Management Communication with impact!

“To be effective in business, you have to communicate well. To be a good manager, you have to communicate exceptionally well”. This was the opening of a newsletter sent to all people managers in Danfoss on October 13, 2010 from Chief Reputation Officer Ole Daugbjerg. Attached was a booklet titled `Management Communication Tool Kit´

Management Communication with impact!

“To be effective in business, you have to communicate well. To be a good manager, you have to communicate exceptionally well”. This was the opening of a newsletter sent to all people managers in Danfoss on October 13, 2010 from Chief Reputation Officer Ole Daugbjerg. Attached was a booklet titled `Management Communication Tool Kit´

Management Communication with impact!

“To be effective in business, you have to communicate well. To be a good manager, you have to communicate exceptionally well”. This was the opening of a newsletter sent to all people managers in Danfoss on October 13, 2010 from Chief Reputation Officer Ole Daugbjerg. Attached was a booklet titled `Management Communication Tool Kit´

Understanding Organizational Narrative-Counter-narratives Dynamics:: An overview of Communication Constitutes Organization (CCO) and Storytelling Organization Theory (SOT) approaches

There is a rich tradition of studying narratives in the fields of communication and language at work. Our purpose is to review two approaches to narrative-counter-narrative dynamics. The first is ‘storytelling organization theory’ (SOT), which interplays western retrospective-narrative ways of knowing with more indigenous ways of knowing called ‘living stories’, ‘pre-narrative’ and ‘pre-story’, and the prospective-‘antenarrative’ practices. The second is the communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) approach to narrative-counter-narrative. Both SOT and CCO deconstruct dominant narratives about communication and language at work. Both theories revisit, challenge, and to some extent cultivate counter-narratives. SOT seeks to go beyond and beneath the narrative-counter-narrative ‘dialectic’ in an antenarrative approach. CCO pursues counter-narratives as a useful tool to make tensions within and between organizations and society, salient as they may contest or negotiate dominant narratives, which hinder the organization from benefitting from less powerful counter-narratives

Communicating strategy in a town hall setting: Is dialog possible?

This article focuses on strategy communication in an administrative housing association. It investigates top management’s attempts to facilitate dialog with employees in a town hall meeting. The purpose is to provide insights into the communicative methods employed, thereby contributing to understanding what can be considered as ‘true’ dialog, why dialog is important, and whether dialog is possible in this specific organizational context.Within the theoretical frame of change communication and strategy-as-practice, a case study of a specific town hall meeting is conducted. Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis three key sequences from a specific town hall meeting are analyzed, and the participants’ actions are described as here-and-now moments for facilitating or hindering dialog.The study points to several communicative techniques employed by management that discourage dialog, instead of facilitating it. Moreover, the meeting is designed and performed as managers’ one-way communication of information, which limits their access to valuable information from the operational employees. In this case, the micro practices investigated are considered an impediment to organizational change and a move towards organizational silence (Tourish & Robson, 2006; Morrison and Milliken, 2000)

Making sense of the corporate philosophy:: Dialogic employee engagement, and narrative positioning

We find an increased interest in the concept of employee engagement within the area of organizational and corporate communication. Employee engagement is an umbrella term for a number of cognitive, emotional and physical aspects (Kahn, 1990) of relating positively to one’s work, and research within this area has mostly connected employee engagement to organizational productivity and effectiveness. In this paper, we suggest a new approach to employee engagement by relating it to employee communication and placing it within dialogue theory (Buber, 1970) combined with Bamberg’s (1997) positioning theory. Our case is a strategy meeting on the topic of how a corporate philosophy devised by top management and entitled “Business Kind2Mind” is interpreted by managers and what they view is the best way to implement the philosophy within subsidiaries. Theorizing engagement dialogically enables a shift from instrumental perspectives to a more interpretive approach in which true mutuality entails participants’ views being heard and incorporated in the corporate philosophy, and engagement is not purely about efficiency and outcome. A dialogical approach enables us to conceive of employee communication not as only upwardly or downwardly directed between manager and employee, but as interactional, with mutual change

Narratologi og tekstlingvistik

Et gensyn mellem to slægtninge Narratology and text linguisticsIn this article I argue for the application of linguistic methods in the study of narratives and map out the difference between linguistic narratology with its focus on »how« narration is established and traditional narratology where the focus is centred on anthropomorphic subjects, i.e. the »who«. The main argument of the article is that by changing the focus from narrator to certain linguistic constructions, we open up an often overlooked level of meaning; a level of meaning which only emerges through so-called function words or in the compounding of the words. This is exemplified by readings of the short story »Der er ikke flere sennepsmarker i Danmark« (2002) by Helle Helle and Jan Sonnergaard’s »Blackout« (1997) among others

Expression and Differential Responsiveness of Central Nervous System Glial Cell Populations to the Acute Phase Protein Serum Amyloid A

Acute-phase response is a systemic reaction to environmental/inflammatory insults and involves hepatic production of acute-phase proteins, including serum amyloid A (SAA). Extrahepatically, SAA immunoreactivity is found in axonal myelin sheaths of cortex in Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis (MS), although its cellular origin is unclear. We examined the responses of cultured rat cortical astrocytes, microglia and oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) to master pro-inflammatory cytokine tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-\u3b1 and lipopolysaccaride (LPS). TNF-\u3b1 time-dependently increased Saa1 (but not Saa3) mRNA expression in purified microglia, enriched astrocytes, and OPCs (as did LPS for microglia and astrocytes). Astrocytes depleted of microglia were markedly less responsive to TNF-\u3b1 and LPS, even after re-addition of microglia. Microglia and enriched astrocytes showed complementary Saa1 expression profiles following TNF-\u3b1 or LPS challenge, being higher in microglia with TNF-\u3b1 and higher in astrocytes with LPS. Recombinant human apo-SAA stimulated production of both inflammatory mediators and its own mRNA in microglia and enriched, but not microglia-depleted astrocytes. Co-ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide/luteolin, an established anti-inflammatory/neuroprotective agent, reduced Saa1 expression in OPCs subjected to TNF-\u3b1 treatment. These last data, together with past findings suggest that co-ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide/luteolin may be a novel approach in the treatment of inflammatory demyelinating disorders like MS