Employers’ Relational Work on Social Media

Given how social media are commonly used in contemporary Nordic countries, social media platforms are emerging as crucial for relational work between employers, employees, and potential employees. By means of a discursive psychology approach, this study investigates employers’ constructs of relational work on social media through the use of two interpretative repertoires: the repertoire of loss of control and the repertoire of ever-presence. The consequences of these interpretative repertoires are a masking of power relations, especially between employers and young employees in precarious labor market positions and those with limited digital knowledge or financial means. Further, the positioning of social media as part of a private sphere of life means the invasion of not only employees’, but also managers’ private time and persona. The result of this study hence calls for the need to understand relational work on social media as part of normative managerial work

Modelling Financing Schemes for Energy System Planning: A Mini-Grid Case Study

Energy modeling has been playing a crucial role in defining solutions for effective energy planning. Bottomup energy system planning models, namely those models characterized by high technological detail, typically present exogenous techno-economic parameters which rely on data gathered by the user, from specific costs to efficiencies. However, poor to no attention has been given to the date to the financial parameters of energy models, which are often assumed and barely justified (e.g., “discount rate equal to 10%”, full stop). Still, model outputs are drastically sensitive to variations of finance-related parameters and must provide the financing structure that a decision-maker should implement for funding the advised energy planning strategies. This results particularly crucial for mini-grid sizing in sub-Saharan African countries, where the challenge of the energy transition entails the construction of massive new capacities to improve energy access rates and tiers of service, demanding an enhanced collaboration between private and public sectors. The case study, applied on an off-grid mini-grid in Mozambique, proposes a comparison between scenarios with increasing financial detail and a possible conceptualization of the hard link between detailed financial modelling and a bottom-up energy model for mini-grid optimization. Different financing schemes are modelled and their impact on the energy modelling outputs assessed. Project finance hence emerges as a useful approach that could upgrade the financing structure of domestic power projects in African countries. This may lead to many benefits: more sustainable and affordable interest rates where corporate finance is missing, improved risk management, diversified funding mix, and facilitated financial support from international institutions

Organising (for) service innovation: formalisation versus creativity

Abstract In this paper we present and compare two studies on challenges with organising (for) innovation in service-intensive companies. One of the studies reviews the contribution of previous studies to the understanding of managing and organising innovation in service companies. The other is an explorative interview study focusing on how people working in service-intensive organisation in Sweden reason about innovation and the role of co-workers in the innovation process. In both these studies a common and important theme is the potential tension between formalisation and room for creativity. The purpose of this paper is to problematise and discuss this tension between formalised processes and creativity in the context of service-intensive companies. We identify four aspects worth attention in further studies: 1) How can service-intensive companies find a balance between formalisation and room for creativity when organising for innovation?, 2) How does the manufacturing industry influence the service industry in terms of processes, methods and vocabulary related to organising (for) innovation?, 3) How is individual and collective creativity conceptualised and what difference does this have for the organisation (for) innovation in service-intensive firms? and 4) What happens with innovation when the service delivery process is being formalised

Institutional leadership—the historical case study of a religious organisation

In this chapter, I discuss institutional leadership vis-à-vis the value of poverty. To do so, I analyse how poverty has been conceptualised within a Catholic religious organisation, the Jesuits. The chapter shows that, in the Jesuit case, poverty is not strictly defined. Instead, poverty results from the constant dialogue between the individual Jesuit and their leader. This means that the understanding of what constitutes poverty is neither explicit nor implicit. The chapter contributes to our understanding of institutional leadership as the promotion and protection of values, as per Selznick’s classical definition. However, we discuss a less known part of Selznick’s work in which the ambiguous character of values is highlighted. In this sense, and after the Jesuit case, we advance the possibility that the promotion and protection of institutional values by institutional leaders does not necessarily imply the definition of what a value is. As values are not defined beforehand but the result of a constant dialogue between the leader and their followers, institutional leadership can be revisited and freed from the heroic view that has long characterised it

A silent cry for leadership : organizing for leading (in) clusters

Leadership research so far has neglected clusters as a particular context for leadership, while research on networks and clusters has hardly studied leadership issues. This paper fills this dual gap in the abundant research on leadership on the one hand and on networks/clusters on the other by investigating leadership in photonics clusters from a structuration perspective. Apart from giving an insight into the variety and patterns of leadership practices observed, the paper addresses the dilemma that regional innovation systems such as clusters usually have a critical need of some kind of leadership, but that neither individual nor organizational actors wish to be led. This dilemma can only be ‘managed’ by organizing for leading (in) clusters in a certain way

Enlazando Oportunidades: Redes laborales para los jóvenes de Abasto.

