Search

Group model building is a participatory workshop technique used in system dynamics for developing community consensus to address complex problems by consensus building on individual assumptions. This study examines changes in individual mental models of the complex problem of childhood obesity following participation in group model building (GMB), as part of a larger community-based system dynamics project. Data are drawn from GMB participants across six community sites in the Whole of Systems Trial of Prevention Strategies for Childhood Obesity (WHO STOPS) in rural and regional Victoria, Australia. Each community participated in two GMB sessions resulting in a causal loop diagram (CLD) of drivers of childhood obesity for each community. Presurvey and postsurvey captured participants' perspectives before and after (n = 25) participation in both GMB sessions and a blend of inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis was used to code individual responses. Three calculations were used to determine the number of responses, whether responses were a result of persuasion from others, and comparison of responses to those found in the CLD. Our study found participant mental models shifted during the course of the GMB sessions, with some responses persuaded by others and 75% of new insights identified in CLDs created by communities. The GMB process created a platform for participants to share ideas and learn from each other. In addition, participants listed new insights about childhood obesity in their community through developing CLDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on Foucault's concept "governmentality" to show how a cohort of middle-aged senior managers who engaged in competitive endurance sports fabricated (avowed) "heroic" leader identities drawing on this repertoire of discursive resources. Neoliberalism constitutes a form of governmentality which encourages people to regard themselves as autonomous and to aspire to personal fulfillment by investing entrepreneurially in themselves as "human capital." Healthism, which requires individuals be responsible for their own health and wellbeing, is one program by which this is accomplished. We analyze managers' talk about themselves as people who self-examined, and sought continually to transform (improve) themselves, to avow identities as superior (heroic) leaders. Our study contributes to the literature on governmentality by showing how in neoliberalism "healthism" constructs managers as enterprising selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives is both developed through and a resource for individuals' narrative identity work. We show how organizationally-based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities that are sanctioned and supplied by societal (master) narratives embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers who had seen action overseas, and our study adds to understanding of how organizational members' quest for meaningful identities may falter and sometimes fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual reviews, narrative reviews, historical reviews – and critical essays that are original, innovative, of high-quality and contribute to theory building in the social sciences. The main purpose of this essay is to sketch out our current broad expectations for reviews and essays as a guide for authors and reviewers. As Editors of the journal, we do not wish to be overly prescriptive. After all, reviews may be integrative and focus on synthesis and integration to generate new concepts, frameworks and perspectives, or they may be more problematizing and contribute by identifying problematics, tensions and contradictions in a literature. Furthermore, consonant with its heritage, Human Relations invites scholarship from all research traditions across the social sciences that focus on social relations at work. It is a pluralistic, heterodox journal that will continue to publish a range of reviews and critical essays so long as authors have clear objectives and contribute meaningfully to the field. This will generally involve writing reviews and essays that seek to maximize what we see and are sufficiently complex to deal adequately with the richness and variety of the literatures and ideas considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities' processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emergent identity work perspective that draws on multiple intertwined streams of established identities theorizing and identities-related research. This perspective is characterized loosely by five broad sets of assumptions: (i) selves are reflexive and identities actively worked on, both in soliloquy and social interaction; (ii) identities are multiple, fluid and rarely fully coherent; (iii) identities are constructed within relations of power; (iv) identities are not helpfully described as either positive or authentic; and (v) identities are both interesting per se and integral to processes of organizing. Recognition of an emergent identity work perspective is valuable in part because this may act as a counterbalance to centrifugal tendencies – fed by myopia, insularity and ethnocentrism – which might otherwise lead to blinkered research and fragmentation. The contribution of this article is to provide a baseline for identity work scholars, and to promote collective critical reflection on identities in and around organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within organizations there is reciprocal interplay between identity construction and learning. Processes of learning are enabled and constrained by identity practices; concomitantly, the possibilities for learning are shaped by the identity positions available to individuals. There is a dynamic between the impositions of organizations and people's freedom to shape their identities and learning plays a crucial role in this. Our purpose in this special issue