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International audience; This paper focuses on research on the “human side” of global mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We argue that there is a need for a more fine-grained understanding of the “human side,” which requires conceptualizing M&As as practice-oriented processes. Drawing on the practice approach, we outline avenues for further research on the “human side” of global M&As. The research directions include (1) multilayered identity dynamics, (2) emotional processes, (3) participation and change agency, (4) resistance, (5) human resource management (HRM) practices and tools, and (6) new forms of communication.

International audience; Research Summary: The purpose of this article is to illuminate the role of concepts in strategic sensemaking. Based on a longitudinal real‐time study of a city organization, we demonstrate how the concept of “self‐responsibility” played a crucial role in strategic sensemaking. We develop a theoretical model that elucidates how strategic concepts are used in meaning‐making, and how such concepts may be mobilized for the legitimation of strategic change. Our main contribution is to offer strategic concepts as a missing micro‐level component of the language‐based view of strategic processes and practices. By so doing, our analysis also adds to studies on strategic ambiguity and advances research on vocabularies.Managerial Summary: Our analysis helps to understand the role of strategic concepts, that is, specific words or phrases with established and at least partly shared meanings, in an organization's strategy process. We show how adopting the concept “self‐responsibility” helped managers in a city organization to make sense of environmental challenges and to promote change. Our analysis highlights how such concepts involve ambiguity that can help managers to establish common ground, but can also hinder implementation of specific decisions and actions if it grows over time. We suggest that under environmental changes, development of new strategic concepts may be crucial in helping managers to collectively deal with environmental changes and to articulate a new strategic direction for the organization.

International audience; Although narrative analysis has made significant advances in organization and management studies, scholars have not yet unleashed its full potential. This review provides an understanding of key issues in organizational narrative analysis with a focus on the role of narratives in organizational stability and change. We start by elaborating on the characteristics of organizational narratives to provide a conceptual framework for organizational narrative analysis. We elaborate on three key approaches to narrative analysis on stability and change: realist, interpretative, and poststructuralist. We then review several topic areas where narrative analysis has so far offered the most promise: organizational change, identity, strategy, entrepreneurship, and personal change. Finally, we identify important issues that warrant attention in future research, both theoretically and methodologically.

International audience; The Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice provides a comprehensive overview of an emerging and growing stream of research in strategic management. An international team of scholars has been assembled to produce a systematic introduction to the various epistemological, methodological and theoretical aspects of the strategy-as-practice approach. This perspective explores and explains the contribution that strategizing makes to daily operations at all levels of an organization. Moving away from a disembodied and asocial study of firm assets, technologies and practices, the strategy-as-practice approach breaks down many of the traditional paradigmatic boundaries in strategy to investigate who the strategists are, what strategists do, how they do it, and what the consequences or outcomes of their actions are. Including a number of detailed empirical studies, the handbook will be an essential guide for future research in this vibrant field.

International audience; Although slow to enter mainstream strategy research, ethnographic methods play an important role in studies of strategy processes and practices. In this article, however, we argue that the potential of “strategic ethnography” has not yet been fully realized. In particular, we maintain that there is a need to complement conventional non-participant, observation-based ethnography with other ethnographic methods. This leads us to suggest four methods that will help advance contemporary research in strategy processes and practices: auto-ethnography which can provide a better understanding of the lived experiences of different types of strategists in different settings; video-ethnography, which allows detailed analysis of strategic practices in their sociomaterial context; comparative ethnography, which enables comparison of processes and practices in different settings, and virtual ethnography, which will further our understanding of the virtual aspects of organizational strategy work.

In this paper, we seek to understand how individuals, as part of a collective, commit themselves to a single, and possibly erroneous, frame, as a basis for sensemaking and coordinated actions. Using real-time data from an anti-terrorist police operation that led to the accidental shooting of an innocent civilian, we analyse how individual actors framed their circumstances in communication with one another and how this affected their subsequent interpretations and actions as events unfolded. Our analysis reveals, first, how the collective commitment to a framing of a civilian as a terrorist suicide bomber was built up and reinforced across episodes of collective sensemaking. Second, we elaborate on how the interaction between verbal communication, expressed and felt emotions, and material cues led to a contraction of meaning. This contraction stabilized and reinforced the overall framing at the exclusion of alternative interpretations. With our study we extend prior sensemaking research on environmental enactment and the escalation of commitment and elaborate on the role of emotions and materiality as part of sensemaking. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.

