The futures of power

Some may recall, or have read about, those heady days when history allegedly ended, as the Berlin Wall collapsed(3). When the wall came down it seemed to may observers as if, with the end of communism at least in Europe the only threat to existing democratic political power was vanquished. Liberal, plural democracy, the open society and open organizations seemed to stretch as a vista into a future full of promise offering peace in our time, with all its assumed dividends, and the triumph neither of the will nor the state but of decent, ordinary democracy. Surely the chance to build a better world of organizations was imminent

Political hybrids: tocquevillian views on project organizations

For the past decade, project organization has become increasingly central to management and organization studies, particularly as these seek to discern the contours of post-modern organizations. Yet, these contours frequently seem to be sighted without bearings on the current realities of project management. In this paper we take such bearings, using data derived from detailed qualitative, ethnographic enquiry into the experience of project management. From this data we construct the contours of project management more sharply. Rather than being a harbinger of an autonomous and more democratic future, free from extant bureaucratic organization controls, we find that project management has distinct modalities of control that we outline in the paper: reputational, calculative, and professional. Indeed, rather than foreshadowing a future transformational form, we find traces of a much older design: that of de Tocqueville

Productive resistance within the public sector: exploring organisational culture

The article examines how South Korean civil servants responded to the introduction of pay for performance. Drawing upon 31 in-depth interviews with career civil servants, it identifies what became known as 1/n, a form of ‘discreet resistance’ that emerged and evolved. The analytical framework allows productive resistance to be seen as ebbing and flowing during organisational change that sees institutionalisation, deinstitutionalisation and re-institutionalisation. In understanding the cultural context of organisational resistance the contribution is three-fold. First, a nuanced definition and understanding of productive resistance. Second, it argues that productive resistance must be seen as part of a process that does not simply reflect ‘offer and counter-offer’ within the change management process. Thirdly, it identifies differences within groups and sub-cultures concerning commitment towards resistance and how these fissures contribute towards change as new interpretive schemes and justifications are presented in light of policy reformulations

Conceptualizing historical organization studies

© 2016 Academy of Management Review. The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: The authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies-organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: History as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies-dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency-and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities

The road not taken: international aid’s choice of Copenhagen over Beijing

A decade after the United Nations conferences on gender equality and social development, this paper explores their policy origins and discusses their differential impact on international aid since 1995. The author draws on her direct experience to consider why Copenhagen led to Poverty Reduction Strategies and the first Millennium Development Goal whereas Beijing has become largely invisible in the mainstream world of aid. She argues that the powerful influence of economic rational choice theory associated with bureaucratic modes of thought has meant that the central debate in development policy has remained that of growth versus equity. Beijing's agenda of societal transformation offered another paradigm of development that has remained marginal. The paper concludes with a proposal. If international aid policy could handle more than one paradigm and thus be more open to different ways of thinking about economy, society and politics, aid agencies would be better able to support transformative processes for social justice

‘Don’t use “the weak word”’: Women brewers, identities and gendered territories of embodied work

Focusing on an unresearched group of women brewers, and drawing conceptually on embodiment and identity work, this article explores worker corporealities within the gendered landscape of microbreweries and deepens understanding of the body/work/gender nexus in the context of brewer’s work. In doing so, it challenges the marginalisation of female worker bodies in scholarly work on male-dominated occupations. Drawing on interview and observation data collected in the UK in 2015, verbal narratives of women brewers’ experiences of their working lives are utilised to provide insights into how their gendered bodily practices constitute resources for constructing a distinctive ‘brewster’ identity. Women brewers engage in identity work, on both individual and collective levels, through the material and symbolic framing of their embodied and gendered working selves; navigating their physical working environments; downplaying gender to emphasise physical competence; and foregrounding gender in relation to non-physical aspects to accentuate difference and collective contribution

Repensando redes estratégicas

The political dispute with the field of organization studies (OS) for leadership in research and education in business administration in the US and the proliferation of schools of thought in the 1980s resulted in serious questioning of the relevance of the field of strategy. Neoliberal globalization and its discourses pushed strategists of big corporations and academics to build the relevance of the area through increasing specialization and internationalization, but the dominant literature still ignores power and political issues and downplays government organizations. This helps explain the underdevelopment of research in strategic networks, the translation gap faced by business schools in the Anglo-American world, and the resistance in Brazil and other countries to the dominant literature. Analysis shows that research in strategic networks in emerging economies should make visible power and political issues, particularly from a critical perspective on asymmetries enhanced by the advance of neoliberalism, and produce knowledge that is relevant to strategists from both business firms and government and also society at large. In Brazil, researchers from strategy and OS should value and reinforce the proximity of these fields, and foster interdisciplinary developments with geography, global sociology and international relations and in particular with the literature in networks based on international political economy.A disputa política com a área de estudos organizacionais (EO) pela liderança em pesquisa e ensino em administração iniciada nos anos 1960 nos Estados Unidos e a proliferação de escolas de pensamento nos anos 1980 resultaram em questionamentos acerca da relevância da área de estratégia. A globalização neoliberal e seus discursos impulsionaram a construção da relevância da área por meio de crescente especialização e internacionalização; mas questões de poder e política continuam sendo desprezadas pela literatura dominante. Este quadro ajuda a explicar o subdesenvolvimento de pesquisa em redes estratégicas, o problema de relevância das escolas de negócios no mundo anglo-americano, e a resistência de pesquisadores no Brasil e outros países à literatura dominante. A análise mostra que pesquisas em redes estratégicas em economias emergentes devem contemplar questões de poder e política, em perspectiva crítica que desafia assimetrias acentuadas pelo avanço do neoliberalismo, para produzir conhecimento relevante para estrategistas de empresas e do governo e para a sociedade. No Brasil pesquisadores das áreas de estratégia e de EO devem valorizar e reforçar a proximidade entre essas áreas e promover desenvolvimentos interdisciplinares com áreas como geografia, sociologia global e relações internacionais, e em especial com a literatura de redes baseada em economia política internacional