Discursive resources: top managers' identities and the long-term survival of their organisations

This paper represents an attempt to understand the dynamics of the identity work in the context of the challenges top managers have to address. Managers' discursive resources influence what they notice and also the interpretation of what is noticed. Their ability to understand and challenge their discursive resources is crucial because the persistence of categories and metaphors that depicts a globalized world where they do not have capacity to react may explain the decline of their organizations. The stories they tell ground their emotions and their identities and then they see the world and themselves through them. Hence, their discursive resources and their emotions impact on the long-term survival of their organizations through the strategic exchange between top managers and organizations. The paper raises queries about the discursive resources that top managers use to define their identities, and how these identities may affect the long-term survival of organizations. The findings from this study add to the theoretical knowledge of the sense-making literature. They have practical consequences for the textile sector in Portugal and how strategic issues are addressed. This is in allowing an understanding of the influence that discursive resources have in managers' identity construction and the effects of their identities on the long-term survival of their organizations

Prices, Profits, Proxies, and Production

This paper studies nonparametric identification and counterfactual bounds for heterogeneous firms that can be ranked in terms of productivity. Our approach works when quantities and prices are latent rendering standard approaches inapplicable. Instead, we require observation of profits or other optimizing-values such as costs or revenues, and either prices or price proxies of flexibly chosen variables. We extend classical duality results for price-taking firms to a setup with discrete heterogeneity, endogeneity, and limited variation in possibly latent prices. Finally, we show that convergence results for nonparametric estimators may be directly converted to convergence results for production sets.Comment: This paper was previously circulated with the title "Prices, Profits, and Production

How top managers make sense of their role in the strategic decision making process

The literature relating to strategy is full of contradictions. Top managers are expected to be tough-minded but flexible, to have tight controls on some areas and loose controls on others, to have an inspiring broad vision along meticulous attention to detail, to have a linear sense of rationality but to thrive on chaos. It is therefore our intention to find out how top managers make sense of these contradictions, how they integrate these contradictions in their experience and their management. This is because top managers live very fragmented lives. Although strategic decision making has long been a topic of great interest in the field of strategic management, most of the studies have not addressed the cognitive dimension of decision making, namely the question of how decision makers actually think. Strategy is a work of fiction and therefore all strategists are authors of fiction and the question is how top managers understand this fiction, their role and how they see themselves in this fiction. This paper will address these and similar questions and will try to find answers to them based on an analytical approach. The study took place in the context of the clothing and textile industries in Portugal and the companies targeted in this study are of medium and large sizes

Chaos in one-dimensional lattices under intense laser fields

A model is investigated where a monochromatic, spatially homogeneous laser field interacts with an electron in a one-dimensional periodic lattice. The classical Hamiltonian is presented and the technique of stroboscopic maps is used to study the dynamical behavior of the model. The electron motion is found to be completely regular only for small field amplitudes, developing a larger chaotic region as the amplitude increases. The quantum counterpart of the classical Hamiltonian is derived. Exact numerical diagonalizations show the existence of universal, random-matrix fluctuations in the electronic energy bands dressed by the laser field. A detailed analysis of the classical phase space is compatible with the statistical spectral analysis of the quantum model. The application of this model to describe transport and optical absorption in semiconductor superlattices submitted to intense infrared laser radiation is proposed.Comment: 9 pages, RevTex 3.0, EPSF (6 figures), to appear in Europhys. J.