International audience; In spite of an increasing interest in category emergence, we lack understanding of its cognitive and especially cognitive linguistic underpinnings. Previous research has pointed out that metaphors may serve an important purpose in category emergence, and we wish to complement this view by offering a tropologcial perspective that elaborates on the key role of the four master tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche and irony – in category emergence. In particular, we argue that metaphor serves to create new meaning through the formation of similarity clusters and schemas; metonymy integrates the emergent category, by means of contiguity, in wider networks of meaning and cognitive infrastructure; synecdoche offers exemplifying representations (prototypes) and labels of an emergent category; and irony provides reflective sensemaking devices for distancing and resistance, which either facilitates or impedes the consolidation of an emergent category. Thus, all four master tropes by themselves, and especially in combinations, serve as means of structuring the cognitive content, inserting the emergent category into a wider cognitive infrastructure, and mobilizing members and audiences.

International audience; This paper focuses on the multifaceted role of language and language-sensitive recruitment in knowledge transfer in multinational corporations (MNCs). In particular, we develop a framework that helps to better understand how language-sensitive recruitment is related to competence, networks, identity, and power. We started by conducting a qualitative interview-based study of 101 MNC subsidiaries. This analysis elucidates the productive and counterproductive effects of language-sensitive recruitment on knowledge transfer related to communication competence, networks, identity, and power. To further understand the productive and counterproductive effects, we conducted a quantitative study in 285 MNC subsidiaries. We found an inverted U-shaped relationship between language-sensitive recruitment and knowledge transfer. Together, these two studies provide a better understanding of the multifaceted and at times counterintuitive implications of language-sensitive recruitment on knowledge transfer in MNCs. By elucidating these effects, this paper contributes to the stream of research examining the role of language in MNCs and international business more generally. It further adds to research on MNC knowledge transfer that to date has focused little attention on language. By elaborating on the potential unintended consequences of language-sensitive recruitment, this paper also has implications for international human resource management research.

International audience; With the growing influence of discursive and narrative perspectives on organizing, organizational scholars are focusing increasing attention on the constitutive role that language and communication play in organizational processes. This view conceptualizes language and communication as bringing organization into being in every instant and is therefore inherently sympathetic to a process perspective. However, our understanding of the role of language in unfolding organizational processes and as a part of organizational action is still limited. This volume brings together empirical and/or conceptual contributions from leading scholars in organization and communication to develop understanding of language and communication as constitutive of work, and also analyze how language and communication actually work to achieve influence in the context of organizations. It aims to elucidate the role language, communication, and narrativity play as part of strategic and institutional work in and around organizational phenomena. In keeping with the preceding volumes in the Perspectives on Process Organization Studies series, this collection demonstrates why we need to start thinking processually and offers a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying these 'works in process' that we call organizations, companies, businesses, institutions, communities, associations, or NGOs.

International audience; There has been increasing interest in the discursive aspects of strategy over the last two decades. In this paper we review the existing literature, focusing on six major bodies of discursive scholarship: post-structural, critical discourse analysis, narrative, rhetoric, conversation analysis, and metaphor. Our review reveals the significant contributions of research on strategy and discourse, but also the potential to advance research in this area by bringing together research on discursive practices and research on other practices we know to be important in strategy work. We explore the potential of discursive scholarship in integrating between significant theoretical domains (sensemaking, power, and sociomateriality), and realms of analysis (institutional, organizational, and the episodic), relevant to strategy scholarship. This allows us to place the papers published in this special issue on Strategy as Discourse: Its Significance, Challenges, and Future Directions among the body of knowledge accumulated thus far, and to suggest a way forward for future scholarship.

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International audience; We examine how organizational stakeholders use narratives in their psychological processing of venture failure. We identify a range of “narrative attributions”, alternative accounts of failure that actors draw on to process the failure and their role in it. Our analysis provides a view of entrepreneurial failure as a complex social construction, as entrepreneurs, hired executives, employees and the media construct failure in distinctively different ways. Narratives provide means for both cognitive and emotional processing of failure through grief recovery and self-justification.

