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Despite the central role of legitimacy in social and organizational life, we know little of the subtle meaning-making processes through which organizational phenomena, such as industrial restructuring, are legitimated in contemporary society. Therefore, this paper examines the discursive legitimation strategies used when making sense of global industrial restructuring in the media. Based on a critical discourse analysis of extensive media coverage of a revolutionary pulp and paper sector merger, we distinguish and analyze five legitimation strategies: (1) normalization, (2) authorization, (3) rationalization, (4) moralization, and (5) narrativization. We argue that while these specific legitimation strategies appear in individual texts, their recurring use in the intertextual totality of the public discussion establishes the core elements of the emerging legitimating discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the role of materiality in legitimising art organising as occurs at festivals and performances. Through ethnographic fieldwork pertaining to art events and projects, we documented how legitimacy is accomplished through the very performance of art. We observed that artistic practices materialise the very norms by which they are assessed and demarcate a normative space of their own. Our paper contributes to the research on legitimacy by showing that it takes place through connection with societal norms and also through a disconnection that fosters such a distinct space. Legitimation thus corresponds to configuring the specific situation where the actions under scrutiny are legitimate; it is a continuous process that is accomplished not for but with an audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The belief in meritocracy – that advancement is based solely on individual capabilities and hard work – remains ingrained in organizations despite evidence that it is a flawed concept perpetuatings gender and other social inequalities. Critical streams of research have highlighted the ideological character of meritocracy discourse, its entrenched nature and acceptance as 'common-sense'. Less is known about how this 'meritocracy myth' is maintained, that is, how this hegemonic discourse retains its potency in day-to-day talk in organizations. We argue that leaders, given their active discursive roles and opportunities to establish and control discourses, play an important but underexamined role in the reproduction and legitimization of this seemingly progressive yet ultimately destructive discourse. We conduct a critical discourse analysis (CDA) drawing on qualitative interviews with leaders in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom focusing on their talk about women's recruitment and progression in academic roles. We identify three discursive interventions through which leaders routinely maintain and reinforce and on occasion challenge the existing system of meritocracy: invisibilizing gender inequality through gender-neutrality; denying constraints through individualization ; and problematizing meritocracy to uphold or challenge the status quo. We argue that by uncovering the means through which meritocracy discourse retains its resilience, our paper offers the opportunity to scrutinize and challenge these discursive underpinnings that uphold the 'meritocracy myth'. We suggest that it is possible to re-imagine what might be considered 'merit worthy' in universities, recognizing and centring structural gender and other social inequalities to create more equal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report on how middle managers in a Russian subsidiary translate empowerment, a 'western' management concept imposed by the Finnish headquarters. The analysis shows that in their discursive struggles these middle managers mobilised proverbs to address competing discourses that reflected imported and local ideals of good management. We advance organisational translation research by highlighting the value of proverbs as an understudied discursive resource in translation activities on the ground. The paper also examines the dual role of middle managers as both translators and implementers of an imported and imposed concept in a multinational corporation. Translation work carried out by middle managers in multinationals has received limited attention in previous research. Finally, by bringing together the discursive and the interlingual, we join recent efforts to broaden the definition of translation to encompass translation work undertaken in multilingual organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deviation from normative practices is common in established categories, stimulating category gatekeepers to reevaluate their approaches to defining and enforcing category boundaries and meanings. While scholars agree that categories are mutable and dynamic, we lack a theoretical framework explaining the mechanisms through which practice deviation stimulates category change. Using structural topic modeling and inductive hand-coding of a large text corpus, I analyse critical reviews of jazz records between 1968 and 1975 to show the discursive mechanisms through which gatekeepers codify change in cultural categories. As jazz musicians experimented with new practices associated with a style now known as jazz fusion, critics discursively reordered their criteria for assessing membership, quality, and value in jazz music, expanding the jazz category into new realms yet retaining its semantic coherence. This paper contributes to research on category dynamics including change and subcategorization, and extends knowledge of category maintenance and gatekeeping in cultural fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the call for more focus on how micro-level processes of identity regulation are shaped by, and constitutive of, wider societal institutions. We provide a case study of identity regulation in a Chinese multinational and show how senior managers in the firm draw on distinctive national and organizational contexts in China to construct, reinforce and reproduce a particular set of identities for employees. These identities draw upon discourses in the wider Chinese context which reflect the struggle of China to become a major industrial power after a century of humiliation by the West and the need for employees to provide this extra effort in the face of the existential challenges faced by the company and by the country. We demonstrate how managers create specific HR mechanisms that intertwine these discourses with the identities of employees and with the identity of the organization. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how micro-processes of identity work and mid-level processes of identity regulation and firm strategy are linked to macro-level institutional structures. Based on the framework provided, the paper discusses how far similar identity regulation mechanisms could be adopted elsewhere where similar macro-level discourses might be available, first in other Chinese MNCs, second, in other East Asian countries such as South Korea, third, more widely in emergent economies where MNCs are embedded in state-driven forms of capitalism, and finally in developed economies where populist nationalism is becoming increasingly influential. In this way, studies of identity regulation can bring organization studies into greater dialogue with other social sciences concerned with wider institutional change and continuity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the discursive construction of difference can shape resistance in organizations. Drawing on an inductive study of international teams in a global leadership programme, the paper reveals how difference is discursively produced and reproduced in team members’ talk. In conditions of normalizing control, the majority of teams engage in individuating practices that reinforce internal differences, preclude group cohesion and marginalize certain members. One team, however, explicitly resists programme stipulations in ways that express members’ heterogeneity and simultaneously reinforce group solidarity and inclusion. Referring to these oppositional practices as ‘resistance through difference’, the article describes how dissent challenges the hierarchies and disciplinary practices embedded in the leadership programme, and theorizes the co-constitution of inclusion and resistance. By examining the construction of difference not as ‘a problem’, but as a productive resource, the paper also addresses the generative outcomes of this managerial resistance. We argue that ‘resistance through difference’ is an important form of dissent that could well become more prevalent as globalized business processes expand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While temporality is generally acknowledged as a critical ingredient in processes of identity formation, studies of identity talk usually assume collective identity is essentially about establishing or facilitating a sense of temporal self-continuity. These studies do not detail how organizational actors might recast their identity narratives and reflectively put together stories about a changing or changed identity. The ethnographic research presented in this article reports how the editors of a Dutch national newspaper constructed their newspaper's identity in temporal discontinuity talk, discursively constructing a contrast between the 'old' and the 'new', between legacies from a common past and plans for the future. As the organizational identity literature is primarily focused on talk of temporal continuities, I draw on studies of organizational change and nostalgic and 'postalgic' narratives in order to develop an understanding of the temporal dimension of collective identity talk that does not rule out, but incorporates, discontinuity and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant literature on organizational storytelling assumes storytelling to be context-bound, but does not empirically detail or theorize how storytelling might differ across organizational settings. In the context of members' everyday work lives, organizational storytelling research tends to focus on the content of stories and not on the actual telling. By addressing this omission, this paper makes three contributions. First, we offer a generic framework for analysing storytelling in situ by zooming in on the situated occurrence of storytelling through a focus on four questions: (1) What makes an event tellable? (2) What triggers its telling? (3) What form does the storytelling take? (4) What work does it do? By using ethnographic data gathered on storytelling in everyday police work, we empirically substantiate this framework. Our second contribution, then, is to show how a setting-specific approach to studying storytelling may help to flesh out a fuller, more grounded account of story life in organizations. Finally, we propose a typology of different forms of setting-specific discourse – meeting-room talk, workstation talk, canteen talk and closed-door talk – which allows researchers to further sensitize organizational research to the situated nature of organizational discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that knowledge on `organizational culture' has acquired authority and constitutes a `truth' on mergers, a truth imbued with both enabling and constraining power effects. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the paper theorizes `organizational culture' as a discursive formation that is implicated in a regime of truth. This regime has involved a process of disciplinary normalization in merger integration with the result that `culture' has become naturalized to `organization'. Drawing on ethnographic research into merger integration, these arguments are illustrated through two vignettes titled `surveillance' and `sanctuary'. These represent the reproduction of, and resistance to, the truth effects of `organizational culture'. The implications of critically examining `organizational culture' in this way are twofold: first, it opens up space for other merger discourses, and second, it enables positioning of merger accounts within cultural discourses in a way that forwards productive rather than divisive effects in theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the discourse of personnel psychology through reference to the work of Michel Foucault. It particularly focuses on the personnel psychology discursive practices known as assessment centres, since they represent one of the most advanced technologies of personnel psychology and form part of `best practice' prescription, both for efficient personnel management, and as a means of protecting equal opportunities. The discursive development of assessment centres is examined through a detailed analysis of their development and deployment as War Office Selection Boards (or `WOSBs') during the Second World War. The paper argues that the deployment of WOSBs deviated from prescribed practice and from the logic and discipline of personnel psychology discourse. In consequence, they could not remain a reliable guarantor of efficient personnel management, or protect equal opportunity. This deviation is discussed in relation to limitations of applying Foucauldian analysis to the study of discourse and