Business elites and corporate governance in France and the UK

Business Elites and Corporate Governance in France and the UK is a cross-national study of business elites and corporate governance in France and the UK. It examines corporate governance from a comparative standpoint and looks beneath the surface at the exercise of power and authority in two distinct national business systems. It explores key issues concerning business elites, their networks, recruitment and reproduction. It aims to shed light on the mechanisms that govern the stability and regeneration of business elites against the backdrop of an increasingly global economy

Critical Realist Action Research and Humanistic Management Education

In line with its institutional commitments and in order to strengthen the relevance of its business education program in addressing the persistent social challenges facing the Philippines, Mission University (not its real name) revised its Master of Business Administration (MBA) curriculum in 2012. A core change in the curriculum was the incorporation of action research training and the requirement for graduation of implementing and defending an action research project. The introduction of action research, which is based on critical realist philosophy of science, was intended to enable the university’s MBA graduates to become reflexive and humanistic agents of change in their work contexts through the application of observation, critical reflection, collaborative analysis and action and scholarly skills. The implementation of the action research requirement is beginning to yield positive results based on the types of projects implemented by the students and their resulting sense of efficacy in the workplace. Challenges in implementation include the need to further hone student skills in pursuing more emancipatory projects and the need to further orient faculty in the critical realist philosophy underlying action research, as distinct from traditional positivism

Organizational context and the discursive construction of organizing

Organizational discourse has very little meaning outside its context. To understand any discourse's meaning, we must theorize about both the discourse's possibility and the circumstances of its constitution. Otherwise, we abstract text, sundering it from context. The present article asks what is context and what types of discourse structures and discourse strategies construct context? The author develops four distinct dimensions of context: when, where, as whom, and why people speak. To collaboratively construct meaning, an organization's members use several discursive means whereby a discourse from one context can be inserted, reframed, appropriated, and recursively placed into a discourse from another context-to achieve cross-contextual organizing of their accounts. Through such cross-contextual discursive work, members strive to balance these four (sometimes conflicting) contextual dimensions