Who Controls the Looking Glass? Towards a Conversational Understanding of Organizational Theatre

This paper presents a longitudinal study of interactive organizational theatre. Managers of a large home care organization used 30 instances of organizational theatre over a one year period to effect organizational change. We found that neither management, who had hoped that employees would accept and internalize the messages accompanying the play, nor employees, who used the liminal spaces to express their own take on the organization’s issues, achieved their aims directly. Yet a year later, organizational performance and satisfaction were significantly improved—much of this was attributed to the play. To explain this, we develop a conversational theory of change, one where ‘conversation pieces’ are central. We also speculate on the properties that conversation pieces and conversational systems like organizational theatre must have if they are to effect change.N/

Anticipation and Organization : Seeing, knowing and governing futures

Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures by engaging insights from Foucauldian scholarship that highlight the intersection between what we can see, know and govern. We highlight the importance of processes of knowledge production in governance efforts, and articulate how anticipatory governance is crafted through intricate combinations of resources such as narratives, numbers and digital traces. The main contribution is a conceptual typology outlining four different templates for anticipatory governance in organizational settings that we term â\u80\u98indicative snapshotsâ\u80\u99, â\u80\u98prognostic correlationsâ\u80\u99, â\u80\u98projected transformationsâ\u80\u99 and â\u80\u98phantasmagoric fictionsâ\u80\u99. We posit anticipatory governance as a knowledge-based, performative phenomenon that addresses potential and desirable futures in and between organizations. Such anticipatory activities gauge and guide organizational processes and modes of thinking and acting along different temporal orientations, and have governance effects that makes anticipation performative by its very nature. This understanding of anticipatory governance, we suggest, offers both conceptual contributions and empirical avenues for research in organization and management studies

Sorting people in and out: The plasticity of the categories of employability, work capacity and disability as technologies of government

The ‘employable individual’ is today a powerful normative category, saturated with assumptions about what it takes to be attractive in the labour market. What happens to people who cannot meet those expectations? For some, the way to employability and employment goes through a process of detecting and coding of disability at the Public Employment Service (PES). Based on interviews with staff at a rehabilitation unit in the Swedish Public Employment Service, the article analyses processes of evaluating work capacity for marginally employable people as part of the Employability Rehabilitation Programme. By studying the classification procedures, the article analyses how administrative categories work as ‘technologies of government’ that ‘make legible’ desirable traits in the individual. The analysis shows that employability is mediated, or enabled, by classificatory procedures that spring out of a template for what is considered acceptable and desirable individual characteristics, hence reinforcing standards of normalcy. Moreover, the categories through which the individual moves are plastic and pliable in relation to political predicates and labour market fluctuations. In this process, to be non-employable becomes a disability and conversely, to be disabled can make one employable

Consequences of a Liquid Mandate : World Economic Forum and the Partial Organizing of Global Agendas

This paper describes and answers the question how the WEF creates a strong position for itself in the global arena, without a formal and institutional mandate. Theoretically the paper builds and adds to emerging body of literature regarding partial organization, as framed by Ahrne and Brunsson (2011). In order to understand the political form of action that WEF has developed for itself we employ the concept of partial organization, arguing that “membership” is the main organizational element through which they organize their environment. By way of making participants into various forms of members the WEF is able to create an organized environment around it self, which it can draw upon in its interest of setting global political agendas, in spite of a lacking nation state based mandate. The paper explains how funders and participants are made into members, and how a partial organization around the WEF is established and maintained. As a consequence, based on the relations between them and their many affiliated members the WEF achieves creating an order around them selves, transcending the actual full organization of the WEF. Participants at WEF activities, as well as WEF staff, would call this order a “network”. We acknowledge the network aspects of this order, but argue that it is foremost based on organization; it is a decided order, based on the decisions taken within the WEF. Empirically, the paper builds on interview data within Geneva staff and participants at WEF activities.Att tjäna världen: World Economic Forum som en global politisk aktö

His Master´s Voice? : Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Business and the World Economic Forum

Commonly, the relationship between corporations and non-for profit organizations, such as foundations, think tanks and private research institutes, is analyzed in terms suggesting that when acting as funders corporations set the frames for the non-for profit organization who, in turn, not only mimics but also serves as to broadcast the views of its funder. Drawing on the case of the Swizz based foundation/think tank World Economic Forum and its corporate funders we scrutinize this relationship. We show that as an organization interested in global policy making it is of vital importance for the Forum to construct its own agency, not merely giving voice to its funderâ\u80\u99s views, and that it will do so drawing on the resources that the funders provide. Moreover, we submit that as organizations all partaking actors will endeavor to construct their own agency, oftentimes by drawing on the resources of others. In so doing, actors may have both overlapping and divergent interests. Evoking the Lévi-Strauss concept of the bricoleur, we analyze how the various and multifaceted priorities of corporations will not only be filtered by the Form, but it will also make use of the resources at hand for organizing forth own policy messages. The result is a complex and dynamic web of actors and voices

Think tanks as policy brokers in partially organized fields: The case of World Economic Forum

As has been noted in research on think tanks it is difficult to describe what a think tank is, and to pinpoint what it is in think tank activities that generates powerful relationships towards other actors. This is even more the case when talking of transnational think tanks. In this report we give a theoretical account of how relationships organized by transnational think tanks may be analyzed. In the report we are drawing on empirical findings from the World Economic Forum (WEF), seen as a transnational think tank addressing a non-national audience. We are suggesting that think-tank experts are engaged in the brokerage of ideas and knowledge, implying anintermediary activity, wherein ideas are translated, shaped and formatted. Operating at the interfaces of various actors, think-tank experts formulate and negotiate ideas with and among actors, encouraging them to adopt and use those ideas. The main argument in the report is that this brokerage can be seen to generate ‘partially organized fields’. The think tank organizes other actors not by constructing a complete organization, but by establishing and maintaining a decided network, drawing upon such organizational elements as membership, monitoring and sanctions. This allows think tanks to maintain a degree of flexibility, whilst gaining control of valuable resources. In the case of the WEF the report show that the combination of a small core of completeorganization with a larger environment of only partial organizing essentially allows the WEF to be bigger than they actually are. The decided networks, i.e. the partnerships, the working groups, and the communities, significantly extends the reach of the WEF, allowing it to reach across organizational boundaries. We suggest that this form of organizing is the prime way for transnational think tanks toorganize outside themselves, thereby exerting political influence. The potential influence it may exert resides in its influence over the shaping of agendas in other organizations, the formulation of pressing political issues, and by mobilizing actors in their decided networks to carry the issues further, on other organizational platforms and with other organizational mandates.Improving the State of the World: World Economic Forum and the Politics of Econom