Desde hace varios años, venimos desarrollado un trabajo sostenido de intervenciones en Orientación Vocacional dentro de la localidad de Abasto (La Plata) y en particular en la Escuela Media N° 38, única institución de educación media de la localidad. Una de las preocupaciones que detectamos en nuestros encuentros con las familias, organizaciones, y referentes institucionales de la comunidad, es la escasa incidencia de jóvenes de Abasto empleados en las distintas empresas industriales, comerciales o de producción que existen en la zona. A través de este proyecto de extensión, iniciamos la construcción de un camino de participación conjunta con la totalidad de los referentes comunitarios de la localidad, y los propios jóvenes, profundizando el diagnóstico de la realidad en relación a oportunidades de trabajo y la situación laboral de los alumnos que concluyen con la educación media. El propósito es que en articulación con la escuela, se favorezca y propicie la inserción laboral de los mismos en su propia comunidad. Conociendo las oportunidades que desde el Sector Laboral existen, y los recursos y necesidades de la población destinataria, avanzamos hacia la conformación de una bolsa de trabajo que permita a los jóvenes, conocer los puestos laborales que se ofrecen y a las empresas incorporar mano de obra de la propia comunidad. De esta manera, los Centros de Formación Profesional, la Escuela Media y los referentes Comunitarios, encontrarán mayor sustento en sus acciones, en la medida en que desde sus lugares puedan propiciar mejores capacitaciones para los destinatarios de sus prácticas. El proyecto se propone establecer nuevas vías de vinculación entre los diferentes sectores, tendiente a potenciar los recursos (oportunidades) de la zona con la realidad de los jóvenes (necesidades) haciendo visible y operativizando una red que los enlace. La inserción laboral progresiva en empleos más formales dentro de la comunidad, así como acciones articuladas con las instituciones de formación profesional y la escuela como lugar de referencia, son algunos de los resultados que vamos concretando. En esta etapa hemos concluido con el relevamiento de la casi totalidad de las organizaciones del trabajo, y tipo de puestos de trabajo para quienes tienen título secundario, llevando a cabo entrevistas en profundidad, jornadas participativas comunitarias, encuestas, observaciones directas, visitas a organizaciones laborales y de formación, para avanzar hacia la concreción de talleres de orientación laboral y condiciones de empleabilidad, contribuyendo claramente desde la extensión universitaria al encuentro intersectorial y las acciones conjunta

Climate social science—Any future for ‘blue sky research’ in management studies?

Summary The environmental humanities call for post-disciplinary approaches to meet the vexing problem of climate change. However, scholars have not scrutinised how management and organisation studies (MOS) could contribute to such an endeavour. This research note explores common surfaces of contact between the natural and social sciences, with the goal of unravelling the legitimate positions to speak from about climate change. The findings suggest that scholars in MOS are exposed to ecological reasoning, which undergirds underdog heroism, disciplinary confusion and a debasement of political subjectivity. As a counter strategy, I suggest that we affirm a ‘blue-sky research’ approach that would support alternative research paths and a more traditional will to know—to advance ‘climate social science’

‘Placing the organisation’ : Studying the communicative constitution of organisation as the production of place

In this paper I want to add to studies exploring how ‘organisations’ are ‘made real’, how they are made present and materialised (Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras, 2008) by focusing on the spatial dimension of such processes (Vásquez and Cooren, 2013). Leaning on Doreen Massey’s work on space and place (2005), I propose that the processes making ‘the organisation’ present may be studied as processes producing a specific (but contested) place (‘the organisation’) and I empirically explore such a possibility. This way, the relational and material character of such an achievement, the role played by co-evolving trajectories, is foregrounded. In my analysis I focus on how the production of an organisation as a place is strengthened through the ongoing production of other places (the ‘landscape’ (Cooren et al. , 2008)). In particular, given the empirical case analysed, it is possible to see how the production of certain organisations (outdoors industry) is intertwined with the production of ‘Sweden’ as a place (or in other word, with ethnicity constructions). This enables to foreground also power dimensions that make such a process a ‘powerfull’ rather than neutral process. Genuinely Swedis