Narrative environments: how do they matter?

The significance and possible senses of the phrase 'narrative environment' are explored. It is argued that 'narrative environment' is not only polysemous but also paradoxical; not only representational but also performative; and not just performatively repetitive but also reflexive and constitutive. As such, it is useful for understanding the world of the early 21st century. Thus, while the phrase narrative environment can be used to denote highly capitalised, highly regulated corporate forms, i.e. "brandscapes", it can also be understood as a metaphor for the emerging reflexive knowledge-work-places in the ouroboric, paradoxical economies of the 21st century. Narrative environments are the media and the materialities through which we come to comprehend that world and to act in those economies. Narrative environments are therefore, sophistically, performative-representative both of the corporate dominance of life worlds and of the undoing of that dominance, through the iterative responses to the paradoxical injunction: "learn to live"

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations

Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language: Metaphor and Austerity

Austerity is a by-product of the ongoing financial crisis. As Kitson et al (2001) explain, what was a \u201cNICE\u201d (\u2018non-inflationary consistent expansion\u2019) economy has turned \u201cVILE\u201d (\u2018volatile inflation, little expansion\u2019), and the economic and social fall-out is now becoming visible. Unemployment, redundancy, inflation, recession, insecurity, and poverty all loom, causing governments, businesses and individuals to reevaluate their priorities. A changing world changes attitudes, and the earliest manifestations of such change can often be found in figurative language. Political rhetoric attempts to sweeten the bitter pill that nations have no choice but to swallow; all are invited to share the pain, make sacrifices for the common good, and weather the storm. But more sinister undertones can also be perceived. In times of social and financial dire straits, scapegoats are sought and mercilessly pursued in the press. The elderly, unemployed, and disabled are under fire for \u201csponging off the state\u201d; and as jobs become scarcer and the tax bill rises, migrant populations and asylum seekers are viewed with increasing suspicion and resentment. Calls for a \u201cbig society\u201d fall on deaf ears. Society, it seems, is shrinking as self-preservation takes hold. Austerity is a timely area of study: although austerity measures have been implemented in the past, most of the contributions here address the current political and economic situation, which means that some of the studies reported are work in progress while others look at particular \u201cwindows\u201d of language output from the recent past. Whichever their focus, the papers presented here feature up-to-the-minute research into the metaphors being used to comment upon our current socioeconomic situation. The picture of austerity that emerges from these snapshots is a complex one, and one which is likely to be developed further and more widely in the coming future

Microfinance in Myanmar : a critical hermeneutic inquiry into ontological economic capacity

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The Leading Journal in the Field: Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management

217 p. : il , 20 x 13 cm.Libro ElectrónicoI am often told, “Don’t waste your time reading books, you’d be better off reading the leading journals in your field.” Unfortunately, the authors of this book have closely read some of those articles: examining arguments, with simple principles and words, plus a touch of irony – and a shared belief in ideas and debates. The suspicions that we all have in a part of our head appears in its ugly nakedness: what is this social game that authors in leading management journals play? What grants them their truth effects? This is a book that one should read the day one enters the academic field; and then regularly thereafter so as not to forget.’ Professor Jean-Luc Moriceau, Telecom Business School (France)"A menudo me dijo:" No pierda su tiempo leyendo libros, que sería mejor que la lectura de las revistas líderes en su campo. "Desafortunadamente, los autores de este libro han leído muy de cerca algunos de esos artículos: el examen de los argumentos, con principios simples y palabras, además de un toque de ironía - y la creencia compartida de ideas y debates. Las sospechas de que todos tenemos en una parte de la cabeza aparece en su fea desnudez: ¿qué es este juego social que los autores de revistas líder en gestión de jugar? Lo que les dé efectos de verdad? Este es un libro que uno debe leer el día se entra en el campo académico, y luego periódicamente a partir de entonces, para no olvidar ". Profesor Jean-Luc Moriceau , Telecom Business School (Francia)Contributors vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Towards a Clinical Study of Finance: The DeAngelos and the Redwoods 9 3 Marientbal At Work 35 4 ‘Lessons for Managers and Consultants’: A Reading of Edgar H. Schein’s Process Consultation 61 5 Multiple Failures of Scholarship: Karl Weick and the Mann Gulch Disaster 85 6 The ‘Nature of Man’ and the Science of Organization 103 7 Performativity: From J.L. Austin to Judith Butler 119 8 Four Close Readings on Introducing the Literary in Organizational Research 143 9 From Bourgeois Sociology to Managerial Apologetics: A Tale of Existential Struggle 16

