Mongolian management: local practitioners' perspective in the face of economic, political and socio-cultural changes

This chapter discusses the understandings, practices and influences upon management in contemporary Mongolia. It draws on a rich dataset of 45 in-depth qualitative interviews with Mongolian senior management practitioners. The sample of participants consists of three groups _ ‘socialist era’, ‘transitional era’ and ‘non-native’ Mongolian managers _ representing the key categories of managers currently working in Mongolian organizations. The discussion explores the understandings of management and managerial roles in the Mongolian context. The authors also offer insights into the specific practices that characterize management in Mongolia, and explain their occurrence through examining a range of interconnected influencing factors: from nomadic cultural heritage and the legacy of socialism, to the country’s unique trajectory of economic transition from socialism to capitalism, and the political and legal structures that shape the stability of the business environment in present-day Mongolia. The chapter concludes with implications for managers and political authorities in the Mongolian context

The micropolitical dynamics of interlingual translation processes in an MNC subsidiary

Drawing on a deep single case study of a Polish subsidiary of a US‐headquartered pharmaceutical multinational company (MNC), the paper contributes to the study of power and politics in international business (IB) by advancing understanding of the interactional and processual dynamics of micropolitics in MNCs, which supplements the current dominant actor‐centred approach. The paper advances understanding of translation in IB by demonstrating how interlingual translation can be deliberately used as a management tool to pre‐empt resistance and promote managerially desired attitudes and behaviours at the subsidiary level. It highlights how hitherto largely ignored processes of interlingual translation provide an important internal forum for the exercise of power and micropolitics. The paper puts forward an emergent model of the micropolitical dynamics of interlingual translation and demonstrates how subsidiary managers can use interlingual translation to support and oppose the views of both corporate and local managerial colleagues, and thereby influence how HQ‐level decisions will be received by subsidiary‐level employees

‘That’s bang out of order, mate!’:Gendered and racialized micro-practices of disadvantage and privilege in UK business schools

The existence of gendered and racialized inequalities in academia has been well documented. To date, research has primarily addressed the intersectional disadvantages faced by members of minority groups with much less attention paid to the privileges experienced by dominant group members. This paper draws on 21 interviews and 36 audio‐diary entries completed by a diverse group of senior higher education leaders who have successfully navigated the career ladder in UK business schools. By juxtaposing minority with dominant group members' narratives, the study advances intersectionality research, offering a contextualized analysis of the micro‐practices of both disadvantage and privilege in academia. Through a focus on how micro‐practices perform differently for members of different groups, it foregrounds “obvious” as well as nuanced differences that contribute to the accumulation of disadvantage and privilege throughout an individual's career and emphasizes simultaneity as crucial to understanding the workings of gendered and racialized disadvantage and privilege

The Influence of Language on Self-Initiated Expatriate Experience

Foreign language competence is part of self-initiated expatriates’ (SIEs) career capital and a means towards the acquisition of further career capital. This chapter focuses on the impact of one aspect of SIEs’ language competence, manifested through foreign-accented speech, and its effect on SIEs’ experiences. It contributes to the body of literature addressing a particular occupational group of SIEs: international academics. Stigmatisation occurs when a recognised difference is judged as socially undesirable or inferior. In organisational contexts, stigmatisation happens through the attribution of negative evaluations to individuals or social groups that are perceived to deviate from organisational norms. The chapter discusses the experiences of differentiation associated with the accents of non-native English-speaking international academic staff in the UK. It establishes the background of the research and explains the strategies for data collection and analysis. Social psychology research has demonstrated that accented speech can be a source of significant stigmatisation, manifest in prejudice and discrimination

Making a difference through atmospheres: The Orange Alternative, laughter and the possibilities of affective resistance

The paper focuses on affective resistance with an emphasis on the context in which resistant action emerges, and on the liberating power of laughter. It adopts the approach of ‘affective ethnographic history’ to examine the activities of the Polish oppositional artistic collective, the Orange Alternative (OA), between 1986 and 1989. The OA organized interventions in the streets of Polish cities which engaged the general public as participants. The focus of the interventions was on the creation of affective atmospheres leading to affective transitions in the participants from fear to the lack of fear. The paper contributes to scholarly debates on resistance in three ways: 1) it proposes that resistance and its efficacy should be assessed not in terms of the form of resistance, but through consideration of resistant action in relation to the context of its emergence; 2) it demonstrates how affective resistance operates through affective atmospheres that result in affective transitions to the state of lack of fear; 3) it reconsiders the significance of laughter as an affective force that has liberating consequences both within a particular resistance assemblage and beyond it