is to contribute to the understanding of the intersection of identity work and learning as a response to experiences of being different. Experiences of difference include moving into a new role, encountering a disjuncture with others while in a role or a difference in broader life which is reacted to as if it were a problem in an organizational setting. Being different produces a variety of challenges and the papers in this special issue trace how people cope with vulnerabilities, develop resilience and often collaborate in their learning. We focus on how people reflect on their own identity and learn and how, by learning together with people who have similar experiences, micro-communities can support, develop and enhance their insight and identity-positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic hearing listeners use binaural cues—interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs)—for localization and segregation of sound sources in the horizontal plane. Cochlear implant users now often receive two implants (bilateral cochlear implants [BiCIs]) rather than one, with the goal to provide access to these cues. However, BiCI listeners often experience difficulty with binaural tasks. Most BiCIs use independent sound processors at each ear; it has often been suggested that such independence may degrade the transmission of binaural cues, particularly ITDs. Here, we report empirical measurements of binaural cue transmission via BiCIs implementing a common " n -of- m " spectral peak-picking stimulation strategy. Measurements were completed for speech and nonspeech stimuli presented to an acoustic manikin "fitted" with BiCI sound processors. Electric outputs from the BiCIs and acoustic outputs from the manikin's in-ear microphones were recorded simultaneously, enabling comparison of electric and acoustic binaural cues. For source locations away from the midline, BiCI binaural cues, particularly envelope ITD cues, were found to be degraded by asymmetric spectral peak-picking. In addition, pulse amplitude saturation due to nonlinear level mapping yielded smaller ILDs at higher presentation levels. Finally, while individual pulses conveyed a spurious "drifting" ITD, consistent with independent left and right processor clocks, such variation was not evident in transmitted envelope ITDs. Results point to avenues for improvement of BiCI technology and may prove useful in the interpretation of BiCI spatial hearing outcomes reported in prior and future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how leaders construct 'loss' identity narratives which defuse the scope for external attack and sustain self-meanings. We draw on a sample of 31 United Kingdom business school deans, who although often depicted as multi-talented, high-status achievers, are also targets for criticism and have high rates of turnover. Our study makes two principal contributions. First, we argue that leaders may employ a specific pattern of identity work involving talk about loss to construct identities that bolster their leadership by presenting them as making sacrifices for their institutions. Losses are ubiquitous and malleable discursive resources that constitute both identity threats and opportunities for constructing preferred identities. Second, we deepen understanding of 'preferred identities', i.e. normative self-narratives that specify who people want to be, and to be seen to be, and which serve self-meaning and impression management functions. Preferred identities, though, do not necessarily serve people's interests, and deans tied themselves to demanding requirements by authoring themselves as research credible, scrupulously moral, hard-working professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault's concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible. Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identities scholarship, in particular that focused on self-identities, has burgeoned in recent years. With dozens of papers on identities in organizations published in this journal by a substantial community, doubtless with more to come, now is an appropriate juncture to reflect on extant scholarship and its future prospects. I highlight three key strands of self-identities research in Organization Studies with particular reference to six articles collected in the associated Perspectives issue of this journal. In reviewing the contribution that work published in Organization Studies has made to debates on the nature of identities, how identities are implicated in organizational processes and outcomes, and the micro-politics of identities formation, I seek also to contribute to ongoing deliberations and to raise issues and questions for further research. I conclude with a call for increased efforts to integrate self-identities issues into the research agendas of sub-fields within organization theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do corporations attempt to regulate the ways middle managers draw on discourses centred on 'effectiveness' and 'ethics' in their identity work, and how do these individuals respond? We analyse the discursive struggle over what it meant to be a competent manager at Disneyland, where middle managers were encouraged to construe their selves in ways that emphasized 'being effective' over 'being ethical', and managers responded with identity work that positioned them as searching for the practical wisdom (phronesis) to make decisions that were both effective and moral. The theoretical contribution we make is twofold. First, we analyse processes of identity regulation and identity work at Disneyland, highlighting divergences between corporate injunctions and middle managers' appropriations of them, regarding what it meant to be a practically wise manager. Second, we discuss a phronetic identity narrative template, contestable both by organizations and managers, in which people are positioned as questing for the