human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how people’s subjectively construed identities are disciplined by, and appropriated from, their talk about organizational routines. Identity work, we argue, is not just an expression of agency but also of power. Based on a study of a UK regional law firm, our research counter-balances understandings of professional lawyers as autonomous knowledge-workers, and emphasizes instead the extent of their subjection to disciplinary processes. It shows that power is intrinsic to discursive constructions of routine processes of organizing. We examine lawyers’ accounts of their time-keeping and billing routine, and how these both fabricated their identities, and how individuals said that they confronted, shifted and perverted organizationally sanctioned systems of meaning. The research contribution of this paper is to examine empirically and to theorize how discourse about routines both disciplines and is a resource for identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper puts forward a discursive devices approach to analysing the linguistic practices involved in the translation of management ideas. The paper draws on empirical data from a study of a quality improvement initiative in a UK public—private partnership. To illustrate our argument, we examine the discursive devices skilfully employed by two change champions during a training session to introduce staff to the new quality regime. Drawing insights from the field of discursive psychology, we analyse how a variety of discursive devices, such as footing, are employed to translate the idea during dialogue between sellers and recipients. We suggest that skilful variation can play a relevant role in the translation of management ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the preferred self-conceptions of men in an elite military unit-the British Parachute Regiment - were disciplined by the organizationally based discursive resources on which they drew. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, we argue that preferred self-conceptions (i.e. desired identities) are mechanisms for disciplining employees' identity work, and analyse how paratroopers were subject to, and constituted by, the discursive practices of the Regiment. Paratroopers' preferred conceptions of their selves were disciplined by understandings both of what it meant to be a paratrooper and of the institutional processes by which they were made. In talking about how the Regiment 'manufactured' them, paratroopers provided insight on how the Regiment produced and reproduced the idealized identities to which they aspired. Second, to complement other understandings of identities, we suggest that people are often best characterized as 'aspirants'. An aspirational identity is a story-type or template in which an individual construes him- or herself as one who is earnestly desirous of being a particular kind of person and selfconsciously and consistently in pursuit of this objective. The recognition of subjectively construed identities as narrativized permits an appreciation of individuals as sophisticatedly agentic, while recognizing that their 'choices' are made within frameworks of disciplinary power which both enable and restrict their scope for discursive manoeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relations between management discourse and employee subjectivity in the process of organizational change, drawing on a new empirical study of doctors and nurses working in the British National Health Service (NHS). It builds on recent critiques of more muscular accounts of discourse to examine the manoeuvres made by working subjects in response to managerialist discourses of the entrepreneurial self. While others have shown that alternative discourses including gender, age and profession are important here, this paper argues that we must pay attention to the spatial and temporal contexts within which such generic discourses are received and understood in order to interpret the practices of subjectivity and power in organizational life. We suggest that this approach allows new insights to policy concerns in the NHS; to our understanding of the nature of work subjectivities; and to sociological understandings of organizational power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the term 'partnership' is increasingly widely applied to a range of inter-organizational engagements within diverse international settings, its meaning is very unclear. This paper analyses how actors involved in implementing partnership working constructed its meaning. It thaws on a case study from within the refugee resettlement field to reveal two contrasting versions of the discourse of partnership: a more 'idealistic' version of partnership as a 'good thing', and a more 'pragmatic' version that represented partnership largely in terms of the instrumentality of stakeholders. The tensions between trust and power within inter-organizational relationships are reflected in the uneasy relationship between these versions, and the effects of this tension on the enactment of partnership in the case study project are discussed. The paper considers the implications of these findings for researching and implementing partnership working more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how graduate trainees in one UK-based private sector retail organization talked about being silenced. The paper illustrates how the trainees' constructions formed a set of discursive practices that were implicated in the constitution of the organization as a regime of power, and how they both accommodated and resisted these practices. Our case focuses on the trainees' discursive construction of normative pressures to conform, compliant and non-compliant types of worker, and explicit acts of silencing, together with their reflexive interrogation of the nexus of discursive constraints on their opportunities to be heard. Drawing on the analytical resources associated with the 'linguistic turn' in organization studies, our research is an exploration of the importance of language as a medium of social control and power, and means of self-authorship. It is also an attempt to locate 'silence' in putatively polyphonic organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the idea of caring leadership based on Heidegger’s philosophy of care. From this perspective, caring leadership is grounded in the practices of ‘leaping-in’ and ‘leaping-ahead’ as modes of intervention in the affairs of the world and the efforts of others. This involves gauging and taking responsibility for the ramifications of intervention, balancing the urge for certainty of outcome and visibility of contribution with