Suchergebnisse

"This book critically examines sustainability challenges that humankind faces and offers responsible organising as a solution in responding to these challenges. The text explores how different actors can responsibly organise for transformative action towards sustainable outcomes, as expressed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Responsible refers to a reflexive understanding of how to organise in times of sustainability challenges. Organising refers to activities and practices where different actors take transformative action together. This comprehensive edited collection of short, clear, concise, and compelling chapters brings together scholars in a range of disciplines and blends theoretical perspectives to study humans and social interactions, organisations, nonhumans, and living environments. It offers topical examples from across the world and from organising of companies and other organisations, supply chains, networks, ecosystems, and markets. The book is written for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities as well as for practitioners working with the SDGs. It discusses complex issues in an informative and engaging way. It is critical and collaborative. The book serves as an introduction to key themes and perspectives of responsible organising and offers new insights on connections between themes and perspectives"--

In this Connexions essay, we focus on intelligent agent programs that are cutting-edge solutions of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). We explore how these programs become objects of desire that contain a radical promise to change organizing and organizations. We make sense of this condition and its implications through the idea of 'rationalized unaccountability' that is an ideological state in which power and control are exerted algorithmically. While populist uses of new technologies receive growing attention in critical organization and management studies, we argue that rationalized unaccountability is the hidden end of a spectrum of populism affecting societies across the world. Rather than populism of the masses, this is a populism of elites. This essay lays out some premises for critical scholars to expose the workings of intelligent agent programs and to call into question the problematic ideological assumptions that they are grounded in.

Feminism, historically and today, provides challenges and opportunities to men. In this essay, we present a dialogue that highlights different positions on men's activism and thought in relation to feminism. We argue that it is essential for men to engage with feminism as activists and in theory, although this may present risks subjectively, professionally and interpersonally. To illustrate our argument, we provide examples of engagement and distance from our working lives in different socio-cultural contexts. We explore questions of vulnerability and uncertainty in learning from feminism, and discuss how our privileges as (White, middle-aged, permanently employed) men condition our ambivalent experiences. The essay is oriented towards encouraging ourselves/men to articulate what feminism in action means, through research, teaching and professional identity work. We consider throughout the conditions of possibility for men in acting up with feminism in critical organization and management studies, in the hope that practical action can create better conditions of work for all of us.

In this article, we respond to Emma Bell and Amanda Sinclair's call for reclaiming eros as non-commodified energy that drives academic work. Taking our point of entry from institutional ethnography and the standpoint of junior female academics, we highlight the ambiguity experienced in the neoliberal university in relation to its constructions of potential. We elucidate how potential becomes gendered in and through discourses of passion and care: how epistemic and material detachment from the local is framed as potential and how masculinized passion directs academics to do what counts, while feminized and locally bound care is institutionally appreciated only as far as it supports individualized passion. The way passion and care shape the practices of academic writing and organize the ruling relations of potentiality are challenged through eros, an uncontrollable and un-cooptable energy and longing, which becomes a threat to the gendered neoliberal university and a source of resistance to it. By distinguishing between passion, care, and eros, our institutional ethnography inquiry helps to make sense of the conformity and resistance that characterize the ambiguous experience of today's academics.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on reflexivity in organization and management studies by scrutinizing the possibilities of self‐reflexivity.Design/methodology/approachBy means of auto‐ethnography, the authors analyze their own experiences as (pro‐)feminist men in the field of gender studies.FindingsThe authors argue that self‐reflexivity is partial, fragmentary and transient: it surfaces in situations where the authors' activities and identities as researchers are challenged by others and they become aware of their precarious position.Originality/valueThe paper's perspective complements more instrumental understandings of self‐reflexivity, and stimulates further debate on its limits as well as potential.