practical wisdom to make decisions that are both moral and effective, and phronesis as an image by which scholars may analyse identities and identity work. This leads us to a more nuanced understanding of middle manager identities and the scope they have to constitute their selves as moral agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the power/identity implications of the increasing Englishization of non-Anglophone workplaces around the world? We address this question using an analytical framework that combines a focus on micro/ meso-level processes of identity regulation with attentiveness to the macro-level discourse of English as a global language. Drawing on reflexive fieldwork conducted at a major French university, we show how Englishization is bound up with processes of normalization, surveillance and conformist identity work that serve to discipline local selves in line with the imperative of international competitiveness. Concomitantly, we also show that Englishization is not a totalizing form of identity regulation; it is contested, complained about and appropriated in the creative identity work of those subject to it. Yet, moving from the micro/ meso- to the macro-level, we argue that Englishization is ultimately 'remaking' locals as Anglophones through a quasi-voluntary process of imperialism in the context of a US-dominated era of 'globalization' and 'global English'. We discuss the theoretical implications of these insights and open some avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processes by which people learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical and practical importance. In a world suffuse with dynamic complexity in which unusual, unexpected and unprecedented events occur on a persistent basis, this challenges the relevance of the sensemaking perspective. We put forward a rebalanced model of sensemaking to make the sensable once again sensible, and open up the sensemaking perspective to understand learning as a process that is more than mere interpretation and attends to embodied sensemaking through adopting a thorough-going process approach. This way, we extend both the grasp and the reach of the sensemaking perspective to make sense of learning and to learn to make sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In patients with bilateral hearing loss, the use of two hearing aids (HAs) offers the potential to restore the benefits of binaural hearing, including sound source localization and segregation. However, existing evidence suggests that bilateral HA users' access to binaural information, namely interaural time and level differences (ITDs and ILDs), can be compromised by device processing. Our objective was to characterize the nature and magnitude of binaural distortions caused by modern digital behind-the-ear HAs using a variety of stimuli and HA program settings. Of particular interest was a common frequencylowering algorithm known as nonlinear frequency compression, which has not previously been assessed for its effects on binaural information. A binaural beamforming algorithm was also assessed. Wide dynamic range compression was enabled in all programs. HAs were placed on a binaural manikin, and stimuli were presented from an arc of loudspeakers inside an anechoic chamber. Stimuli were broadband noise bursts, 10-Hz sinusoidally amplitude-modulated noise bursts, or consonant- vowel-consonant speech tokens. Binaural information was analyzed in terms of ITDs, ILDs, and interaural coherence, both for whole stimuli and in a time-varying sense (i.e., within a running temporal window) across four different frequency bands (1, 2, 4, and 6 kHz). Key findings were: (a) Nonlinear frequency compression caused distortions of high-frequency envelope ITDs and significantly reduced interaural coherence. (b) For modulated stimuli, all programs caused time-varying distortion of ILDs. (c) HAs altered the relationship between ITDs and ILDs, introducing large ITD-ILD conflicts in some cases. Potential perceptual consequences of measured distortions are discussed. [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]

‘Sensemaking’ is an extraordinarily influential perspective with a substantial following among management and organization scholars interested in how people appropriate and enact their ‘realities’. Organization Studies has been and remains one of the principal outlets for work that seeks either to draw on or to extend our understanding of sensemaking practices in and around organizations. The contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, we review briefly what we understand by sensemaking and some key debates which fracture the field. Second, we attend critically to eight papers published previously in Organization Studies which we discuss in terms of five broad themes: (i) how sense is made through discourse; (ii) the politics from which social forms of sensemaking emerge and the power that is inherent in it; (iii) the intertwined and recursive nature of micro-macro sensemaking processes; (iv) the strong ties which bind sensemaking and identities; and (v) the role of sensemaking processes in decision making and change. Third, while not designed to be a review of extant literature, we discuss these themes with reference to other related work, notably that published in this journal. Finally, we raise for consideration a number of potentially generative topics for further empirical and theory-building research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyse the relationships between identity work and internal legitimacy. Based on an in-depth case study of prisoners in Helsinki Prison, we focus on how their identity work affirmed and contested three kinds of institutional legitimacy – pragmatic, moral and cognitive. The research contribution we make is to show that some forms of identity work are also a form of internal legitimacy work, and how this identity talk constructs