the desire to encourage and enable others. Our analysis suggests several twists to contemporary leadership debates. We argue that the popular models of transactional and transformational leadership are to be critiqued not for their over-reliance but, rather, their under-reliance on agency. This is a different kind of agency to that of heroic or charismatic models. It involves tolerance of complexity and ambivalence; a rich sense of temporal trajectory; concern for one’s presence in the world; and crucially, the ability to resist the soothing normativity of ‘best practice’. From this position, we argue that the problem with the growing scholarly interest in an ethic of care is that it provides too tempting a recipe to follow. In a Heideggerian view, caring leadership has little to do with compassion, kindness or niceness; it involves and requires a fundamental organization and leadership of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discursive legitimation of controversial investment projects to provide a better understanding of the ways in which corporate social responsibility is constructed in international settings. On the basis of a discursive analysis of an intense dispute between Finnish, Uruguayan and Argentinean actors over a pulp mill project in Uruguay, we develop a framework that elucidates four legitimating discourses: technocratic, societal, national-political, and global-capitalist. With this framework, our analysis helps to better understand how CSR involves discourse-ideological struggles, how CSR is embedded in international relations, and how CSR is mediatized in contemporary globalizing society. By so doing, our analysis contributes to critical studies of CSR as well as research on legitimation more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Age, as an embodied identity and as an organizing principle, has received scant attention in organization studies. There is a lack of critical appreciation of how age plays out in organizational settings, the material and discursive dynamics of age practices, how age discourses impact on the body, and how age and ageing intersect with other identity categories. This is curious since age works as a master signifier in contemporary society and is something that affects us all. In this introductory essay, we show how the papers in this special issue redress this lacuna by enhancing and challenging what we know about age and organizations. We also set out an agenda for stimulating research conversations to bring an age-sensitive lens to organizational analysis. We structure our analysis around two focal points: age as an embodied identity, and the symbolic meanings of age within organizing practices. In doing so, we aim to provide a catalyst not only for research on age in organizations but also about the aged nature of organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends have seen a move from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ in Europe to increase labour flexibility and reduce state expenditure on sickness absence. This shift in healthcare logics has meant an increasing role for individuals to take an active part in the political process of managing their health and sickness absence. This paper draws upon empirical cases of observations of status meetings, in which the employee’s medical situation and work capacity are evaluated, as well as interviews with participating actors. The study finds that governmental standards are, at times, incompatible with each other and this complexity allows for local strategies in managing the sickness absence process. These findings are discussed in relation to employment and it is concluded that local actors’ translations of policies have important material consequences for employees’ health, rehabilitation opportunities and access to sickness benefits. This contributes to our understanding of how political interventions to govern the population are appropriated locally to govern individual bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses how a case for institutional change is made through rhetoric in an individual text. Drawing on Aristotle’s three types of rhetorical justification, logos, pathos and ethos, we make three contributions. First, we show that the multiple competing logics which often dominate a field can become incorporated into key texts. As a result, the notionally rational argumentation repertoires which underpin each logic exist in tension, and are prone to contradict each other, making it difficult for a text to support convincingly one logic rather than another on the basis of logos appeals. In such instances, the authors of a text may favour one logic over another through the strategic use of ethos (moralizing) and pathos (emotion-evoking) rhetoric. Second, we demonstrate how ethos and pathos function to construct social categories (identities) and draw on dominant cultural myths. Third, we theorize these textual strategies as acts aimed at reconfiguring relations of power/knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the relationship between public policy, legitimacy and organizational identity in the context of a societal controversy. Public policy is theorized as a mode for effecting discourse transformations which offer new possibilities and rules for organizational legitimacy and societal relations. Our study highlights the legitimating function of public policy formation processes and possible legitimacy-appreciating anddepreciating identity attributes for organizations at the centre of controversy. We develop a macro-level understanding of discursive legitimacy and organizational identity, examining the broader societal context and associated democratic implications of power/knowledge and truth claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report an ethnographic research study conducted in one of the world's largest police organizations, the New South Wales Police Service. Our research question was, 'How do forms of power shape organizational members' ethical practices? 