Relatedness, co-inquiring and imagination: Mimetic images of recovery

The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological challenges of developing a shared academic-student discourse of recovery with undergraduate students in their final year at a British business school.We reflect on the meaning of recovery and how it was negotiated and constructed by the relation established between students and academics, by analysing the visual- and text-based materials they produced and the discussions provoked by these materials using symmetric ethnology and content analysis.The main finding is that students tended to reflect on the real, particularly the social, by creating copies and replicas; we as academics, engaged with this practice with ambivalence. The article concludes that this as an attempt to manage what is felt to be unmanageable, echoing what some authors consider to be a contemporary practice of social justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) and others consider to be a well established cultural practice (Taussig, 1993).The paper contributes (1) to a better understanding of how relatedness and reflexive inquiry become essential for when teaching and that is linked with academics being able to be openly related with students and their situation; (2) to a better understanding of recovery and how it can be co constructed by academics and students through a share narrative; (3) to a methodology for the analysis of text and images, and its appropriateness for the study of ways in which imagination of the future may be co-constructed; (4) and to an understanding of mimetic objects, replicas and copies.The paper suggests that this approach could have practical implications when applying co inquiry approaches of learning, the understanding of institutional and academic meaning of replication and relatedness in academic context of economic crisis.We conclude that academic relatedness and students-tutors engagement is constructed differently when re considering replication as a way of learning. Preference for copying and pasting found texts and images, rather than creating, served as a way of managing the unknown and of constructing recovery through a process of ‘mimeting’

Responsible forms of project management education: Theoretical plurality and reflective pedagogies

The paper aims to revive an interest in the notion of responsible project management education (RPME) in the context of related contemporary debates about the integration of reflexivity, ethics and sustainability in the business schools’ curricula; the purpose, values and effectiveness of university education; and practical relevance of business and management courses, to mention only a few. We offer an interpretation of what RPME at university level may mean concerning the practice of curriculum design and pedagogy of project management courses in light of a perceived nature of project management theory and the field as practised. We argue that responsible project management education should make the theorising of the process of projectification, relational complexity and practical wisdom (combining prudence, instrumental and value rationality) accessible and appealing to all involved and should pursue experiential reflective learning. To illustrate how it may work in practice, we reflect on our longstanding experience with designing and delivering a PM module for an MBA programme. Apart from the challenge with maintaining the requisite diversity of the teaching team and practitioners’ input into the course, we illuminate some benefits and challenges as perceived by the participating students. These are: discomfort caused by encountering a different ‘project management’; excitement in embracing the unexpected; light-bulb moments in redefining one's own understanding of PM practice and in finding a new way of understanding and dealing with a specific situation in the workplace

The texture of entrepreneurship programs: Revisiting experiential entrepreneurship education through the lens of the liminal–liminoid continuum

Positioning the liminal and the liminoid on a continuum, we define a ‘‘space’’ within which practice-led, experiential learning occurs. The more liminal processes within this space are associated with familiarity, wide social recognition, and relative security, the more liminoid are allied with risk-taking, innovation, creativity, and higher levels of uncertainty. Our research was conducted among student or founders on MEntrep, an integrated Masters and venture creation program. Our findings suggest it is the coexistence of the liminal program experiences, such as the ‘‘rite of passage’’ of obtaining a Masters qualification, that act as a safety net as students embrace the fluidity and lack of security associated with the more liminoid experiences many associate with the venture creation endeavor. We argue that M-Entrep is an example of a program that interweaves liminal and liminoid processes, creating a texture that is both open and containing, facilitating ‘‘entrepreneuring’’ and encouraging students to reimagine themselves in new roles and statuses. By exploring entrepreneurship education through the lens of the liminal and the liminoid continuum, facilitators of entrepreneurship education programs can better appreciate, design, and influence the texture of this space to benefit the student learning experience

Vulnerability in the global tropics? An ethnography of the experiences of international managers in Venezuela and Mexico

The Latin American tropics have been considered spaces where the taken-for-granted vulnerability of the international assignment experience is exacerbated because of poor working conditions. In classical approaches to international management studies, the complexity attributed to the role of global managers resides in the ‘fact’ that they live under conditions of permanent confrontation, adjustment, change and adaptation. The literature typically portrays the international manager as perpetually experiencing an ‘out-of-place’ existence, as their supposed ‘national culture’ of origin is by definition different from the ‘national culture’ of the destination country. The stereotyped exoticism of the tropics – constructed as spaces for tourism and adventure, but also characterised as precarious in terms of their health infrastructures, uncomfortable climates, and socio-economic and political instability – contributes to the framing of international management in these regions as highly challenging. In this article, these stereotypical conceptions are challenged. Evidence is provided indicating that managers’ narratives about ‘the experience of working and living in the tropics’ have more to do with their negative experiences of organisational power and the creation of a singular organisational culture of control and commitment than with the experience of the tropical context per se. The analysis is based on 6 years of intermittent longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork (2005–2009; 2020–2022) with international and nomadic Latin American professionals working in two factories located in the tropics owned by an industrial corporation

Les paraules leader/líder i les seves ressonàncies en una corporació multinacional ítalo-llatinoamericana

