5,385 research outputs found

    Introducing argumentative and discursive enterprise leading and management

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    Leading an enterprise requires, obviously, decision making. However, these decisions require explanations in order to make it possible for stakeholders to get an understanding about the enterprise's strategic direction. This is even more important when these stakeholders are in charge to transpose such strategic decision into their tactical or operational work. Enterprise modelling may be capable of depicting strategies per se, but it is rather a vessel of communication than of explanation. Whilst, a strategy may be accordingly modelled, those who receive such a model needs to purposeful interpret and successfully implement it. However, without any insights, justifications or references that go beyond the claim of a model, it is dificult to embrace the theory of the actual modeller. Therefore, in this paper argumentative modelling will be specifically applied to the domain of strategic management. Moreover it will be elucidated how modelled strategic arguments can be used as a basis for enterprise architecture alignment and management. As it will be shown in the paper, the application of argumentative modelling overcomes classical restrictions and makes it possible to support a discourse, which can be later on used as an explanation for the intentions of the modeller

    It's all action, it's all learning: Action learning in SMEs

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    Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to argue that action learning (AL) may provide a means of successfully developing small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach - The literature around SME learning suggests a number of processes are important for SME learning which similarity, it is argued, are encompassed in AL. AL may therefore offer a means of developing SME. This argument is then supported through the results of a longitudinal qualitative evaluation study conducted in the north-west of England, which involved the use of AL in 100 SMEs. Findings - The paper finds that the discursive and critical reflection aspects of the set environment appeared to be of great utility and importance to the SMEs. Sets also had an optimum level of which helped them find "common ground". Once common ground was established set members often continued to network and form alliances outside of the set environment. SME owner-managers could discuss both personal and business. Finally, AL offered the opportunity to take time out of the business and "disengage" with the operational allowing them to become more strategic. Practical implications - In this paper both the literature review and the results of the evaluation suggest AL may offer a means of engaging SMEs in training, which is relevant and useful to them. AL offers a way for policy makers and support agencies to get involved with SME management development while retaining context and naturalistic conditions. Originality/value - This paper attempts to move beyond other articles which assess SME response to government initiatives, through examining the literature around SME learning and constructing a rationale which proposes that AL encompasses many of the learning processes suggested in the literature as effective for SME development. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    Do policy makers tell good stories? Towards a multi-layered framework for mapping and analysing policy narratives embracing futures

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    Faced with major global problems, public policies increasingly embrace narratives of systemic transition towards desired future. This article introduces a conceptual and analytical framework designed to reconstruct and analyse historical and prospective policy discourses on emerging societal challenges. The proposed Policy Narrative Framework Analysis (POLiFRAME) is novel in integrating frame analysis with the notion of theory of change connecting historical and prospective dimensions of policy narratives. The framework adds an emphasis on the selection and interpretation of empirical evidence to support policy narratives. Application of the framework is illustrated with a case study on frames and reframing of EU resource efficiency policy

    Imagining higher education in the European knowledge economy:Discourse and ideas in communications of the EU

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    The paper focuses on the role of EU institutions in European higher education. Following the outset of the EU Lisbon Strategy (2000), the EU Commission positioned itself as an influential venue for generating, coordinating and communicating discourse on higher education (within the Bologna Process and beyond). Gradually, the scattered ideas converged into a relatively detailed set of policy proposals on the systemic and institutional reforms needed to engage higher education in the regional economic project. The ideas evolved within the imagined knowledge economy. The dominance of this political rationale has resulted in the steady advance of the Europeanisation of higher education, including the incremental tendency to transfer national competencies to supranational arenas - so far limited to soft instruments such as recommendations, guidelines, reporting and common actions

    Governance and Business Communication

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    The author starts exploring the field by investigating the corporate websites and blogs of the leading US companies - the paper explores the language of the corporate governance, leadership, internal and external specifics of the corporate communication. The paper argues that all companies can be classified into 4 discursive types identified by the author on the basis of the four types of social implications in their discursive rhetori

    'Getting people on board': Discursive leadership for consensus building in team meetings