organizations as more (or less) legitimate. This is important because it demonstrates that identity work is an intrinsic (though often overlooked) aspect of processes of organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present an overview of the literatures on organizational identity and organizational identification. We provide overviews of four major approaches to organizational identity: functionalist, social constructionist, psychodynamic, and postmodern. The literature on organizational identification, by contrast, exhibits greater consensus due to the hegemonic power of social identity theory, and is predominantly functionalist. We review recent research on organizational identification regarding performance outcomes and antecedents (mainly focusing on leadership and the social exchange perspective), and in relation to change and virtual contexts. Some suggestions for further research are then offered. Finally an overview of the articles in this special issue is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Background: Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is a severe demyelinating disease often leading to serious disability. Accumulating evidence now implicates humoral mechanisms in its pathogenesis. In the absence of an approved therapy, anti-inflammatory/immunosuppressant drugs have been used empirically for more than three decades. Recent evidence for a role of antibody to aquaporin-4 in the pathogenesis of NMO has led to the use of rituximab, a monoclonal antibody targeting the CD20 epitope on the entire B cell lineage.Objectives: To evaluate the impact of rituximab on the relapse rate and disability in NMO.Methods: This is an IRB approved retrospective longitudinal study of NMO patients treated with rituximab.Results: We identified 53 patients with NMO, 23 of whom had been treated with rituximab. These patients (2 males, 21 females) had a mean age of 37.1 ± 14.6 years at the time of diagnosis. Eight of the 23 treated with rituximab were treatment naïve. All 23 were scheduled to receive infusions every six or 12 months after treatment initiation with a minimum follow-up of six months (median 32.5 months, range 7–63 months). Median relapse rate declined significantly from 1.87 relapses/patient per year to 0.0 relapses/patient per year. Kurtzke Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) scores stabilized or improved in all patients. Use of rituximab is associated with a significant reduction in relapses and disability in patents with NMO. [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]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by C. R. Hinings on an essay regarding the aspects of European identity, one by Christopher Grey on the elaboration of the contextual changes in the European identity, and one by Behlül Üsdiken on the Americanization of organizational scholarship.

In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and outcomes. We report on an in-depth case study of an award-winning creative architecture firm. Our data show how talk about creativity and the creative identities of architects can be analysed as effects of power. Theoretically, our study represents an investigation into the disciplining of professional architects' discourse about their selves, their organization, and their work. This article adds to debates on creative industries, demonstrating that creativity is deeply embedded in organizationally based relations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how multiple organizational identities are constructed through rhetoric to maintain and enhance the legitimacy claims made by organizations. Our theorizing is founded on an investigation of the 43 geographically based English and Welsh constabularies. The research contribution of our study is threefold. First, we show that officially sanctioned web-based organizational identity claims are multiple and discuss their implications for identity theory. Second, we consider how these multiple identity claims are constituted using particular rhetorical strategies. Third, we argue that the multiple identity claims constituted aspects of constabularies' self-presentation strategies by which they attempted to exert control over stakeholders' perceptions and establish pragmatic, cognitive and moral claims to legitimacy. This is contrary to some previous research that has suggested that organizations seek to reconcile or redefine multiple claims, and that has ignored them as a resource for satisfying sceptical audiences. The principal argument we make is that organizational identities are often multiple, are phrased using specific rhetorical schemes, and that identity multiplicity supports claims for legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change spawns stories and stories can trigger change. Stories can also block change and can define what constitutes change. In this Introduction to the special issue, the special issue editors explore some of the current debates on stories and organizational change, introduce the articles that are included in the issue, identify some prominent themes (power, identity construction and defence, plurivocality, knowledge transfer, boundary unfreezing, sense-making and sense-destroying) and some possible blind spots (authenticity, narrative structure). In this way, they offer a conspectus on the current state of play in this field, signalling some challenges and directions for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK-based engineering company drew in their efforts to construct versions of their selves. Predicated on an understanding that subjectively construed discursive identities are available to individuals as in-progress narratives that are contingent and fragile, the research contribution we make is threefold. First, we argue that managers may draw on mutually antagonistic discursive resources in authoring conceptions of their selves. Second, we contend that rather