'We look at existing theories that propose the deployment of two interrelated arguments: that ethics are embedded in organizational practices and discourse at a micro-level of everyday organizational life, which is contrasted with a focus on the macro-organizational, institutional forces that are seen to have an impact on ethics. Resisting this distinction between the 'micro' and the 'macro', we build on these two bodies of knowledge to explain ethical change as deeply embedded in power relations that traverse the scale of social action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that polyphony is built on the transaction between voices and expenential truths, where voice and experience constitute each other. From this perspective voice is associated with the plural, transformational character of moment-to-moment experience. This view differs from the prevalent appropriation of polyphony where voice expresses a relatively stable identity (e.g. Hazen 1993) such that many voices (polyphony) may be reduced to many identities. The experiential understanding of polyphony is examined through close inspection of Bakhtin's contextualization of polyphony in carnival, a reading of his work that is largely missing from the organizational literature. This reading is further developed in the context of talk about teamwork in a large healthcare organization. Analysis of this talk reveals three different types of discursive truths that create different kinds of identities and different kinds of possibilities for organizational change: the public, teleological truths of epic discourse; the intimate truths of confession and irony; and the contested truths of the argument and what Bakhtin (1984) calls the microdialogue (or inner conversations with ourselves). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to a developing interest in discourse in management and organization studies. Strategizing activity is studied as an example of organizing conceived as a discursive practice. Material drawn from an intensive case study of 'StitchCo', a global retailing and manufacturing company, is deployed to analyse how strategy activity was articulated, mobilized and enacted; and, in particular, to explore how accounting practices became discursively imbued with strategic significance in ways that contributed to what the strategy discourse contrived to invoke and prescribe. Grounded in a Foucauldian power/knowledge framework, this approach is seen to offer an innovative and challenging supplement to established analyses of (strategic) management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do groups resist the apparently all-encompassing discourse of management? Rejecting current theories of resistance as 're-appropriation' or 'micro-politics', we argue that resistance may be thought of as a hegemonic struggle undertaken by social movements. We identify four major resistance movements that engage with management: unions, organizational misbehaviour, civic movements and civic movement organizations. We argue that these forms of resistance differ in terms of location (civil society or workplace) and strategy (political or infra-political). We chart out the possible interconnections between these different modes of resistance and detail how these interconnections are established. By doing this, the paper provides a framework for understanding the many forms of resistance movements that seek to disrupt the hegemonic discourse of management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life, art and science are irremediably intertwined: how, where and with whom one shares the brief moments of existence necessarily affect what one thinks, how one writes, and what one will address. Being a scholar is a vocation, as Weber knew only too well, in which science, ethics and art blend; sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not. None who live an intellectual and public life are immune to the normal glosses of the sociology of knowledge and this paper provides glimpses, through a personal lens, of what such a gloss might see. It is a glimpse of a life still living and lived; an artist still at work, an agenda still being developed, frozen like a snapshot of an instant - and just as representative. Can a snapshot capture an essence? Sometimes. Whether this does is left to others to judge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with rethinking the notion of 'good management practice'. It explicates a way of framing management theory in terms of tensions between apparently contradictory pieces of good practice advice. The relevance of this, as a practical conceptualization that could usefully inform managers about the kinds of considerations they might take account of in both their day to day and longer term management thinking, is explored. The emerging theoretical framework is elaborated in terms of some characteristics of, and language about, tensions together with possible levels of use of the concept to inform practice. It is suggested that the use of the approach necessarily implies a view of the user as a reflective practitioner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that rhetoric is a key element in both the thinking and communicative processes of ordinary human actors and that this applies as much to the writer of this paper as to the two organizational actors whose words are closely analyzed. Following a rhetorical analysis of a dialogue between two managers encountered within a participant observation research project, two broad discourses are identified within the organization and these are said to provide sets of discursive resources which are variously drawn on by managers in making sense of their managerial work and in pursuing interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent organizational theorizing has noted the emergence of a new spirit of normative control; implicit, informal, and internalized, "neonormative" control emphasizes a positive affective disposition toward work, a happy, fun, and inclusive workplace where employees are encouraged to "be themselves". This emphasis on positivity, however, is often accompanied by diffuse and persistent anxiety, fear, and other forms of subjective suffering often noted in studies of neo-normative control. The relation between purportedly positive neo-normative discourses of engagement and the persistent resurgence of subjective suffering remains under-theorized and holds wider implications for understanding the control regime represented by neo-normative control and its possible modes of contestation. Through a qualitative case study of a changing organizational safety program at a university facilities service, we examine how engagement and fear discourses worked together at different phases of the program to create both ambient anxiety and self-engagement solutions to manage that anxiety. Rather than conceptualizing suffering as the unintended consequence or ignored remainder of neo-normative "positive" messages, we describe how fear appeals explicitly invoke suffering to enrol employees into a self-shifting mode that leads them to be proactive. In our discussion, we theorize the co-constitutive aspects of positive and negative emotional discourses within a control-capturing process, developing the implications of this dual-affective orientation for understanding