Although extant research has highlighted the role of discourse in the cultural construction of organizations, there is a need to elucidate the use of narratives as central discursive resources in unfolding organizational change. Hence, the objective of this article is to develop a new kind of antenarrative approach for the cultural analysis of organizational change. We use merging multinational corporations (MNCs) as a case in point. Our empirical analysis focuses on a revelatory case: the financial services group Nordea, which was built by combining Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian corporations. We distinguish three types of antenarrative that provided alternatives for making sense of the merger: globalist, nationalist, and regionalist (Nordic) antenarratives. We focus on how these antenarratives were mobilized in intentional organizational storytelling to legitimate or resist change: globalist storytelling as a means to legitimate the merger and to create MNC identity, nationalist storytelling to relegitimate national identities and interests, Nordic storytelling to create regional identity, and the critical use of the globalist storytelling to challenge the Nordic identity. We conclude that organizational storytelling is characterized by polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, and architectonic dialogisms and by a dynamic between centering and decentering forces. This paper contributes to discourse-cultural studies of organizations by explaining how narrative constructions of identities and interests are used to legitimate or resist change. Furthermore, this analysis elucidates the dialogical dynamics of organizational storytelling and thereby opens up new avenues for the cultural analysis of organizations.

Managing diversity has emerged as a timely issue in organizations operating in the global economy. We contribute to the critical literature on diversity and its management in transnational organizations by exploring ways in which diversity is discursively (re)constructed in a European Union Framework Programme project. We draw on Michel Foucault's insights on the specificity of the relations and mechanics of power, and the connections between disciplinary power, normalization and knowledge. We conceptualize the EU Framework Programme system as a disciplinary apparatus (dispositif)—a network of time-, place- and field-specific disciplining discursive practices—and approach diversity in an EU project as a technology of normalization. Managing diversity becomes thus understood both as an enabling and a limiting exercise of disciplinary power.

This article concentrates on the discursive construction of mergers and acquisitions in the media. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the article focuses on justification, legitimization and naturalization processes in three historically significant cases in the Finnish media. The analysis reveals four distinctive discourse types- `rationalistic', `cultural', `societal' and `individualistic'-and elaborates their structural characteristics. The analysis shows that rationalistic discourses typically dominate discussion, while the other discourses are subordinated to the rationalistic discursive practices. This usually means justification of particular merger or acquisition deals and legitimization of specific actions taken by management. In the longer run, this is likely to lead to naturalization of specific management practices in the mergers and acquisitions context.

We argue that privileged forms of scholarly writing in the English language perpetuate inequalities in academia. While writing and language, on the one hand, and marginalization and exclusion, on the other, are subject to critique, we propose that these are considered together as interrelated elements of an unequal academic system. We call for linguistic sensitivity to challenge the systemic inequalities that condition our writing in English and discuss this by elaborating what relationally reflexive writing can mean in organization studies. We highlight the Polish and Finnish linguistic positions from which we speak and confront hegemonic rhetorical conventions in the English language to argue for more dialogical and inclusive forms of scholarly writing.

The founders of Organization include Marta Calás and Linda Smircich who are among the most influential feminist theorists in organization studies. We take inspiration from their work to outline ideas for feminist and other critical scholars studying organizations and organizing. We draw especially on their consistent interest in transnational feminism, engagement with feminist new materialisms, and emphasis on epistemological and ontological questions about (feminist) organization studies. We highlight key theoretical points and show how feminism(s) can remain socially, societally, and globally meaningful. Our aim is to continue to create feminist organization theorizing that, as Calás and Smircich's scholarship does, remains critical and vigilant about who its knowers are, what kind of knowledge it produces, and what this knowledge is for.

We offer a critical inquiry into the faltering entry of an anthropomorphised AI (ro)bot, an algorithm without physical or visual form, into the workplace in a media consultancy company. While living a digital life in the virtual world, the ro(bot) was given a human name. We highlight the unexpected consequences the humanisation of an early form of artificial intelligence (AI) has on the affects circulating between people and the new technology and between members of different organisational groups. We argue that anthropomorphising technologies such as AI influences the affective life of organisations and amplifies existing discontent between organisational members, complicating the introduction of the technology. Focusing on human–AI interaction, our analysis reveals a rift between managers who are excited and hopeful about the future capabilities of AI and employees who are frustrated and angry about its present shortcomings. We conclude that collective affects play a central role in contemporary technology-driven organisations in which the role people play in relation to the avalanche of AI technologies is often neglected.