than being relatively coherent or completely fluid and fragmented managers' identity narratives may incorporate contrasting positions or antagonisms. Third, we show that managers' identity work constituted a continuing quest to (re)-author their selves as moral beings. Antagonisms in managers' identities, we suggest, may appropriately be analysed as the complex and ambiguous effects of organizationally based disciplinary practices and individuals' discursive responses to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine accounts of emotional experiences in one organization. Drawing upon data from interviews across a range of employees, we analyse aspects of emotion, identity and power. Adopting a constructionist perspective we use a method of discourse analysis to analyse how participants constructed emotions according to tacitly understood rules regarding appropriate emotional displays. These rules were made visible through an examination of the participants' positioning strategies as they described emotional experiences. Our findings suggest that, rather than an institutionally held level of appropriate articulations of emotionality, there was a role-related, socially located rule system linked to separate categories of teachers, managers and administrative employees. The contribution of the article is threefold. First, we use in-depth case data from 44 semi-structured interviews to analyse how teachers and managers/administrators in a UK-based further education (FE) college constructed emotions according to certain rules (informal norms) regarding appropriate kinds of emotional displays. Teachers acknowledged and upgraded labelled emotions, while managers and administrators denied and downgraded accounts of emotional experiences. Second, we discuss the implications of talk about emotion for the (re)production of teachers' and managers/administrators' work identities. Third, we consider how people's talk about emotions was bound-up in relations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of essays arose from a call for papers issued by Organization Studies in 2004 to celebrate and critically engage the scholarship of Karl Weick; to carry forward his thinking into new contexts and take stock of recent developments in the themes, issues and theories that have preoccupied Weick in his more than 40 years of scholarship. The first seven papers included here accomplish these objectives. In the final essay, in response to our request, Weick himself reflects on continuing themes in his work and major influences on his scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We may usefully interrogate individual texts in order to expose them as exercises in power that serve hegemonic and Iegitimation functions. To illustrate this argument I analyse the account of the collapse of Barings Bank given in the Report of the Board of Banking Supervision, and juxtapose this with other versions of the events given by investigative journalists, Nicholas Leeson, and management scholars. The Report, I suggest, promulgates a public discourse myth designed to mitigate public anxieties, and is an explicit attempt to maintain and reproduce the legitimacy of the Bank of England, the City of London, and existing regulatory structures. [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]

In this paper, we reflect on the use of fictional source material and fictional formats in organization studies in order to explore issues of responsibility in the writing of research. We start by examining how research using fictional narrative methods has worked to radically destabilize distinctions between what is real and what is fictional. In relation to this, we ask the question: if a research account can be regarded as fiction, what are the implications of this insight for the responsibilities of authors? Opposing the view that using fiction necessarily leads to an `anything goes' relativism, we argue that a recognition of the fictionality of research texts implies a heightened sense of researcher-author responsibility. We see our main contribution as extending existing discussions of reflexivity in research into a consideration of issues of ethics and responsibility as it relates to the textuality of research writing. To do so, we draw on Derrida's theorization of responsibility and undecidability as a way of problematizing and discussing the ethics of research in relation to its textuality. We argue that the explicit borrowing from fictional genres evinces the essentially `written' and fictional status of research papers, and highlights the ethical dimensions associated with decisions related to representational strategies and authorial subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the Cullen Report into the Piper Alpha disaster in order to research how public inquiry teams represent their efforts to make sense of events as authoritative. It is argued that inquiry reports are highly convention-governed sensemaking narratives that employ various forms of verisimilitude in order to bolster their authority. They are also monological storytelling performances that function hegemonically to impose a particular version of reality on their readers. The investigation of the means by which inquiry reports accomplish verisimilitude and hegemony are important as they may shed light on how this form of public discourse depoliticizes disaster events, legitimates social institutions, and lessens anxieties by concocting myths that emphasize our omnipotence and capacity to control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that examined the divergent understandings of senior managers and two cohorts of their subordinates in a postmerger situation. Arguments on the effect of psychological processes and broadly available cultural resources on their working lives; Factors affecting change in organization; Implications for further research on the practice of change management.

