Under Construction (Identities, Communities and Visual Overkill)

Most of modern identities emerge from mediated interactions in public and virtual spaces. There are no acknowledged authorities to watch over organizational identities and grant them legitimacy. These identities are renegotiated in real and virtual communities, often carry a permanent label 'under construction' and can be violently contested in public space. Garrulous behaviour stimulated by interactive media and by the forthcoming Evernet allows for a gradual build-up of individual and social response to the visual overkill in media-regulated societies. Voicing the images over, we mobilize for action, dismantle institutional structures and generally speaking mix gate-keeping with data-dating, thus contributing to the overall change of world's cultural climate - one of bricks, clicks and flicks. Benetton's Toscani campaign and Napster's ordeal are cases in point

Critical Complexities, (from marginal paradigms to learning networks)

The concepts of critical theory require critical changes. Strategies of a Frankfurt school had been transformed in the new academic and institutional environment. The development of scientific research programs resulted in a flexible restructuring of research communities. The new complexity of research networks is less hierarchic, more mobile, not easily centralized. Theories of organizational learning reflect methodological compromises with respect to the paradigms and political compromises with respect to the governance structures. Nomadic, virtual and flexible research communities float in cyberspace discovering the fundamentals of democracy in an era of informational affluenc

Trading Virtual Legacies (Management of Tradition from Alexandria to Internet)

Will the reconstructed library of Alexandria prevent a forthcoming clash of civilizations? Inventing and re-inventing traditions requires total quality management and multiple networking in shifting alliances in the information space. Stock exchange of cultural forms has long abandoned the golden standards of Enlightenment and follows a theory of cultural relativity and an international political economy of attention

Social Life of Values

The case of the Danish “cartoon war” was a premonition of things to come: accelerated social construction of inequalities and their accelerated symbolic communication, translation and negotiation. New uses of values in organizing and managing inequalities emerge. Values lead active social life as bourgeois virtues (McCloskey, 2006), their subversive alternatives or translated “memes” of cultural history. Since social life of values went global and online, tracing their hybrid manifestations requires cross-culturally competent domestication (Magala, 2005) as if they were “memes” manipulated for further reengineering. Hopes are linked to emergent concepts of “microstorias” (Boje,2002), bottom-up, participative, open citizenship (Balibar,2004), disruption of stereotypical branding in mass-media (Sennett, 2006). However, Kuhn’s opportunistic deviation from Popperian evolutionary epistemology should fade away with other hidden injuries of Cold War, to free our agenda for the future of social sciences in general and organizational sciences in particular (Fuller, 2000, 2003)

Tracing Cold War in Post-Modern Management's Hot Issues

Tracing Cold War in post-modern managerial science and ideology one encounters hot issues linking contemporary liberal dogmas and romanticized view of organizational leadership to the dismantling of a welfare state disguised as a liberation of an individual employee, empowerment of an individual consumer and a progressive, liberal and global development of a market/parliament mix. The concept of totalitarianism covers fearful symmetries between three modes of paying the bills for western modernization; liberal, communist and the emergent "egalibertarian"(1), while the ideologies of organisationalism and globalization testify to a search for a post-Cold War mission statement. Messiness of re-engineering the enlargement of the European Union testifies to the hidden injuries of Cold War, not all of them caused by a class and class struggle

East, West, Best

Address given in shortened form at the occasion of accepting the appointment as Full Professor of "Cross-Cultural Management" at the Rotterdam School of Management / Faculteit Bedrijfskunde of Erasmus University Rotterdam on Friday, September 28, 200

Unhealthy Paradoxes of Healthy Identities

Comparative cross-cultural studies and identity research in social psychology focused on national and organizational differences, clashes and dimensions (Hofstede, Barsoux & Schneider, Jackson, Ward, Bochner & Furnham, Capoza & Brown). Mapping cultural software of individuals and dynamics of small groups was supposed to provide additional managerial knowledge and skills indispensable for global expansion of stable organizational bureaucracies. However, social constructivists and critical social scientists have also exposed a contingent nature of managerial skills in complex and chaotic environments and demonstrated arbitrariness of sense-making in organizations (cf. Weick, Hatch). Increasing frequency of individual interactions and accelerated evolution of organizational forms drew attention of research communities to the unhealthy (irrational, pathological) paradoxes of what used to be considered healthy organizational identities (Alvesson, de Vries, Gabriel, Carr). Problems of identity and identization (cf. Honneth, Sievers, van Riel) acquired growing significance viewed against the background of three paradoxes. First, managerial ideologies call for flexible networks of empowered individuals, but managerialist ideologies tacitly support hierarchic control. Second, there is no sustainable "fit" between new psychologized individualism and evolving "organizationalism" (Leinberger & Tucker). Robust identities and sustainable fit are continually challenged by unhealthy shadows of authoritarian "psychostructures" and dominant forms of organizationalism (Negri, Melucci, Stehr, Beck). Third, emergent alliances in social and managerial sciences have not succeeded yet in changing the methodological and ethical landscape of research in order to challenge dominant modes of organizing, social embedding and self-reflection. Such a shift could offer insights into the unhealthy paradoxes of healthy identities assumed by functionalists and criticized by constructivists, contingency theoreticians and evolutionists (Abrahamsson, Boje,Featherstone, Clark & Fincham, Denzin & Lincoln)

Commentary: Setting the theoretical stage

This a commentary on the paper by Fink and Mayrhofer published in European J. Cross-Cultural Competence and Management, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009, pp.42-6

Honing and Framing Ourselves (Extreme Subjectivity and Organizing)

The present backlash of neo-neopositivism has been academically justified either with a biological or evolutionary ideologies. How did academic intellectuals respond? First, by developing a concept of professional self-identity and institutional peer-control and making it independent of empirical and third-party verification Both these concepts are purely formal and allow for an autonomous self-regulation of a professional community minimizing external influences. Honing ourselves is about the self-reflection of the academic intellectuals who are caught in the networks and hierarchies of the emergent industrial, academic and public organizations Second, by continuous critical re-engineering of the Enlightenment project in the post-communist, post-liberal, complex world on the edge of chaos, in which the retreat of the state and the emergence of complex networks has diminished the role of national culture as the basic frame and blueprint for socialization. Third, by an attempt to form a democratic community of academic citizens. Will a loose collection of researchers and teachers ever rise to the level of principled citizens of a scientific community

Organizing as Improvisations (Methodological Temptations of Social Constructivism)

Academic communities in social sciences are still dominated by neo-positivist paradigm, but communities of practice developing social constructivism have started to redress paradigmatic imbalances. According to the latter man-made organizational reality is processual and saturated with sensemaking (Weick). Social constructivists succeeded in reconstructing complex organizational disasters and contributed to organizational innovation and change (for instance in the wake of ICT challenges). They belong to postmodernist critics of modernity's failure to regulate social development and contribute to a better understanding of organizing (e.g. implementing a new technology or managing knowledge production) as patchworking and improvising. In spite of discriminating practices, they survive in academic communities