International audience; This study adopts a recontextualization perspective on language policies and practices in wholly owned foreign subsidiaries. Drawing on a field study of 101 subsidiaries in Japan, we develop a contingency model that distinguishes between four different types of recontextualization with characteristic language policies and practices: developing/locally adaptive, developing/globally integrated, established/locally adaptive, and established/globally integrated. Our analysis shows how each of these four types is accompanied by specific problems and challenges. In particular, it elucidates five important aspects of language implementation: (1) the emergence of language praxis from the interplay of headquarters strategies and local responses; (2) the hybridization of language practices; (3) the central role of key actors such as subsidiary presidents in recontextualization; (4) the pervasive power implications of language policies and practices; and (5) the multifaceted implications for strategic human resource management. By so doing, our analysis opens up new avenues for context-specific and practice-oriented studies of language in multinational companies.

International audience; Despite a proliferation of critical studies on management education, there is a paucity of knowledge of the ways in which problematic beliefs, values, and practices are reproduced in and through management education. By drawing on and extending Bourdieu's seminal work, this paper offers a new perspective on reproduction on the global scale. Our framework spans three inter-related levels of analysis: the dominant beliefs, values, and practices (nomos and doxa) of management in global society; the structuration of the field of management education on a global scale; and the prevailing pedagogical practices in management education programmes. Our analysis adds to critical studies of management education by elucidating the overwhelming institutional forces of reproduction and thus explaining how difficult it is to effect change in the prevailing ideas, values, and practices. Unlike most critical analyses, we also explain how change might take place and what it would require. Thus, our analysis advances studies of reproduction in this era of globalization more generally. It also provides an example of how Bourdieusian ideas can be applied and expanded upon in novel ways in research on education in general and management education in particular.

International audience; The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the effects of organizational and national cultural differences on international acquisitions. We argue that cultural differences prompt social identity building that leads to ‘us versus them’ thinking and thereby creates the potential for social conflict. We also maintain that the same cultural differences can contribute to learning in terms of knowledge transfer. We develop a structural equation model to test these hypothesized effects on a sample of related international acquisitions. Our analysis shows that cultural differences at the organizational level are positively associated with social conflict, but that national cultural differences can decrease social conflict. Furthermore, both organizational and national cultural differences are positively associated with knowledge transfer. This analysis shows the importance of disentangling the various effects that cultural differences have on international acquisitions. It also suggests that national cultural differences are less of a problem in international acquisitions than is usually assumed.

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International audience; This article reviews research in Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) and suggests directions for its development. The power of this perspective lies in its ability to explain how strategy-making is enabled and constrained by prevailing organizational and societal practices. Our review shows how SAP research has helped to advance social theories in strategic management, offered alternatives to performance-dominated analyzes, broadened the scope in terms of organizations studied and promoted new methodologies. In particular, it has provided important insights into the tools and methods of strategy-making (practices), how strategy work takes place (praxis), and the role and identity of the actors involved (practitioners). However, we argue that there is a need to go further in the analysis of social practices to unleash the full potential of this perspective. Hence, we outline five directions for the further development of the practice perspective: placing agency in a web of practices, recognizing the macro-institutional nature of practices, focusing attention on emergence in strategy-making, exploring how the material matters, and promoting critical analysis.

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International audience; International mergers and acquisitions (M&As) often invoke national identification and national cultural differences. We argue that metonymy is a central linguistic resource through which national cultural identities and differences are reproduced in media accounts of international M&As. In this paper, we focus on two revealing cases: the acquisition of American IBM Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company Lenovo and the acquisition of American Anheuser-Busch (A-B) by the Belgian–Brazilian company InBev. First, we identify the forms, functions, and frequencies of national metonymy in media accounts of these cases. We present a typology that classifies varieties of national metonymy in international M&As. Second, we demonstrate how these metonyms combine with metaphor to generate evocative imagery, engaging wit, and subversive irony. Our findings show that national metonymy contributes to the construction of emotive frames, stereotypes, ideological differences, and threats. Combinations of national metonymy with metaphor also provide powerful means to construct cultural differences. However, combinations of metonymy with wit and irony enable the play on meanings that overturns and resists national and cultural stereotypes. This is the first study to unpack the deployment of metonymy in accounts of international M&As. In doing so, it also opens up new avenues for research into international management and the analysis of tropes in management and organization.