Presents a study that examined a metaphorical insight concerning the interpretative skills of ethnographers by examining parallels between ethnography and jazz. Dual quest for self-identity and empathy by ethnographers; Analysis on ways in which ethnography can be articulated with reference to jazz; Implications of the depiction of ethnographers as jazz soloists.

This paper focuses on issues of identity and identification in a UK-based institution of higher education (Westville1 Institute). It is suggested that identity, both individual and collective, and the processes of identification which bind people to organizations, are constituted in the personal and shared narratives that people author in their efforts to make sense of their world and read meaning into their lives. The research contribution this paper makes is threefold. First, it illustrates how an organization's identity narrative evolves over time, and the variety of identification narratives, including dis-identification, neutral identification and schizo-identification, in terms of which participants define their relationship to it. Second, it makes a contribution to what are still rather inchoate efforts to theorize the dynamics of individual-collective processes of identification and identity construction. Finally, it argues that the efforts of senior managers to control processes of organizational identity formation, and participant identification, are interpretable as hegemonic acts required for legitimation purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the implications for the study of human relations, of the lack of a clear cultural identity which makes discovery of the individual self a difficult task. A postmodern agenda has surfaced identity as a key concept in the study of human relations. While psychologists have long been preoccupied with the individual identity, now groups and organizations are increasingly being ascribed identities together with cognates such as personalities, emotions and feelings. Outlined are some interesting and potentially fruitful lines of inquiry related to identity in organizations, and conclude with the suggestion that current levels of interest in identity, from diverse communities of social science scholars, may indicate that it has more scope for linking and cohering different social scientific research agendas that has so far been recognized. General acceptance and usage of the term identity reflects a new interest in issues centered on identity not just at the level of the individual but also as the concept applies to collectives.

The general assumption of consonance between belief and action in individual and organizational behaviour has meant that relatively little attention is paid in the organizational literature to how individuals and organizations respond to allegations of belief/act discrepancy. In this article we identify three forms of response to such allegations, self-deception, hypocrisy and scapegoating, and suggest how they may be interrelated. It is proposed that these responses may be seen as important means whereby individuals make sense of events and present their actions to others. The argument is developed and deployed with reference to the British 'Arms to Iraq Affair', which was the subject of detailed scrutiny through an extensive public inquiry. The principal research contribution of our article is to problematize the issue of belief/act discrepancy in a way which invites the juxtaposition of sensemaking and impression management concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the differing narratives describing the failure of a hospital in the United Kingdom information system. Suggestion that these narrative may be seen as an attributing failure to the occurence of particular events; Reasons for the promotion of these alternative narratives; Reference to a hospital information support system.

This paper focuses on the political processes through which legitimacy was sought for a large information technology system by its sponsors and key supporters. It is suggested that this was accomplished by means of a niche marketing campaign in which key stakeholder groups were fed radically different explanations regarding the motivations which prompted investment in the system and its likely implications for them and the organization. The system was legitimated by a combination of 'rational' arguments which appealed to stakeholder self-interest and cultural norms, control over the flow of information, and symbolic action. The research contribution this paper makes is to illustrate the symbolic and political processes, some of which can be interpreted as hypocritical, by which a select group attempted to manipulate other actors' understandings of a large and complex IT system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the micropolitical behaviour of a group of four individuals who were able to gain acceptance for their interpretation of events as a project unfolded through symbolic action, myth making and control over the flow of information. It is suggested that these devices were resorted to in order to create a façade of project-risk minimization in ways which were in part self-deceptive and ego-enhancing. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, it illustrates the social, symbolic and political processes by which a select group were able to manipulate other actors' understandings of complex organizational events. Second, it suggests that apparently irrational and uninformed decisions may have a rational and intelligible basis when interpreted as politically motivated symbolic acts required for legitimation purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]