El papel de la metáfora como eje vertebrador de los cinco últimos programas electorales del Partido Conservador británico y la conceptualización de sus políticas en las ilustraciones editoriales de la prensa conservadora británica

Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 11/04/2019In the last decades there has been a growing interest in multimodality applied to specific discourses within Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The present dissertation analyses metaphorical conceptualisation used by the British Conservative Party and the editorial cartoons in the British conservative press for the general elections in 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015. This is done in an integrative approach which combines cognitive approaches, Critical Discourse Analysis (Charteris- Black’s (2014) Critical Metaphor Analysis and Musolff’s (2016) scenario-based approach) and corpus techniques. For this dissertation, two corpora were collected: (1) the manifesto corpus of 136,817 words, made up of the last five general elections; and (2) a cartoon corpus made 246 editorial cartoons published in The Daily Telegraph and The Times in the election years. Each corpus was divided into four sections according to the general election, except for the fact that the 2001 and 2005 general election belong to the same section. This study focuses on four main areas: (1) leadership; (2) economic issues; (3) British national interest; and (4) domestic issues. For the analysis of the manifesto corpus, different tools included in Antconc 4.3.3. (Anthony, 2014) were used. The analysis offers quantitative and qualitative data which reveals that metaphorical conceptualisation is an essential tool in the ideological evolution of the Conservative Party, which, under Cameron, produced a change of conceptualisation strategy on certain issues covered by the study, such as the the economy and society. However, the alleged ideological evolution is not reflected in the relationship between the UK and the EU. The results obtained in each section are contrasted to the conceptualisation made by The Times and The Daily Telegraph about the same issues, in search for synchronic patterns of similarity and differences in the source domains used to portray the same issues. This dissertation intends to serve as a starting point of multi-national contrastive studies to improve political communication and the knowledge about national and social identities.En las últimas décadas ha habido un creciente interés en estudios de multimodalidad aplicados a discursos específicos en el marco de la Teoría de la Metáfora Conceptual (Lakoff y Johnson 1980). La presente tesis analiza la conceptualización metafórica del Partido Conservador británico y las ilustraciones editoriales de la prensa conservadora inglesa en las elecciones generales de 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010 y 2015. Esto se hace mediante un enfoque integrador que combina aproximaciones que combinan enfoques cognitivos y de Análisis Crítico del Discurso (Análisis Crítico de la Metáfora de Charteris-Black, 2014 y el enfoque basado en escenarios de Musolff, 2016) junto con técnicas de corpus. En esta tesis se han creado dos corpus: (1) un corpus de programas electorales hecho con los programas electorales de las últimas cinco elecciones generales, y (2) un corpus con 246 ilustraciones editoriales del The Daily Telegraph y The Times en los años de las elecciones. Cada corpus está dividido en 4 secciones, correspondientes a cada uno de los años en los que las elecciones tuvieron lugar con la salvedad de que las secciones de los años 2001 y 2005 se analizan conjuntamente. La investigación está centrada en 4 grandes áreas: (1) liderazgo; (2) economía; (3) interés nacional británico, y (4) política interior. El corpus de programas electorales ha sido analizado utilizando distintas herramientas del paquete de Antconc 4.3.3. (Anthony, 2014). El análisis ofrece datos cuantitativos y cualitativos que demuestran que la conceptualización metafórica es una herramienta esencial en la evolución del Partido Conservador británico que, bajo el liderazgo de Cameron, realizó un cambio en la estrategia de conceptualización en las áreas estudiadas, como la economía o la sociedad. Sin embargo, esta evolución no se refleja en otros aspectos como la conceptualización de la relación del Reino Unido con la UE. Los resultados obtenidos en cada sección se contrastan con la conceptualización realizada por The Daily Telegraph y The Times, de manera que se ofrecen patrones de similitudes y diferencias en la conceptualización realizada sobre los mismos asuntos. Esta tesis pretende ser un punto de partida para la profundización de estudios contrastivos sobre comunicación política y la creación de identidades nacionales.Fac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu

An Analysis of Chinese acquisitions of Made in Italy firms in the luxury sector

Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) from emerging economies has begun to increase significantly and has been growing at a faster pace than Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the developed world. This research seeks to assess the impact of Chinese acquisitions and their implications for the “Made in Italy” luxury sector and its firms. This paper presents a cross-case analysis of two Chinese acquisitions in order to provide some in-depth insights into the influences and the motives driving Chinese firms to invest in the luxury Made in Italy sector, the patterns and modes of the Chinese acquisitions as well as the competitive strategies and the distinctive challenges that both investors and acquired firms have to face. From the findings, it emerges that both the investor and the acquired firm need to overcome several key challenges to be mutual benefits from the acquisition