neo-normative control and its self-fulfilling properties at work in the neoliberal workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on industry-level research to explore the enterprise discourse in the UK passive fire protection industry. It highlights the theoretical weaknesses of the enterprise discourse by questioning the assumption that employers and managers necessarily support enterprise. It examines how employers, not just employees, may seek to resist or evade enterprise and how, far from offering a united front, employers may oppose each other. The article points towards the need for industry-level studies due to the limitations and potentially misleading insights that can flow from organization-level studies. Overall, it is argued that there may be more common ground between employees and employers in terms of opposition to enterprise than has previously been suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the high-end fashion industry in India examines the process of construction of the worth of a new industry. Analyses of data from multiple sources revealed that framing by early entrepreneurs and the socio-cognitive processes that resulted from the transactions of field-constituents with the new industry constructed the worth of the industry. These socio-cognitive processes—curation and certification, commentary and critique, co-presentation, comparison and commensuration—enabled broader audiences to make sense of the industry and comprehend its worth. The findings form the basis of a general model of the social construction of worth through a process of distributed sanctification, contributing to the growing literature on social construction of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing "data imperative" and "fetishization of data" across organizational contexts, critical scholars have adhered to a set of normative understandings for how people experience and engage with data and datafication in and around organizations: namely, as numbers and statistics that are "captured", interpreted, and operationalized. In reality, however, data and datafication are experienced within organizational life in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with numbers and statistics. In this essay, we shift our attention to these less overt and less examined ways in which data and datafication shape organizational life—specifically, the aesthetic, emotional, and discursive aspects of our everyday encounters with it. By attending to the multiple, complex, and nuanced entanglements of data and organization, organizational scholars will be better equipped to navigate the increasingly fraught terrain between technocratic data worship and anti-science politics that characterize the current political moment. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more politicized, historicized, and democratized data studies that can support movements for social, economic, and ecological justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of power on sensemaking processes, bridging two major, yet traditionally separate, literatures in organization studies. Dividing power into its systemic and episodic forms, we elaborate how power shapes not only the content of sensemaking, but also the form of sensemaking processes. We explicate the distinct ways in which power works in four archetypal sensemaking processes: automatic (preconscious and committed), improvisational (preconscious and provisional), algorithmic (conscious and committed) and reflective (conscious and provisional). These ideal-type processes help us theorize how influences related to systemic and episodic power induce more or less conscious and provisional forms of sensemaking. This refined understanding of sensemaking processes enables further explication of episodic power into distinctive kinds of sensegiving and sensebreaking activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the establishment of Organization Studies in 1980, Michel Foucault's oeuvre has had a remarkable and continuing influence on its field. This article traces the different ways in which organizational scholars have engaged with Foucault's writings over the past thirty years or so. We identify four overlapping waves of influence. Drawing on Foucault's Discipline and Punish, the first wave focused on the impact of discipline, and techniques of surveillance and subjugation, on organizational practices and power relations. Part of a much wider 'linguistic' turn in the second half of the twentieth century, the second wave led to a focus on discourses as intermediaries that condition ways of viewing and acting. This wave drew mainly on Foucault's early writings on language and discourse. The third wave was inspired by Foucault's seminal lectures on governmentality towards the end of the 1970s. Here, an important body of international research investigating governmental technologies operating on subjects as free persons in sites such as education, accounting, medicine and psychiatry emerged. The fourth and last wave arose out of a critical engagement with earlier Foucauldian organizational scholarship and sought to develop a more positive conception of subjectivity. This wave draws in particular on Foucault's work on asceticism and techniques of the self towards the end of his life. Drawing on Deleuze and Butler, the article conceives the Foucault effect in organization studies as an immanent cause and a performative effect. We argue for the need to move beyond the tired dichotomies between discipline and autonomy, compliance and resistance, power and freedom that, at least to some extent, still hamper organization studies. We seek to overcome such dichotomies by further pursuing newly emerging lines of Foucauldian research that investigate processes of organizing, calculating and economizing characterized by a differential structuring of freedom, performative and indirect agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how gender inequalities are reproduced through categorization processes in mainstream discourse. Drawing from an analysis of six years of US media coverage of credit card borrowers throughout the recent financial crisis, we show how categorization processes facilitate gender-based status differences by categorizing male and female credit card borrowers based on competence. We find that three dimensions of competence-savviness, responsibility, and agency-are constructed through two discursive mechanisms: accounts and vocabularies. Additionally, we highlight how vocabularies work to amplify stereotype-consistent accounts, yet undermine stereotype-inconsistent accounts. We contribute to research on institutional maintenance by highlighting