International audience; In spite of the proliferation of research on cultural differences in international mergers and acquisitions, we lack systematic analyses of the impact of cultural factors on knowledge transfer. In this paper, we argue that both national and organizational cultural differences and cultural integration in the form of cultural convergence and crossvergence affect knowledge transfer in acquisitions. We develop specific hypotheses concerning the nature of these effects, and test our hypotheses with data on international acquisitions carried out by Finnish corporations. The analyses performed show that national cultural differences provide great potential for knowledge transfer in international acquisitions. Furthermore, organizational cultural convergence and crossvergence have a significant positive impact on knowledge transfer. In particular, convergence and crossvergence moderate the impact of national cultural differences on knowledge transfer.

The Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice provides the first comprehensive overview of an emerging and growing stream of research in strategic management. An international team of scholars has been assembled to produce a systematic introduction to the various epistemological, methodological and theoretical aspects of the strategy-as-practice approach. This perspective explores and explains the contribution that strategizing makes to daily operations at all levels of an organization. Moving away from a disembodied and asocial study of firm assets, technologies and practices, the strategy-as-practice approach breaks down many of the traditional paradigmatic boundaries in strategy to investigate who the strategists are, what strategists do, how they do it, and what the consequences or outcomes of their actions are. Including a number of detailed empirical studies, the handbook will be an essential guide for future research in this vibrant field.

International audience; Despite the central role of legitimacy in corporate social responsibility debate, little is known of subtle meaning-making processes through which social actors attempt to establish or de-establish legitimacy for socially contested corporate undertakings, and through which they, at the same time, struggle to define the proper social role and responsibility of corporations. We investigated these processes in the context of the intense sociopolitical conflict around the Finnish forest industry company Metsä-Botnia's world-scale pulp mill in Uruguay. A critical discursive analysis of Finnish media texts highlights three types of struggle that characterized the media coverage: legalistic argumentation, truth fights, and political battles. Interestingly, this case illustrates how the corporate representatives – with the help of the national media – tend to frame the issue in legalistic terms, emphasize their expert knowledge in technical and environmental evaluations, and distance themselves from political disputes. We argue that similar tendencies are likely to characterize corporate social responsibility debates more generally.

International audience; Few studies have examined legitimation in multinational corporations from a discursive perspective. To complement the existing institutional literature, we adopt a critical discourse analysis perspective that allows us to examine the microlevel processes of discursive legitimation. We provide an example of a media text - dealing with a production unit shutdown - to demonstrate how this perspective elucidates the various textual strategies used to legitimate multinational corporations' actions and their controversial consequences.

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International audience; Organizational Identity in Practice provides much-needed, in-depth studies on what happens when aspirations, claims and beliefs interact. Given the practical needs of managers and students, this exciting new text provides readers with more insight into what differences in these identity aspirations, claims and beliefs really mean and what we may expect to occur when these differences become visible and what the outcomes of these processes are likely to be.The diverse case studies illustrate how well-known firms have dealt with the broad issues of "who we are as an organization" and "what makes us similar or distinct from others" and cover a broad range of industries, firms, and organizational forms. The cases from companies such as Air France, AT&T, Bang & Olufsen, BP, Statoil, Starbucks, Scania and Alfa Romeo are focused on the broad topics of organizational identity, strategy and the environment, multiple and conflicting identities, the construction of identities, and how organizations express and project their identities. The authors give scholars, students and managers valuable ideas on how to deal with organizational identity challenges within firms.

International audience; Les fusions et acquisitions (F & A) sont souvent motivées par des effets synergiques escomptés. Les spécialistes des fusions et acquisitions, tant académiques que professionnels, admettent pourtant que les premières idées et justifications relatives aux synergies s’avèrent souvent irréalistes, voire illusoires : ils comprennent mal les processus à leur origine, et leur évolution dans le temps. Appliquée au cas particulièrement révélateur de la fusion, annoncée en septembre 2000, entre les compétences thérapeutiques de Pierre Fabre et les compétences diagnostiques de BioMérieux (d’où le concept de « théranostique » inventé pour nommer cette combinaison entre les deux groupes pharmaceutiques), puis de la séparation de ces mêmes entreprises en juin 2002, la théorie de la construction sociale des synergies proposée ici permet d’identifier, dans le processus de construction sociale des synergies, quatre phases que les auteurs considèrent caractéristiques des fusions et acquisitions contemporaines.