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    Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and ‘away-days’. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions within the team. Third, a more hierarchical authoritarian or a more interpersonal egalitarian leadership style can be identified via specific combinations of these five discursive strategies. The article concludes that the egalitarian leadership style increases the likelihood of achieving a durable consensus. Several related avenues for research are outlined

    How International Law Standards Pervade Discourse on the Use of Armed Force - Insights into European and US Newspaper Debates between 1990 and 2005

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    For almost a decade, ‘public legitimacy’ has remained largely unaddressed in empirical international relations (IR) analyses of international legalization. Yet, this concept has behavioral consequences. IR scholars for long assume that a belief in the legitimacy of a norm may be one reason for a ‘compliance pull’ on the international stage. The present study addresses this gap. It suggests a sociological conception of legalization observable in mass media debates and encompassing law’s ‘public legitimacy’, understood as the congruence between legal regulations and discursive practices to that effect that these rules are also accepted by the larger public. This conception is illustrated in European and US newspaper reporting about military interventions in the post-Cold War era (1990-2005). Based on a large-n media analysis, the study not only concludes that an ‘international rule of law’ frame is heavily diffused across the communicative practices of European and US public spheres. It also shows that two legal norms in particular – human rights and United Nations (UN) multilateralism – generate a shared sense of ‘public legitimacy’ across the six countries analyzed.European Public Sphere; media; legitimacy; Europeanization; Europeanization

    Monetary Policy Processes in Postcommunist Romania

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    This thesis has a twofold aim. It first argues that monetary policy is inherently political because it involves struggles over meaning. It modifies Niebyl’s (1946) conceptual approach with an explicit attention to meaning, advancing a theory/ policy discourse/institutional practices nexus for exploring central banking. It shows that the emergence of leading representations of monetary processes (in Ricardo, Keynes and Friedman) involved discursive struggles during periods of crisis to assign meaning to problems and establish dominant interpretations. Politics and power were not grafted onto policy but were ontologically constitutive of it, shaping specific institutional configurations and practices. Second, this conceptualization is taken to a case study: a critical scrutiny of the role played by the central bank of Romania (NBR) in the reconstitution of the postcommunist Romanian economy as neoliberal economy from 1990 to 2008. The thesis asks what does the central bank do when the state, defined through its central planning legacy, ‘retreats’ from the market? The usual account explains policy success as direct result of commitments to neoliberal (monetarist) principles prescribed by international policy advice. Before 1997, neocommunist governments politically validated a communist legacy: soft budget constraints in the (state) productive sector. Politicized monetary policy decisions produced repeated crises. Afterwards, neoliberal governments gradually institutionalized an autonomous economic sphere, allowing an objective formulation and implementation of stability-orientated monetarist policies. The thesis challenges this orthodoxy. It argues against the attempts to erase politics from monetary policy processes that the above account articulates. Instead, drawing on critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism in its shifting forms, the period under analysis will be (re)interpreted as an ongoing process of neoliberalization, with the central bank an important actor in it. Indeed, the narration of crises identified the NBR as an essential instrument of institutional change and neoliberal ‘policy-making’. Monetarist narratives (ideologically) legitimized neoliberalism and effectively enacted neoliberal principles of monetary governance in the central bank. Thus, before 1997, the central bank functioned as a key vehicle of the neoliberal attack on the state’s capacity to craft economic reform. Since neoliberal institutions (also) take time to build, expanding policy repertoires outside the monetarist range invested the central bank with increasing powers to respond to structural and institutional resistance to neoliberal logics, arising from both communist legacies and ongoing political struggles. After 1997, the central bank’s rationality gradually changed to a constructive phase, normalizing an extralocal mode of economic governance whose distinguishing features will be identified. Institutional practices reconstructed the relationship between money, foreign exchange and treasury markets, subjugating liquidity management to the requirements of financialized accumulation. With financial stability increasingly tied into transnational actors’ choices, the NBR adopted inflation targeting. Nevertheless, inflation-targeting’s promise of stability operated to sideline the destabilizing nature of normalized neoliberal practices of monetary management, clearly evoked by the 2008 crisis. The thesis concludes with policy implications and an agenda for future research
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