the role of categorization processes in the reproduction of institutionalized relations of inequality. Further, we contribute to research on gender inequality by offering an in-depth examination of the micro-processes involved in the social construction of gender-based status differences. In this way, we shed new light on the cultural means through which gender inequalities are reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its specific rhetorical potential that is distinct from verbal text, visual material facilitates and plays a pivotal role in linking novel phenomena to established and taken-for-granted social categories and discourses within the social stock of knowledge. Employing data from the worldwide news coverage of the global financial crisis in the Financial Times between 2008 and 2012, we analyse sensemaking and sensegiving efforts in the business media. We identify a set of specific multimodal compositions that construct and shape a limited number of narratives on the global financial crisis through distinct relationships between visual and verbal text. By outlining how multimodal compositions enhance representation, theorization, resonance, and perceived validity of narratives, we contribute to the phenomenological tradition in institutional organization theory and to research on multimodal meaning construction. We argue that elaborate multimodal compositions of verbal text, images, and other visual artifacts constitute a key resource for sensemaking and, consequently, sensegiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise of alternative organisations such as social enterprises is largely due to the promotional activities of intermediary organisations. So far, little is known about the affective nature of such activities. The present article thus investigates how intermediary organisations make social entrepreneurship palatable for a broader audience by establishing it as an object of desire. Drawing on affect-oriented extensions of Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist theory, hegemonisation is suggested as a way of understanding how social entrepreneurship is articulated through a complementary process of signification and affective investment. Specifically, by examining Austrian intermediaries, we show how social entrepreneurship is endowed with a sense of affective thrust that is based on three interlocking dynamics: the articulation of fantasies such as ‘inclusive exclusiveness’, ‘large-scale social change’ and ‘pragmatic solutions’; the repression of anxiety-provoking and contentious issues (constitutive quiescences); as well as the use of conceptually vague, floating signifiers (moments of indeterminacy). Demonstrating that the hegemonisation of social entrepreneurship involves articulating certain issues whilst, at the same time, omitting others, or rendering them elusive, the article invites a counter-hegemonic critique of social entrepreneurship, and, on a more general level, of alternative forms of organising, that embraces affect as a driving force of change, while simultaneously affirming the impossibility of harmony and wholeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elite professionals opportunistically employ threats to their work identities to author preferred selves. Predicated on understandings that identities are subjectively available to people as in-progress narratives, and that these are often insecure fabrications, we investigate the identity work of members of a UK-based professional Rugby League club. The research contribution we make is to demonstrate that professionals use identity threats as flexible resources for working on favoured identities. We show that rugby players authored identity threats centred on the shortness of their careers, injury and performance, and how these were appropriated (made their own) by men to develop desired occupational and masculine identities. In so doing, we also contribute to debates on how professionals’ identity discourse is an expression of agency framed within relations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generations, and generational categories, offer a means of organizing our understandings of age and age-related issues. Particularly within practitioner-orientated debates, differences between generations are highlighted as creating tensions which organizations must address. In contrast, we offer a critical interrogation of generations and unpack the implications of particular constructions. Specifically we examine the discursive construction of generational issues in United Kingdom online news about age at work, focusing on baby boomers and the lost generation. We highlight the discursive work involved in constructing each generation as entitled to work and how responsibility for employment issues is variously positioned. These interrelated concerns develop into a debate about consequences, as different versions of the future are constructed. In contrast to essentialized understandings, our study shows how generations and generational categories are constructed and organize understandings of age at work. We further highlight how the constructions of generational differences and tensions become enrolled to legitimate age-related differences with regard to work. Such insights are essential to further our understandings of age-related issues in contemporary organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge appropriation has been underpinned by an assumption of the organization’s ‘entitlement’ to appropriate knowledge and the outcomes of its utilization. Given the complexity of knowledge and the potentially conflicting views held about it, this assumption is revealed to be theoretically imprecise in the way it marginalizes alternative voices through the pursuit of competitive advantage and ‘value capture’. We attribute this approach to the functionalist analytical lens which sees knowledge as an asset appropriable almost exclusively by the organization in the form of financial/economic ‘rents’. In order to advance understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the organization-individual appropriation regime, we make the case for an expansion of the discursive space for talking about the phenomenon, and posit the concept of ‘property in knowledge’ which we tie to the way individuals construct their identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study uses a psychoanalytic framework to explore how leadership identities are constructed. It advances the idea that leadership identities are imaginary constructions that invariable fail, reiterating a lack of being. Empirical material consisting of interviews with 15 leaders is used to explore