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Management is a craft and reflexivity can enhance how this craft is practiced. Alas, organizations seldom provide circumstances that are conducive to reflexivity and individualize responsibility for reflexivity. This paper posits that the clinical practice of medicine provides an instructive example for how reflexivity can be organized for, i.e., formalized and routinized, in craft-based work. Clinical practice is defined by systematic analysis, on-going peer review and routinized teaching and these features of clinical practice embed reflexivity in organizational processes. We show how systematic analysis, on-going peer review and routinized teaching can be organized for with varying intensity in a management context, and how leading-edge organizations seem to have already embrace quite sophisticated versions of them (albeit in a piecemeal fashion). Some of these activities already happen unsystematically in organizations, but we make the case that practicing management according to a clinical model may benefit organizations in substantive ways. Most notably, these benefits are likely to include a reduction of unnecessary interventions, an improvement in the quality of interventions, a facilitation of organizational coordination, and a reduction in the need for managerial talent.

The notion of “performativity” (and the idea of the “performative”) has recently gained traction in the organizational studies field (Cabantous & Gond, 2011; Callon, 2007; Huault & Rainelli, 2009). Some authors have even talked about a “performative turn” (Muniesa, 2014, 2017). Broadly speaking, the notion of performativity points to the idea that discourses (e.g. speech acts, theories) are not merely describing reality but contribute to enact the reality they describe. It is indeed used by scholars from different research traditions, ranging from Actor-Network theory (Callon, 2007), critical management studies (Spicer, Alvesson, & Kärreman, 2009) and gender studies (Butler, 1997).

This article explores the intersection of branding, identity and control. It develops the notion of identity-incentive branding and links research on the collective-associative construction of occupational identities with work on identity incentives as an engaging form of control. Empirically, we draw on a case study of a North American grocery chain that is known for employing art-school graduates and other creative talents in creative (store artist) and non-creative shop-floor positions. The study shows that the brand is partly built outside–in through association with employees who embody brandrelevant characteristics in their identities and lifestyles. In return, those employees receive identity opportunities to validate their desired sense of self as ‘creative subject’. We discuss the dual nature of identity-incentive branding as neo-normative control and outline its implications for the organization and the employees.

In A. Wilkinson, S.J. Armstrong & M. Lounsbury (Eds.) . Oxford: Oxford University Press, At the beginning of the 1980s the publication of several key books and special issues of journals in the field of organization and management studies heralded the arrival of a new field known today as ‘organizational culture’. For academics the concept of culture served as a vehicle to renew their interest in the symbolic dimensions of organizational life and processes of meaning- making in organizations (Yanow and Ybema, 2009). For practitioners, it provided the promise of a most welcome toolkit for creating commitment in times of economic recession. However, after more than a decade of being a dominant management fashion, slowly scholarly and managerial interest in ‘culture’ started to wane, diminishing culture to a standard chapter in organization theory (OT) and organization behaviour (OB) textbooks. Recently, however, some scholars claim to be witnessing a renaissance of interest in culture and culture management (Fine and Hallett, 2014; Weber and Dacin, 2011). Some claim that the characteristics of this ‘second wave’ of culture interest are different from the first in its attribution of agency to individuals and organizations and its increased attention to ‘public culture’ and outside appearances (Weber and Dacin, 2011: 287– 8). Although we warmly welcome renewed interest and we see merit in analysing culture as strategically drawn on by organizational actors in their self- presentation to an outside audience, we also believe it is worth critically discussing this renewed interest by going back to the original inspiration for studying culture in organizations. We may lose some of culture’s strengths as a root metaphor in the second wave’s movement away from studying ‘internalized taken- for- granted beliefs’ and ‘private culture’. Specifically, culture as a concept used to have the capacity to elicit interest in more implicit processes of meaning- making and covert power processes and backstage politics, as well as dedication to provide thickly described analyses of everyday organizational life. In this chapter we first briefly revisit the earlier literature on organizational culture and culture management by offering a short historical overview. We then discuss the renewed interest in culture and compare its characteristics to the original interest. Nostalgically embracing the original ambitions of culture as a root metaphor then provides us with a viewpoint from which to critically assess the current interest in culture’s offsprings in organizational research as well as a foundation for offering an alternative. We claim that the zeal for providing layered interpretation and thick description typical of the original approach deserves to be revitalized in contemporary accounts of, and approaches to, cultural life in organizing. The movement in academic interest in culture and culture management from substance to image, from taken- for- granted beliefs to branding, deserves critical scrutiny. Rather than scratching the surfaces of public culture and actors’ strategies of self- presentation, we suggest that organizational research needs to focus on critically examining outward appearances, puncturing its myths by demasking its symbolic and staged qualities, and probing into the not- readily observable, the silent and silenced, backstage and off- stage worlds in the organizational dungeons, rekindling its fascination for what might be under the skin, beneath the surface, behind the scenes, and between the lines

In A. Wilkinson, S.J. Armstrong & M. Lounsbury (Eds.) . Oxford: Oxford University Press, At the beginning of the 1980s the publication of several key books and special issues of journals in the field of organization and management studies heralded the arrival of a new field known today as ‘organizational culture’. For academics the concept of culture served as a vehicle to renew their interest in the symbolic dimensions of organizational life and processes of meaning- making in organizations (Yanow and Ybema, 2009). For practitioners, it provided the promise of a most welcome toolkit for creating commitment in times of economic recession. However, after more than a decade of being a dominant management fashion, slowly scholarly and managerial interest in ‘culture’ started to wane, diminishing culture to a standard chapter in organization theory (OT) and organization behaviour (OB) textbooks. Recently, however, some scholars claim to be witnessing a renaissance of interest in culture and culture management (Fine and Hallett, 2014; Weber and Dacin, 2011). Some claim that the characteristics of this ‘second wave’ of culture interest are different from the first in its attribution of agency to individuals and organizations and its increased attention to ‘public culture’ and outside appearances (Weber and Dacin, 2011: 287– 8). Although we warmly welcome renewed interest and we see merit in analysing culture as strategically drawn on by organizational actors in their self- presentation to an outside audience, we also believe it is worth critically discussing this renewed interest by going back to the original inspiration for studying culture in organizations. We may lose some of culture’s strengths as a root metaphor in the second wave’s movement away from studying ‘internalized taken- for- granted beliefs’ and ‘private culture’. Specifically, culture as a concept used to have the capacity to elicit interest in more implicit processes of meaning- making and covert power processes and backstage politics, as well as dedication to provide thickly described analyses of everyday organizational life. In this chapter we first briefly revisit the earlier literature on organizational culture and culture management by offering a short historical overview. We then discuss the renewed interest in culture and compare its characteristics to the original interest. Nostalgically embracing the original ambitions of culture as a root metaphor then provides us with a viewpoint from which to critically assess the current interest in culture’s offsprings in organizational research as well as a foundation for offering an alternative. We claim that the zeal for providing layered interpretation and thick description typical of the original approach deserves to be revitalized in contemporary accounts of, and approaches to, cultural life in organizing. The movement in academic interest in culture and culture management from substance to image, from taken- for- granted beliefs to branding, deserves critical scrutiny. Rather than scratching the surfaces of public culture and actors’ strategies of self- presentation, we suggest that organizational research needs to focus on critically examining outward appearances, puncturing its myths by demasking its symbolic and staged qualities, and probing into the not- readily observable, the silent and silenced, backstage and off- stage worlds in the organizational dungeons, rekindling its fascination for what might be under the skin, beneath the surface, behind the scenes, and between the lines