International audience; This editorial provides an introduction to the themes of this special issue on ‘connectivity’ in merging organizations. The growing impact of mergers and acquisitions on organizations, industries and economies has generated substantial research interest in the ensuing change processes from strategic, human resource and cultural perspectives. However, this research has focused on certain perspectives and failed to interrogate others. In the case of the cultural perspective, researchers have tended to focus on cultural differences between merging firms and how these differences may be bridged. This focus has provided important insights into the dynamics of these processes, but at the same time has constrained our appreciation of the richness of connectivity between organizations and their contexts as well as clouded our efforts in developing new concepts and angles for research. Through the focus of the special issue on connectivity, the strengths and limitations of the cultural paradigm in M&A research will be debated and a research agenda for the future suggested.

International audience; National identification persists in a 'globalizing' world. In this article, we focus on the linguistic aspects of the relations between military and business management, particularly in relation to 'Finnishness'. We attempt to locate discourses drawn on when 'good' management and leadership are (re)constructed in Finland. In the studied texts, a particular, and arguably a significant, image of Finnish management emerges. This masculinist image of sturdy, situation-conscious management-by-example draws explicitly from military management, and seems to live on in different contexts. In addition to discursively /re)constructing its uniqueness and functionality, this omage lives on in comparison to 'others'. Swedishness and 'Swedish management' seems to provide a recurring object of comparison through which Finnishness and 'Finnish management' attains its meanings. We argue that 'Finnish management' can be understood as a discursive resource that actors can flexibly utilize in context-specific social interaction. This may have significant power-related implications

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International audience; This article focuses on cultural identity-building in the cross-border merger context. To provide an alternative to the dominant essentialist analyses of cultures and cultural differences, cultural identitybuilding is conceptualized as a metaphoric process. The focus is on two processes inherent in the cross-border merger context: construction of images of Us and Them and construction of images of a Common Future. Based on an analysis of a special metaphor exercise carried out in a recent Finnish–Swedish merger, the article illustrates how the metaphoric perspective reveals specific cognitive, emotional and political aspects of cultural identity-building that easily remain ‘hidden’ in the case of more traditional approaches.

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International audience; This article examines knowledge transfer from a sensemaking perspective. It focuses on a particularly revealing empirical case - the creation of a pan-Nordic financial services group - to uncover sensemaking processes and patterns thar are likely to characterize post-merger knowledge transfer. The article identifies four specific sensemaking processes around the transfer of "best practices": identification, evaluation, (re)contextualization, and (re)configuration.

International audience; In a ground-breaking longitudinal research project, the authors of 'Merging across Borders' provide a fascinating account of the cultural and socio-political dynamics involved in a complex, quadruple cross-border merger. While most depictions of post-merger dynamics are limited to anecdotes and retrospective reflections, the team of researchers - from business schools in the four countries represented in the merger - capture events as they unfold, illustrating how organizational reality is both constructed and reconstructed over time. Overall, the volume is an insightful blend of theory and practice, methodological rigor and organizational relevance, and problem analysis and practitioner guidance. It will be of invaluable assistance for anyone contemplating undertaking or researching a cross-border merger. Anthony F. Buono, Professor of Management and Sociology, Bentley College, author of The Human Side of Mergers and Acquisitions This book is a fascinating read for both academics and practitioners. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study of a four-country pan-Nordic merger, the authors provide illuminating insights on the socio-cultural dynamics that transpire during post-merger integration. Although the book is grounded in existing theory and research, it adds many new ideas and perspectives that will help executives more effectively manage the difficult process of integration and academics blaze new directions for research. As a researcher and consultant in post-merger integration, this book will definitely become a staple in my library. David M. Schweiger, Professor of International Business, Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, US . International mergers and acquisitions are more popular than ever, even though they often fail to deliver the benefits strived for, and moreover tend to create many problems and challenges for the people involved in integrating the companies. "Merging across Borders: People, Cultures and Politics" offers insight into social, cultural, communicative and political dynamics in complex organizational change processes following mergers and acquisitions; dynamics which have often been neglected in previous research. The book is written by a Nordic research team, and it is based on their extensive field study of a series of cross-border mergers and acquisitions leading to the creation of Nordea, the largest Nordic financial services group. "Merging Across Borders" is written both for reflective practitioners and for people studying international management and organizational issues in cross-cultural settings.

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[FELLMAN Susanna, KUUSTERÄ Antti and VAARA Eero (eds.), sélection de communications présentées au VIe Congrès annuel de l'European Business History Association, organisé sur le thème Companies, owners and employees à Helsinki (Finlande) les 22-24 août 2002], The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, Commentationes Scientiarum Socialium, Nr. 72, Helsinki, 2008]