the productive role this lack plays. The study suggests that leadership identities are always already subverted by unconscious desire and therefore less powerful than we might think with regard to imposing structures on others, but also much more powerful than we might think as liberating struggles with leaders’ imaginary selves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conceptualization of professions and professionalization is once again a significant theme in the social sciences. The position of professions seems increasingly complex as relations with other occupational groups develop in ways that seem uncertain, ambiguous and complex. We present a discourse-based framework for the analysis of professional change, drawing on Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), and their adaptations of the work of Laclau and Mouffe, and Bhabha. The model focuses on the articulation process within conjunctures of social practice, and in particular how social actors endeavour to make advantageous articulations which achieve a degree of permanence in an inherently changeable world. It also considers how discourses are articulated together to create hybrid forms of professional discourse. We apply the framework to recent changes in the role and autonomy of general medical practitioners in the United Kingdom following the implementation of the clinical governance system, to assess the value of the framework in addressing the negotiated nature of professionalism and, more specifically, to explore the relationship between managerialism and professional autonomy and status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature suggests that communication constitutes organizations, but this argument requires refinement to address its remaining flaws. This essay suggests the tremendous potential of using Michel Foucault’s work to grasp the underlying meaning of this argument and to respond to its shortcomings. The proposed Foucauldian-based process model highlights links across Foucault’s main lines of thought, applied to the relationships among technology, discourse, discipline, control, subject, and identity in an organization. By reframing the concept of technology as a discursive and nondiscursive practice that constrains and enables everyday life, this approach offers better understanding of the argument that communication constitutes organizations. The conceptual model also serves as a backdrop for exploring a problematic field situation with a case study. Technology appears part of processes by which technology, organizations, and subjects get redefined. The organization is dynamically constituted as an evolving, political, negotiated order through power–knowledge relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We draw on Lacan's notion of language to study employee subjectivity in a public sector organization (Publica) in the Netherlands. Our main contribution lies in using Lacan's theorization of language and subjectivity as a basis for a detailed textual analysis of how local organizational discourses shape and inform the subjectivities of employees. We situate our approach within the literature on subjectivity, language and power in work organizations before describing how we carried out interviews to elicit interviewees' accounts of performance management. The mechanisms of metonymy and punctuation, two central features of a Lacanian conceptualization of language, are analysed by means of a relational analysis of key performance signifiers that we identify in the interview texts. We show how the signification of performance in Publica is pinned down by a central empty signifier which can be understood as a 'quilting point' and serves as a site for employee desire and identification. Finally, we show how desire and identification are channelled in specific ways to activate employee self-regulation in achieving the devolvement of responsibility and labour intensification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the discursive positioning of managers involved in inter-organizational relationships (IORs) within industrial supply chains. In closely examining a series of interviews, we find a number of interpretive repertoires of boundary construction used in IOR managers' identity discourse. Our analysis of these repertoires suggests that, although the development of IORs apparently signals the emergence of 'widening circles of identification', distinction drawing and boundary setting is as much a part of managers' IOR talk as boundary transcendence. IOR managers can thus be seen as 'boundary bricoleurs' who discursively mark different self/other boundaries that varyingly position themselves, and their colleagues, competitors, customers and suppliers, as 'inside' or 'outside' the organization, the market, the relationship or their field of expertise. In this tensile positioning, they forestall closure on their identity by constantly shifting identifications, sometimes within the same stretch of talk. Oscillating between an inclusive and an exclusive 'us', and thus articulating embracing yet distinctive identities vis-a-vis other network actors, enables IOR managers to navigate through their complex and dynamic inter-organizational field, maintaining multiple inter-firm relationships while at the same time preserving their own organizational and professional status within these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the role of metaphors in relation to Web-based phenomena through a comparative study of 29 Web portals, established under a World Bank project known as the Development Gateway. Our analysis suggests that three metaphors - expert, market and community - are particularly significant across these portals, either separately or in combination. The study indicates three particular ways in which these metaphors can combine - merging, masquerading and morphing. We conclude by discussing the implications of using metaphor to understand how practitioners design Web portals and how users engage with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of corporations in constructing the nature, meaning and implications of 'consumer responsibility'. It draws on a theoretical framework that elaborates how objects, subjects and concepts are configured in organizational discourse. Using critical discourse analysis, it reveals how consumer responsibility is organized into meaningful cultural knowledge through corporate communications. The findings suggest that such communications rely on strategic juxtapositions that offer a morally unconflicting concept of consumer responsibility that is facilitative of market choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]