadership and how that discourse complements and conflicts with the academic and workplace discourses. Analysis shows that although individuals define leadership in a similar fashion to the academic discourse, they identify heroic figures as leaders, and they neither look for, nor feel they need, leadership in their own lives.     

Local discourse and global competition: production experiences in family workshops of the Brianza

One of the most important consequences of post‐Fordist global restructuring has been the ‘deterritorialization’ of capital and its increasing geographic expansion. Another and quite different view emphasizes the fact that capitalist activity can be organized by means of localized or territorially based systems of specialized production. In this article my purpose is to show how these two disciplinary discourses are actually not mutually exclusive. Developed local economies are not immune from concerns of deterritorialization, nor should their economic achievement gloss over the glitches that are emerging at the local level due to stiffer global competition. These two aspects become immediately apparent as I illustrate the local discourse that emerges among workshop owners within an industrial district of the Brianza in the Italian region of Lombardy. After a discussion about the origin and the characteristics of this regional economy, I illustrate by way of ethnographic examples how innovation and competitiveness within and outside this industrial district mask forms of exploitation and contradictions amidst family‐run workshops. In discursive terms, exploitation is articulated in various ways, but two in particular seem to be most recurrent in the narrative of small entrepreneurs of this region. One is the ideology of ‘hard work’ and the other, more recently heard of, is the ideology of ‘high quality product’. In the brief concluding section I will stress the point that these two discourses emerging from exploitative social relations of production are to be viewed as responses to the concerns regarding the possible deterritorialization of some factories and the increasing competition with crossboundary markets.     

The workplace integration of veterans: Applying diversity and fit perspectives

Military veterans are a valuable part of the human capital resource pool. Nonetheless, veterans often struggle with their transition into civilian life and workplaces. This problem often limits the extent to which work organizations utilize their talents. Here, we briefly review relevant work from outside the management field and nascent work within the field to build a conceptual model for understanding the integration of veterans into the workplace. We do this by applying diversity and person-environment fit perspectives. A diversity standpoint helps us to understand veterans as a social group and their inclusion in the workplace, while the person-environment fit perspective helps us describe veterans’ compatibility with their work environments in terms of organizational demands and veterans’ needs. We intend for this conceptual model to guide future empirical research on veterans as human capital and their transition into civilian organizations as part of their societal reintegration, career development, and personal well-being.