Des de la Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, i el Grup de Recerca AFIN de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, s'ha analitzat la ressonància semàntica de paraules relacionades amb el lideratge (líder, cabdill, capo, director) entre un grup de directius internacionals Italo i Castellano parlants, tenint en compte que la paraula líder és un préstec lingüístic de l'anglès i que en cada idioma el significat i la percepció d'aquest termes són resultat d'una construcció cultural.Desde la Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, y el Grupo de Investigación AFIN de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, se ha analizado la resonancia semántica de palabras relacionadas con el liderazgo (líder, caudillo, capo, director...) entre un grupo de directivos internacionales ítalo y castellano parlantes, teniendo en cuenta que la palabra líder es un préstamo lingüístico del inglés y que en cada idioma el significado y la percepción de esos términos son resultado de una construcción cultural.The Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, and the AFIN Research Group, Autonomous University of Barcelona, have analysed the semantic resonance of words related to leadership (leader, caudillo, capo, director...) among a group of international directives, all Italian and Spanish speakers, keeping in mind that the word Leader is a lexical loan from English, and in each language the significance and perceptions of those terms are result of cultural construct

Guest editorial: Living in a “bubble”: Global working communities and insulation in mobile contexts

Globally mobile workers are often depicted as isolated individuals and families, who navigate crises and hazards more or less on their own (Dabic, González-Loureiro and Harvey, 2015; Bader, Stoermer, Bader and Schuster, 2018; McNulty, Lauring, Jonasson and Selmer, 2019). However, experiential knowledge suggests that in the case of, for example, assigned, and self-initiated expatriates as well as multinational professionals, their assignments are rarely undertaken as isolated individuals (Fechter, 2016; Puchmüller and Fischlmayr, 2017). Rather, it has been documented that mobile workers across the globe seek contact in ways that suggest the existence of distinct communities (Cohen, 1977). These groupings can in some instances become secluded collectives that effectively insulate foreign nationals from the local socio-cultural environments. In this situation, it is not uncommon to observe nationality-based bonding in places where global mobile workers work on international assignments. In some instances, they are even physically isolated in gated communities (Lauring and Selmer, 2009). Alternatively, globally mobile employees and professional experts can sometimes unite around shared identities and values (Harrington and Seabrooke, 2020; Zhang, Lauring and Liu, 2021). Although some research has been conducted on mobile work communities, this theme has generally received limited attention and many questions remain unanswered. This could, for example, be in relation to their ultimate purpose, their acceptance and rejection criteria, and their robustness

Nomadism and movement as epistemologies of the contemporary world

De la misma manera que el movimiento y el nomadismo, en tanto que formas de vida opuestas al sedentarismo, implican no solo el abandono de la idea de un hogar fijo sino también un desafío activo o una evitación furtiva de la autoridad sedentaria del estado, el movimiento y el nomadismo como epistemologías confrontan el orden generalmente fijo de los lenguajes, discursos y perspectivas con los que la ciencia intenta explicar nuestro mundo social. Emergen así nuevos caminos para pensar el movimiento, las subjetividades, lo grupal y lo institucional, en un mundo que no solo es global, sino real y virtual al mismo tiempo. En este número extraordinario, se reúnen aportaciones que experimentan, discuten y reflexionan cuestionando el pensamiento estático.In the same way that movement and nomadism as a lifestyles opposite to sedentism involve not only the abandonment of the idea of a permanent home, but also an active challenge or furtive avoidance of the state's sedentary authority, movement and nomadism as epistemologies confront the generally fixed order of languages, discourses and perspectives with which science tries to explain our social world. New ways of thinking about movement, subjectivities, groups and institutions emerge, in a world that is not only global, but real and virtual at the same time. In this special issue we have gathered the contributions that experiment and questioning static thinking

The words leader/líder and their resonances in an Italo-Latin American multinational corporation

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. The problems of ‘lost in translation’ are well known. Yet some terms of English managerial vocabulary, which are perfectly translatable in other languages, remain untranslated. One explanation of this phenomenon is what Linguistic anthropology call negative semantic resonances. Semantic resonances focused on the issue of which meanings can or cannot be expressed by a single word in different cultures. In this paper, based on an organisational ethnography of Latin American expatriates working for an Italo-Latin-American multinational corporation (Tubworld), we analyse the resonances of the word leader/líder and director, direttore, capo, guida, coordinador, caudillo among a group of expatriates; all Italian, Spanish or multilingual speakers who use English as a second language in their everyday interactions. The paper explains how the different uses contribute to create a meaning of what a leader should and should not be; someone who leads without leading, sometimes a manager. The authors, an Italian native speaker who learnt Spanish during childhood and use English as his everyday language and a Spanish native speaker, argue that Italian or Spanish speakers not only avoid the words duce and caudillo (the vernacular vocabulary for leader, not in use due to the political and cultural meaning) but also the word leader/líder itself, as it resonate to the other two (violent, authoritarian, autocratic, antidemocratic leadership) but furthermore because the word, a lexical loan from English, failed to encapsulate the complexity of leading multilingual organisations like Tubworld

More than a method? Organisational ethnography as a way of imagining the social

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The authors–two anthropologists and an organisational theorist, all organisational ethnographers–discuss their understanding and practices of organisational ethnography (OE) as a way of imagining and reflect on how similar this understanding may be for young organisational researchers and students in particular. The discussion leads to the conclusion that OE may be regarded as a methodology but that it has a much greater potential when it is reclaiming its roots: to become a mode of doing social science on the meso-level. The discussion is based on an analysis of both historical material and the contemporary learning experiences of teaching OE as more than a method to our students