Evidence from Copenhagen Business School

In three decades Higher Education Institutions have experienced decreasing trust and increasing demands of accountability from society. The aim is to explore how assessments of departments’ research activities can contribute to improvement of research organization, research culture and credibility. The empirical study is based on reports from two assessment rounds of nine research departments, in 1994 to 2007. Qualitative statements and recom-menda¬tions are transformed to relative quantifiable performance measures on ten different dimensions in order to study development over time and analysis of departments´ variation. Results indicate significant improvement among some departments while others have not managed to such extent

Managing Accountability: Exploring Reasoning in a Management Team

This article deals with a sociocultural perspective on dialogue and communication in analyzing the actors’ ways of meaning making in talk as action in a management team meeting. It investigates the potential of the dialogical approach for studying talk and communication. The aim of the paper is to investigate the understanding of institutional categorising practices and rhetorical strategies used in a decision making process. Categorising practice is delimited to a “sale and lease back case,” an example of institutional reasoning, argumentation and decision-making. Data are generated from a video recorded management meeting and participant observations. Findings frequently indicate the team members’ mobilization of rhetorical strategies and of institutional categories as flexible tools in re-contextualisation and negotiation of the issue in question. In contrast with prior studies of integration processes, after mergers and acquisitions, the results illustrate the complexity of actors’ ways of meaning making of actions in a management team meeting

"Integration" - a polyphonic concept in merging companies

In this study a new method for researching the qualitative differences in meaning making of a concept is introduced to clarify how managers in two merger cases differ in the way they make sense of the ongoing process. A discursive perspective is used to focus on the social construction of the meaning of “integration,” a concept frequently used and often taken for granted in national and international post merger and post acquisitions studies. This general problem, how we understand and interpret a word, the concept “integration,” has been studied in the context of two Scandinavian acquisitions. The claim is that several language forms can be used to express the same meaning of a concept as well as the same words can be used to express differing meanings, depending on the actors understanding of the words. The findings illuminate the qualitative differences among managers’ ways of making sense of this concept in four categories of description. It can be argued that the variation in understandings on the one hand is related to the referential aspects, the meaning aspect, and on the other hand to the structural aspects of the concept

Institutional audit of the University of Lisbon

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

"Integration" - a polyphonic concept in merging companies

In this study a new method for researching the qualitative differences in meaning making of a concept is introduced to clarify how managers in two merger cases differ in the way they make sense of the ongoing process. A discursive perspective is used to focus on the social construction of the meaning of “integration,” a concept frequently used and often taken for granted in national and international post merger and post acquisitions studies. This general problem, how we understand and interpret a word, the concept “integration,” has been studied in the context of two Scandinavian acquisitions. The claim is that several language forms can be used to express the same meaning of a concept as well as the same words can be used to express differing meanings, depending on the actors understanding of the words. The findings illuminate the qualitative differences among managers’ ways of making sense of this concept in four categories of description. It can be argued that the variation in understandings on the one hand is related to the referential aspects, the meaning aspect, and on the other hand to the structural aspects of the concept.mergers; acquisitions; integration processes; variation theory

Managing Accountability: Exploring Reasoning in a Management Team

This article deals with a sociocultural perspective on dialogue and communication in analyzing the actors’ ways of meaning making in talk as action in a management team meeting. It investigates the potential of the dialogical approach for studying talk and communication. The aim of the paper is to investigate the understanding of institutional categorising practices and rhetorical strategies used in a decision making process. Categorising practice is delimited to a “sale and lease back case,” an example of institutional reasoning, argumentation and decision-making. Data are generated from a video recorded management meeting and participant observations. Findings frequently indicate the team members’ mobilization of rhetorical strategies and of institutional categories as flexible tools in re-contextualisation and negotiation of the issue in question. In contrast with prior studies of integration processes, after mergers and acquisitions, the results illustrate the complexity of actors’ ways of meaning making of actions in a management team meeting.acquisition; categories and rhetoric strategies; situated knowing; accounting practices; institutional context