Suchergebnisse

Based on a case study, this paper elaborates on the psychological regimes of truth that organize and regulate male parenting and partly constitute the conditions of possibility for male identity and subjectivity both as fathers and employees. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the discursive-cultural constraints that Western managers and employees — males in particular — may face when trying to pursue a better work/life balance. Based on an empirical analysis of expert literature on male parenting, the paper argues that prevalent psychological regimes of truth about fathers and fathering do not necessarily render enactable the sorts of identities that enable both men and women to achieve a better work/life balance.

This paper takes a strategy-as-practice perspective on the study of strategy tools and the theory-practice gap in strategic management research. Based on a case study, the paper argues that differences in epistemic culture may complicate communication and co-operation between academics and practitioners. These differences may also result in management scholars producing knowledge and strategy tools that lack practical pertinence for corporate actors, particularly in the context of modernist management scholars and contemporary post-bureaucratic knowledge organizations (PBOs). In PBOs, where flexibility, participative management style and consensus building dialogue are emphasized, modernist strategy tools designed for rational problem solving by individual decision-makers may be inadequate. In PBOs, practical strategy work calls for tools that support collective knowledge production, promote dialogue and trust, and function as learning tools. Overall, the paper concludes that the development of strategy tools that actually support practical strategizing calls for a more social model of knowledge and strategy work.

In the contemporary conditions of neoliberal governmentality, and the emerging 'gig economy,' standard employment relationships appear to be giving way to precarious work. This article examines the mechanisms of biopower and techniques of managerial control that underpin—and produce consent for—precarious work and nonstandard work arrangements. Based on an ethnographic study, the article shows how a globally operating direct sales organization deploys particular techniques of government to mobilize and manage its precarious workers as a network of enterprise-units: as a community of active and productive economic agents who willingly reconstitute themselves and their lives as enterprises to pursue self-efficacy, autonomy and self-worth as individuals. The article contributes to the literature on organizational power, particularly Foucauldian studies of the workplace, in three ways: (1) by building a theoretical analytics of government perspective on managerial control that highlights the nondisciplinary, biopolitical forms of power that underpin employment relations under the conditions of neoliberal governmentality; (2) by extending the theory of enterprise culture to the domain of precarious work to examine the mechanisms of biopower that underpin ongoing transformations in the sphere of work; and (3) by shifting critical attention to the lived experience of precarious workers in practice.

This paper focuses on the dynamics and interplay of meaning, emotions, and power in institutional work. Based on an empirical study, we explore and elaborate on the rhetorical strategies of emotion work that institutional actors employ to mobilize emotions for discursive institutional work. In an empirical context where a powerful institutional actor is tasked with creating support and acceptance for a new political and economic institution, we identify three rhetorical strategies of emotion work: eclipsing, diverting and evoking emotions. These strategies are employed to arouse, regulate, and organize emotions that underpin legitimacy judgments and drive resistance among field constituents. We find that actors exercise influence and engage in overt forms of emotion work by evoking shame and pride to sanction and reward particular expedient ways of thinking and feeling about the new institutional arrangements. More importantly, however, the study shows that they also engage in strategies of discursive institutional work that seek to exert power—force and influence—in more subtle ways by eclipsing and diverting the collective fears, anxieties, and moral indignation that drive resistance and breed negative legitimacy evaluations. Overall, the study suggests that emotions play an important role in institutional work associated with creating institutions, not only via "pathos appeals" but also as tools of discursive, cultural-cognitive meaning work and in the exercise of power in the field.

Purpose
– The purpose of the paper is to discuss and illustrate how contemporary market discourses rearticulate socio-political relationships and identities, including the rights, duties, and opportunities of individuals and categories of individuals as citizens. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze how "economic citizenship" is articulated and negotiated in the intersection of (Nordic) welfare state ideals and shareholder-oriented market discourses. The paper further elaborates on how different identity markers, especially gender and class, intersect in these articulations and contribute to exclusionary practices.


Design/methodology/approach
– The paper approaches the articulation of economic citizenship through an empirical study that focusses on business media representations and online discussions of a major factory shutdown in Finland. Drawing from discourse theory and the notions of representational intersectionality and translocational positionality, the paper analyzes how gender and class intersect in the construction of economic citizenship in the business media.


Findings
– The study illustrates how financialist market discourses render citizenship intelligible in exceedingly economic terms, overriding social and political dimensions of citizenship. The business media construct hierarchies of economic citizens where two categories of actors claim full economic citizenship: the transnational corporation and the transnational investor. Within these categories, particular systems of privilege intersect in similar ways, rendering them masculine and upper middleclass. Whether interpreted as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, the financialist discourses rearticulate the social hierarchies and moral landscape in Finnish society.


Originality/value
– The paper contributes to critical/feminist management studies by elaborating on the role of the business media as an important site of political identity work, positioning, and moral regulation, where neoliberal ideas, based upon and reproducing masculine and elitist systems of privilege, appear as normalized and self-evidently valued.

Are organizational projects for refugee and migrant inclusion always trapped with the logic of exclusion and inequality that they seek to dismantle? Existing literature on critical diversity and inclusion studies has demonstrated how the "doing" of inclusion in organizations tends to come with paradoxical effects: well-intended efforts to include migrants and refugees construct them as vulnerable, non-autonomous subjects who need help, within a hierarchical order that is taken for granted. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how three civil society organizations (CSOs) navigate these paradoxical effects and the unduly constraining power relations involved through practices that we theorize as counter-conduct against the pastoral government of a national refugee and migrant integration regime. The analysis identifies three practices of counter-conduct through which organizations "do inclusion differently": contesting constraining categorizations, problematizing hierarchical power relations, and questioning the assimilationist goals and principles of the integration regime. We argue that through continuous critique and renegotiation of the ways in which boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are drawn within the integration regime, organizations work toward conditions in which power relations remain fluid and allow for strategies to alter them.

This article focuses on the dynamics and interplay of meaning, emotions, and power in institutional work. Based on an empirical study, we explore and elaborate on the rhetorical strategies of emotion work that institutional actors employ to mobilize emotions for discursive institutional work. In an empirical context where a powerful institutional actor is tasked with creating support and acceptance for a new political and economic institution, we identify three rhetorical strategies of emotion work: eclipsing, diverting and evoking emotions. These strategies are employed to arouse, regulate, and organize emotions that underpin legitimacy judgments and drive resistance among field constituents. We find that actors exercise influence and engage in overt forms of emotion work by evoking shame and pride to sanction and reward particular expedient ways of thinking and feeling about the new institutional arrangements. More importantly, however, the study shows that they also engage in strategies of discursive institutional work that seek to exert power—force and influence—in more subtle ways by eclipsing and diverting the collective fears, anxieties, and moral indignation that drive resistance and breed negative legitimacy evaluations. Overall, the study suggests that emotions play an important role in institutional work associated with creating institutions, not only via "pathos appeals" but also as tools of discursive, cultural-cognitive meaning work and in the exercise of power in the field.